#2 - From Awareness to Action

In the second episode of the School Can't Experience Podcast, host Leisa Reichelt, joined by Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers, explore:

• the critical role parents and carers play in supporting young people struggling with 'School Can't' ,
• recognizing early signs of distress, understanding the importance of the young person's perspective, 
• and the pitfalls of dismissing their struggles as phase-based behavior problems,
• the importance of shared language about the nervous system, co-regulation strategies,
• the inadequacy of reward-based systems, and
• a call to prioritize a child's well-being over school attendance metrics.

Useful resources:

• Student Stress Investigation Cards by Tiffany Westphal - https://www.studentstressinvestigation.com.au/
• Lives in the Balance (Dr Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions)  - https://livesinthebalance.org/

Transcript

Leisa Reichelt: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the School Can't Experience Podcast. I'm Leisa Reichelt and this podcast is brought to you by the School Can't Australia community. Caring for a young person who's struggling to attend school can be a stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many more around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. We hope this podcast gives you some insights into what others are experiencing and some new ways of thinking about how to understand and support the young people in your life. This is our second episode, and I'm joined again by two legends of our School Can't Australia community, Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers. Tiffany and Louise volunteer hours of their time every week administering the School Can't Australia Facebook community, as well as doing advocacy work in the community and in the media on our behalf. In our first episode, we looked at some of the basics of School Can't and what's going on for our young people when they're struggling to attend school. Today we're talking about the crucial role that parents and carers can play in supporting our young people once we recognize that they're experiencing School Can't. I started this discussion by asking Tiffany and Louise how we know when we need to start taking action.

Tiffany Westphal: 1:18

Look, it's a bit of a journey, I will say, and often it takes time to realise that this is what's going on for your child. You might notice things and you're busy and, you can manage to still get your child to school, until you can't, and I think that earlier we notice that there's something going on, the easier it is to do something about.

Louise Rogers: 1:43

I think

Tiffany Westphal: 1:43

as well.

Louise Rogers: 1:43

those early signs, they're often dismissed by the people around you. So even if you say, hang on, my child's experiencing reticence to being at school, you're told, they're fine, and you're given the anxious mother narrative.

Tiffany Westphal: 1:58

It's so true that we often hear as parents,'but they're fine at school, you know, there's nothing to see here'. It's really hard then when you have to, as a parent, convince somebody else that your child is in distress, and your child's not being listened to or seen. You might be inclined to think that those are, you know, behaviour problems rather than nervous system problems. And so it's difficult to identify those early signs. And then once you identify those early signs, there's a whole lot of learning that takes place. And you go, okay, this is what's going on. We've got School Can't happening here. So what do I need to know as a parent? Because this is not knowledge that I have in my toolkit and often you discover that your existing parenting toolkit is not fit for purpose when you're tackling this problem, there's a whole lot of learning that happens, and then you start building a team of people around you, a team of supports around You start to look for peer supports because noone in your immediate circle of, of family and friends often shares this experience with you. But you're also often looking for professional supports

Leisa Reichelt: 3:06

Different people can get such dramatically different pictures of what's going on because of the effort the kids go to to try to keep it together for as long as they can. So, taking these signs seriously when we see them, I think, is what I'm hearing from you, and really trying to look at it through the young person's lens, as much as possible, and not allowing yourself to be sent away with, it's fine, it's just a phase. Be a little bit stricter, try a bit harder is kind of step one.

Tiffany Westphal: 3:40

Yeah. This whole narrative that we carry as well it's a child's job to go to school. This is what you have to do. It's expected of you that you go to school and it's not optional. You don't have a choice. A lot of those things that we say to children shut them down from having a pathway to communicate with us about their distress, so we need to be careful about how we respond in the moment.

Leisa Reichelt: 4:04

What's the pathway if we don't do this? If this child isn't heard, isn't listened to, if their distress isn't acknowledged?

Tiffany Westphal: 4:13

What happens is that the child assesses that the adults can't help me. So they internalize that the problem is me, I'm a bad kid. I'm a bad person. Or they become really angry or hostile, at the world and at you as a parent, because they're in distress, they're in fight- flight, they're trying to survive what's happening to them. The longer it goes on that they are not getting any kind of relief from their distress, the more hopeless it can feel to them and they start to withdraw, and shut down, in order to survive.

Louise Rogers: 4:48

I think it's important to highlight that until you address the problem, until you acknowledge what's going on, you're not addressing the difficulty that young person is having. If they're chronically stressed, they'll continue to experience chronic stress.

