The Space Between

Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, once said Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. For those of us that are not award-winning intellectuals like Mr. Frankl, this quote basically means that in the heat of the moment, there is time to contemplate your choice and, if you make the right choice, you grow as a person.

If youre a parent like me, you are faced with stimulus every day. Temper tantrums often become a regular occurrence, typically coming to a head right as youre heading down aisle three in the grocery store. Never fails! Managing aggressive behavior of children will push many parents to their emotional limits. We can only hope to use the space between the stimulus and the response to craft the right decision, safely and compassionately de-escalatingthe situation before arriving at the checkout.

If you think we parents have it rough, its nothing compared to teachers. While trying to teach, they also have to manage the behavior of many different personalities, each with special gifts and challenges.However, when you combine increased class size, decreased assistance and inadequate crisis training, you are often left with frustrated teachers and a dysfunctional classroom. In a desperate attempt to control and maintain order, more and more teachers are choosing restraint and seclusion as behavioral modification techniques when verbal commands are not effective. In fact, children are restrained or secluded over 267,000 times each year in U.S. public schools, with the majority being children with special needs. And those are only the cases that are actually reported.

What is sadly ironic is that research indicates that these types of interventions actually cause, reinforce and maintain aggression and violence.[i] Children most at-risk for behavioral problems in the classroom typically have a history of trauma. When a child is restrained or placed in a seclusion room, all that past suffering resurfaces, causing them to act out even more and fueling a cycle of long-term trauma. So basically, in an attempt to make the classroom safer, the teacher is inadvertently encouraging a future altercation.

The basic problem seems to be that most school staff are trained that if verbal de-escalation doesnt work, they should immediately go to restraint or seclusion of the child. Its like a car going from 0 to 60. There is no space between, no middle ground on which to manage the situation without resorting to physical and emotional domination over the child.

I mean, think about it. Where else in society is it acceptable to abandon civility and go straight to violence so quickly? Prisons perhaps. When you consider a 7 year old was recently restrained with handcuffs because he was too hyper in class, school does actually sound a lot more like prison than a constructive learning environment.

Ifwe are going to make a real change, we have to fill in the gap between asking a child to stop an unruly behavior and physically restraining them into submission. Providing teachers with training that offers meaningful intervention, which includes a safe, physical alternative to use before restraint, will be the key to massively reducing these practices and increasing the safety of the child and caregiver.

Personally, Im a mom with a child with high functioning autism. I have had to learn to read my childs signals, understand his triggers, and manage his behavior. My expectation is that his teachers do the same, not just for him but for all the students in his class regardless of whether they have special needs. I know without a shadow of a doubt that if properly trained, my sons teachers would never resort to restraining him or any other child.

I know this because professionally I work for Ukeru, the first crisis management program that does not teach restraint or seclusion. We are creating the space between. I work every day to give teachers the power they need to choose their best response to some pretty intense stimulus.

When I talk to teachers that have regularly restrained children as a matter of course, they typically tell me that they dont want to use these techniques. I find their top reasons for restraining or placing a child in seclusion are fear and frustration. Ultimately, teachers believe they have no other alternative.

Now they do.

[i]Promoting Alternatives to the Use of Seclusion and Restraint Issue Brief #4. SAMHSA, 2010