Tiffany Westphal: 5:06

They don't have the skills or resources to fix the problem. They are dependent on us as adults to use our power and our skills and knowledge and resources to try and assist in identifying what the problem is and how can we create safety for them.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:22

I think my understanding of this is that, if it's left unaddressed, you can get into situations where self harming and worse can become issues that you're dealing with as well, yeah?

Tiffany Westphal: 5:35

Certainly, yes, we see increased increased mental health problems, increased anxiety, increased depression, increased suicide ideation,

Leisa Reichelt: 5:44

So at the same time as all of that's going on, you also have this external narrative of, kids should be going to school, kids should be behaving this way, that way. These are formative times in your child's life, if you don't do a better job of parenting them, their future will be destroyed.' How do we

Tiffany Westphal: 6:01

that's right

Leisa Reichelt: 6:02

two things?

Tiffany Westphal: 6:03

That's really frightening for parents to to hear, and let's be upfront about this. A lot of the posters that you see about attendance and the stuff that's printed in school newsletters about the importance of good school attendance pushes this narrative that your child's future will be impacted by poor attendance. And I think sometimes this causes parents to push harder than it's healthy to do so instead of stopping and pulling back a minute and going,'hang on, what's going on for my child' and being curious. I often find it really helpful to remind parents that we never stop learning as humans. Our brains are always capable of learning. There are lots of pathways to further study and to learning as adults if it's not happening in primary school, if it's not happening in high school. The thing is to focus on well being now so that when they're recovered, when they're feeling okay, when you've found a solution that works for them, there are options there.

Louise Rogers: 7:03

I liken it to, asking someone to keep going where they're carrying a wound. The longer that wound stays there, it's going to get infected, it's going to impact the experience of school and the experience of life. It's better to address it now, and do what you can to support a young person now, than to let it keep going. The well being is the most important thing here.

Tiffany Westphal: 7:29

I think it's really helpful to look at this through a trauma lens too, would you say to somebody who'd experienced trauma in the workplace let's say, a policeman who'd been involved in an incident at work where he'd been assaulted. Would you say to that person,'you need to get straight back on the horse and get back to work straight away in order to recover from that?' We wouldn't. We know that that's not safe and yet we say to children, you need to get straight back to school to prove to yourself that there's nothing to be anxious about at school. Why are the rules pertaining to school different

Leisa Reichelt: 8:05

that's an excellent question. It can be tricky for us as caregivers to understand what it is about that school experience that's causing distress to our children. Because if we want to solve the problem for them, we need to know what the problem is. How do we get to that? When do we get to that?

Tiffany Westphal: 8:31

Takes time and a lot of detective work and a lot of being curious. It's taken years for me to understand all of the stressors that my child's experienced at school. Sometimes our children are too distressed to be able to tell us. And sometimes, they can't make sense of it themselves. Sometimes the experiences that they have, it's always been like that for them at school and they've never known any different, so it's hard for them to articulate that that's what the problem is, because it's just always been the way it is.

Louise Rogers: 9:04

It's so important to acknowledge that, young people may have the skills or the capacity in the moment to respond to their distress in ways that we grown ups think are socially appropriate. What happens then when we use that behavioural lens is we concentrate on this behaviour, instead of addressing the thing that came before, which was the difficulty that our young person was having. The young person's been kind of failed on two levels now- we've got cross with them for expressing their distress and that we've also not done anything about the reason that they are distressed. So they can be left feeling quite unsupported and now with two problems.

Leisa Reichelt: 9:51

So I guess on the, getting to the why thing. A couple of reflections on that... It doesn't necessarily matter if we don't understand exactly why the child isn't able to go to school. We just need to accept that it is what it is and that it will be a process of exploration and possibly a team process of exploration to start to understand it more.

Tiffany Westphal: 10:14

Yeah. Look, I think understanding that it does take time and giving yourself permission for it to take time too. There's a narrative that we have to get our kids back to school as soon as possible, because otherwise it's going to be harder to get them back to school. I'm not sure that that's actually a causative finding. Maybe they're taking longer to get back because they've had more distressing experiences or they've been distressed for a longer period of time. But, so it does take time to do this work. It's been important for my child to understand why so, I think that longer term it's really helpful to have these insights, but it's a process. I think it's really important to get the young person's voice, but also we can get insights from teachers, and from specialists as well. So lots of us find ourselves consulting pediatricians. Often the first port of call is the GP when we start to notice something's not right with our child's mental health. Many of us try, approaching it from a mental health perspective and going to visit a psychologist, but oftentimes that's not effective just seeing a psychologist to learn anxiety management skills or coping strategies, is is not going to be effective if we're still going back into this really stressful environment. A huge number of our community is supporting young people who are neurodivergent. Children who turn out to be autistic or they're ADHDers, or they have learning difficulties or sensory processing issues of some sort. It can be really helpful to have that information about yourself as a young person but also to be able to share that information with the people supporting the young person as well. It often takes a long time to navigate that space. Wait lists for pediatricians are really long. Sometimes people are waiting a year to see a pediatrician. And it's expensive. That is a cost prohibitive thing for a lot of people. You can ask your school to do some initial investigation for you. Lots of government schools have, student support services, but even those services are often under a lot of pressure, and they triage, responses to students through those. services. So, if you're noticing difficulties with attention reading spelling, social difficulties or, the child feeling like they're in trouble all the time, there's lots of things then to be curious about.

Leisa Reichelt: 12:43

Separating how their body and their brain works from who they are as a person and their value as a person, I think really helps as well. I've discovered something really interesting with my son which is that the anxiety or distress would often build towards the end of the day, getting closer to going to bed. And that was also when his ability to make sense of the world and his emotions was probably at its least strong. Something that we've learned just in the last six months or so is as that builds up, we've got that model of the brain that we use of, the flipping the lid and. hand model,

Louise Rogers: 13:20

model.

Leisa Reichelt: 13:20

ask me why, but his frontal cortex is called George. It's like,'George has gone to sleep now, so he can't help us. Let's wait for the morning when George is back. And then I'm sure he'll help us to understand what's going on and come up with a solution'. And it's amazing how often that works. So, you know, we get up in the morning and he wakes up and gets out of bed and he knows what's going on and what the solution to the problem is going to be. All he needed to do was put it away, get some sleep and then readdress it in the morning that's been such a powerful shift for us rather than trying to dig into it at night and it just gets worse and worse

Tiffany Westphal: 13:53

It's interesting, night time is often the time that our children are seeking out connection with us to, to try and unpack their distress because everything is slowing down and stopping, there's now space in the brain to notice I'm distressed about this and I need a calm brain to be able to go to sleep. I love the way you've described, let's park this because yes, our capacity diminishes as the day goes on. It's important to have lots of conversations with our young people about capacity and about the things that are impacting their capacity

Leisa Reichelt: 14:23

We talked in episode one about the autonomic nervous system and how crucial that is in supporting our children through the experience, of being able to get back to some kind of learning or get back to school. What can we be doing or what should we be avoiding to help to try and keep that autonomic nervous system in that nice, calm, regulated zone. What are the things that we can be doing to help support that?

Tiffany Westphal: 14:52

Firstly, I think it's really important that we have a shared language with our young person about their nervous system, I found it quite powerful to have conversations with young people about how the nervous system functions, and about fight, flight and shut down and what does that look like and to start to notice those things. And, and that makes it so much easier, to develop awareness about what do I look like, what what thoughts am I having, what feelings and sensations am I having when my nervous system is starting to, to escalate. Kids can get quite good at identifying mum or dad's nervous system state and providing some feedback. So my kids are really good at detecting changes in my nervous system state and, and telling me about it. So, mum, mum. You need to calm down a bit, they say to me, because you're yelling at us, and I'm like, I'm not yelling, my voice is raised because I'm excited about something, but to them, it feels like I'm yelling. Learning to communicate with each other about how things feel for you, when you're experiencing somebody else's nervous system state. We learn a lot through co- regulation and experiences of co- regulating, that lived experience of having your nervous system supported to feel safe when you don't feel safe, is the most powerful way we can teach our children about regulation. Learn about what it feels like, to be supported to feel safe again and when we feel distressed, what are the pathways back to feeling safe? What, what things work for me to feel safe? And it's a lifelong journey learning about the nervous system too. It's not something that, you graduate primary school and you've got this fully developed capacity to manage your own nervous system. I'm still learning things as an adult about what works for me and what doesn't.

Leisa Reichelt: 16:49

We've been using the breathing exercises a lot lately, which I know feels like such a cliche these days, in terms of really kind of getting you back into that regulated zone, especially for me, if I'm trying to get myself back into a calm zone so that I can go and re engage with him when he's dysregulated, I find, some nice breathing exercises can do a massive amount of good.

Tiffany Westphal: 17:13

I found being outside works for me. I like to go outside and look for birds and study changes in my vegetable garden.

Louise Rogers: 17:20

A big help for me, I love singing. Absolutely love singing and music. So, if I can put some headphones on and listen to some music that I enjoy and sing along to it and move, that really helps me.

Tiffany Westphal: 17:32

My daughter has a list on the back of her bedroom door of things that make me feel good when I'm feeling distressed. Things that make her feel good when she's feeling stressed. And our dog features up the top of that list

Louise Rogers: 17:42

You make a good point there in that, we all have different things that we need. we are not all going to respond, same way to the same stimulus. So

Leisa Reichelt: 17:53

I think it's important for us to remember, the impact that we can have in terms of whether we help the dysregulation spiral up or spiral down again. I don't think we put enough, import on the role that we can play in really trying to stabilize things by having the ability to stabilize our own, nervous system and sense of regulation. That was a super important one for me. I hate telling anybody that they have to try to be calm because it can be so hard and feel very simplistic,

Tiffany Westphal: 18:26

It's important to understand the concept of co-escalation. We call that spiraling upwards co-escalation, and co-escalation is essentially like throwing fuel on a fire and it gets worse. Things get worse.

Louise Rogers: 18:39

So important to recognize that regulation doesn't necessarily mean calm. It means having the right energy for the task ahead of you. When we're helping a young person downregulate, we want to be in that calm situation, but being regulated is not going to mean calm

Leisa Reichelt: 18:59

That's a good point.

Tiffany Westphal: 19:01

I was just going to say there's a different energy needed when you're getting ready for bed coming home after school or, when you're trying to get your day underway. That's a really good point, Louise.

Leisa Reichelt: 19:13

At the point where my son was having a lot of difficulty, we ended up sleeping in the same bed often because I didn't know why at the time. It was only later that I learned that it was like, you know, he was kind of like borrowing my nervous system in order to feel safe enough to be able to go to sleep. It was like hard to understand at the time, but now it makes sense.

Tiffany Westphal: 19:38

I used to have to sit in my daughter's room in the dark until she'd gone to sleep before I was allowed to leave the room.

Louise Rogers: 19:44

every now and again in our house.

Leisa Reichelt: 19:47

I think there are so many of these things that go on in the privacy of your house that we don't talk about and we just think, I couldn't possibly tell anybody else that that's what's going on. but actually it's surprisingly common, isn't it? In the things that we need to do to help with co- regulation and the things that we need to do to reduce demands.

Tiffany Westphal: 20:09

You know, it's interesting to me when I reflect about co- regulation and supporting our young people to feel regulated. When our children are infants we do this without

20:23

questioning

Tiffany Westphal: 20:24

the need to do it, you know, when your baby is distressed, you pick them up and you hold them, you might sing to them, you use movement, all sorts of things to try and help them feel settled and safe, but something happens when our children go to school that we start to expect they're going to do all of this themselves. And I think we need to be aware that it's okay to provide that support. You can't spoil a child by providing them with emotional support.

Leisa Reichelt: 20:55

Shall we talk about demand reduction? What it means to take the pressure and reduce the energy demands on the child. What can that look like for young people who are experiencing school can't?

Tiffany Westphal: 21:06

Can we start by saying, how do you know when you need to reduce demands?

Leisa Reichelt: 21:10

How do you know when

Tiffany Westphal: 21:11

I think,

Leisa Reichelt: 21:11

reduce demands?

Tiffany Westphal: 21:12

Yeah, I think that's a really good thing to ponder before we talk about what does it look like to reduce demands? How do you know when you need to reduce demands? I think you know when you see somebody who's in distress that you need to then reduce demand. Different people have different experiences of what a demand is and it changes from moment to moment and from day to day.

Louise Rogers: 21:38

The other thing is, if you've identified that your young person has a lot of difficulties, Dr. Ross Green he's got an inventory of lagging skills and unsolved problems that you can download from the Lives in the Balance website. You can identify that your young person has multiple difficulties, but you only want to be working through one or two of those difficulties at a time. So all the other difficulties, you Plan C those, you put those aside. Take the demand of fixing those things off the table for now, just concentrate on one or two things. And you remember that all of those difficulties are stressors for that young person. So every time you solve a stressor, you're reducing the load on that young person. Supports and accommodations at school do the same thing. There's a number of difficulties a young person has that have been identified and your IEP is going to, put in place supports for each of those difficulties. And that is going to reduce demands on that young person to make, hopefully, the work in the classroom be within that young person's window of tolerance for managing stress.

Tiffany Westphal: 23:01

Demands are, sometimes environment specific, they're very contextual to a particular situation. So if a student's having difficulty going to school because, they are having difficulty demonstrating their knowledge in writing we go, okay, is the difficulty because the child is having trouble with holding a pen, is it a motor skill problem? Or is it a difficulty with spelling or remembering what they were going to write? The order of the words, is it a difficulty with summarizing their thoughts or just putting something into a sentence? When we understand the nature of that difficulty better, then we can reduce the demands by providing supports and accommodations. For a student who's having difficulty with the mechanics of writing, we're reducing the demand to do the physical act of writing by either allowing them to use voice to text or using touch typing.

Louise Rogers: 23:55

My young person had difficulty getting dressed in the morning. In talking, with my young person about the difficulty, they said that it was the way the clothes felt on him and the textures. We organised an accommodation with the school in that he was allowed wear, a t shirt and soft shorts that were in the same colour as the school uniform instead of the school uniform. For a while that was great he was able to go to school, because he wasn't experiencing that discomfort anymore.

Leisa Reichelt: 24:28

I think we'll talk more in our next episode about the kinds of accommodations you can get within a school environment and other ways of approaching schooling, but that's a really good example.

Tiffany Westphal: 24:39

You know, sometimes there's reduction of demands that are very specific demands that we've identified. But then there's also the big picture there's this overview of what's happening for a child. So sometimes we have a child who's in a shut down state, the more escalated the nervous system, the more likely we are to need to reduce demands substantially in order to be able to bring the nervous system back down, to support regulation.

Leisa Reichelt: 25:09

You talked a little bit about rewards and the behavior chart situation in our first episode, can you just touch on why that's not a good strategy to use

Tiffany Westphal: 25:20

Oftentimes, this is one of the first things that parents do, is try and use rewards and consequences. And sometimes that can get us initial results of attendance at school because the child is able to deliver a little bit for a little while, in order to get the reward. And so parents will say, well, it worked. Until it stops working. The problem with rewards and consequences is that they don't do anything to address the underlying difficulty that the student's having. Sometimes the student can push through a little bit longer in order to get a reward, but it's exhausting and it's not something that can be sustained over the long term. It causes additional stress and it can lead to additional distress, and worsened mental health. So we need to be very careful about rewards and consequences because they add a lot of pressure, to a child and they don't address the underlying issues.

Leisa Reichelt: 26:17

Is it that they assume that the problem is a lack of motivation and actually its not a lack

Tiffany Westphal: 26:21

Yeah, that's right.

Leisa Reichelt: 26:22

and so the solution that you're putting in place doesn't address the actual problem.

Tiffany Westphal: 26:27

It's about reframing what are we seeing here? We go back to that first need to reframe, you know, it's not a behavior problem. It's a nervous system response to something.

Louise Rogers: 26:36

It can be quite shaming too, and it doesn't acknowledge the effort that young person has put in to actually do the thing that, you want them to do

Leisa Reichelt: 26:48

Excellent. All right. think it's time for us to wrap up. When we were approaching this episode, it was really, okay, what are practical things that we can do to help support? It's quite interesting, although not surprising, that we've spent the vast majority of time thinking about, how we support the child out of the context of school, and not putting that first priority on, how do we urgently get the child back into school and get that attendance up that is probably an unexpected thing for a lot of people because, your child has to go to school. How do you keep yourself focused on supporting your child's nervous system and their wellbeing and reducing their distress rather than, succumb to this kind of ongoing pressure of getting, over 80 percent attendance or whatever the benchmark is these days.

Tiffany Westphal: 27:35

Well, I've been on this journey for 10 years now, Leisa, and, I've learned that it's futile not to put my own child's well being front and centre, and to be responsive to her nervous system needs, because it just leads to, further distress and worsened mental health.

Louise Rogers: 27:56

And it's also important to support ourselves in that context too, so that we have capacity to be there for our young people. And that can be really, really difficult with our crazy, chaotic lives. If our young person can't go to school, maybe they can't do lots of other things, maybe we can't get away from the house, maybe the most we can do is small things like get a cup of coffee and stand outside in the garden for five minutes. Start small with things you can do to support your own nervous system. As you shift, you'll be better equipped to support your young person.

Leisa Reichelt: 28:35

And on that reassuring note, we're going to wrap up this second episode and give a big thanks again to Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers for joining us. We'll be back in our third episode to talk again with Tiffany and Louise this time we're gonna be talking about working with schools to try to reduce the stress of school by understanding and advocating for accommodations for our young people. We've popped a bunch of useful links in the show notes, including links to the School Can't Australia website, the Facebook community, the Lives in the Balance website that Louise mentioned, as well as ways for you to give us some feedback and maybe even volunteer to share your own School Can't experience on a future podcast episode. We would love to hear from you. And finally, please consider donating to School Can't Australia, your tax deductible donations assist us to raise community awareness to, partner with researchers, to produce resources like webinars and this very podcast which assist people who are supporting children and young people experiencing School Can't. Thanks again for listening, and we'll talk again soon. Take care.