Alyssa Campbell: Emotional Regulation, Resilience, and Proactive Behavior Support for Children

On today's episode of Right About Now, a little bit of a different episode. I talked to Alyssa Campbell. She's the author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions, It's a New York Times Best Seller, and she just released Big Kids Bigger Emotions. We talked about releasing the book. Everything that goes into raising kids today, and some of the insights that we can use to better train our kids to adapt and deal with today's challenges. And some of the triggers that happened were all different. I think this is important in today's society as we talk about raising good human beings, good people, good people that go on to be good business people. I also brought in perspective of my wife, who is a principal to middle school. So, fascinating discussion with Alyssa Campbell about all of these things. Enjoy this talk, and I know you will too, right now. We're not saying that we're going to snow plow obstacles out of their way. We're saying how do we teach them what it really looks like to cultivate resilience, to know what it feels to be in a hard feeling, to experience something hard, and move through it and process it, and come out on the other side instead of just bearing it down or building resentment. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. A few weeks from now, so it won't officially be one day. We will ground this in a little bit of reality of your reality today. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's a whirlwind today. That's for sure. I started press and media yesterday at 5.30 in the morning and ended the day at 11 p.m. We're in it. C-O of seed and so, collaborative, emotion processing method. That's a mouthful, but it's an important one. That's right. We call this step method for short. Talk to me about seed and so, and then we'll get into the book. Yeah, for sure. Seed is the company that I created, and we work with schools and talker programs and teachers and then organizations on how to understand how to actually create spaces that are calm and regulating. And we use it, I mean, we're a team of 12 at this point, and we use it in our workspace every day to know how do you work best, how do you function, how does it work within teams, and the mismatches of teams, and being able to navigate really just being a human on planet Earth is the work that we do. Ah, how to be a human. We need more of that sometimes. It sounds basic, but like for them to do a quarry that we've lost our humanity, especially with AI and everything else, a little worrisome and just overall development. I'm a father of four boys and it's not lost on the role that I play in bringing them up, but as parents, it's, you don't feel like you always know every answer. And I don't know this about being perfect, but we do want to raise good human beings. That's it. And there's so much information out there right now. It can be hard to know like what actually to pay attention to. So we're just here that this still is really getting nerdy with you, but make it make sense. Yeah, talk to me. Your second book. My second book, Tiny Humans Big Emotions, was a New York Times bestseller and hoping to bring this one to the list as well. I know. Who's our target for the book? Obviously, I go parents and all that, but some of them is a little deeper than that. Yeah, this one is for the five to 12 year old age range of those elementary school kids and its parents, its teachers. The bulk of what we do at seed as a business is working with schools. That's our biggest revenue driver. It's really coming in and working with schools and through schools, also working with families. So the book's designed to be able to serve families and schools and teachers. In fact, one of the coolest things we've seen so far in this pre-order season for books with schools doing like bulk orders or families to have access to it or for their teachers to have access to it, to dive into work, look like, to do in tandem with each other. It's interesting you say that my wife is a principal at a middle school. Yeah, we should chat. She's a progressive, but I call the book. Obviously, talked with a lot of authors and we have them on the show. She's used to that, but maybe the topic per se. The title of Big Kids, Bigger Feelings, playing into your first book, you can kind of work your way there, but let's set the stage. What are we talking about and what are the big takeaways? Yeah, so what we do that's different than what's happening is that we look at your nervous system as a whole and this is the part of being a human on planet Earth. You know, we have your five senses. Sight sound, taste, touch, smell. There are four other senses that we don't talk about a lot that really factor into how you show up in the world and if you can be regulated, if you can access your whole brain, whether it's for things that work or it's for teaching or it's for learning for kids. And so we have our vestibular sense, which is located in your inner ear. It's responsible for your movement and balance. We have our proprioceptive sense that lets you know where your body ends and something else begins. If you are like walking by the table and you bump into it, your proprioceptive senses. It's having a hard time letting you know, oh, there's a table there. You should move over a little bit. And we have our interceptive sense that lets us know if we're hungry, if we're tired, if our hearts be in fast, if we're like anxious, any of those internal cues. And then we have our neuroceptive sense, which is like the energy reader of the room. If you come into a room and two people have been arguing and they stop arguing, but you feel it in the room, you know, this is awkward. That's a neuroceptive sense that work. And so we look at all nine of these senses and help you understand where you fall or where a kid falls in terms of whether they're sensitive to it. It drains them or they're seeking it. It regulates them. The things I'm sound sensitive. When my kids are like loud and annoying and like making all the noise and all the sound is happening in my house, it adds up for me and I can lose my cool if I'm not mindful of it. And paying attention to it and supporting yourself through it. Just the other day, they were like bickering in the car on the way to school and driving each other nuts. And I was, I'm going to pop in my airpods and I'm going to listen to one song so that I can control the sound and not lose my cool on them. And so we're looking at these nine senses and helping you understand like how does your nervous system work? What's going to drain you? What's going to recharge you so that you know when you're getting drained? Oh, here's what I have to do to recharge because it's not one size fits all. You know, this is a data four. And this is stuff that's so overlooked. When we, we have a school that we work with, it's high meets. Most of their kids are high poverty. A lot of them have at least one incarcerated parent, a number of homelessness situations going on. And we came into that school last year. And from Q1 to Q2, all we focused on was this nervous system, understanding each kid, putting systems in place for those needs to be met proactively throughout the day. Not just the kid is losing it and is dysregulated. And then they're pulled out of a classroom and there's disciplinary action. Not that reactive cycle, but proactively supporting it. And we saw a 60 60 percent reduction in behavior support calls from Q1 to Q2 just by doing that. When we're looking at this, we're looking first and foremost at how do we really set you up for success throughout the day? That's interesting. I'm considering thinking about a lot of wife. She comes home and has the stories to tell. And she deals with a lot of that poverty and other things. There's a lot of variables that play into maybe the misbehavior, but it doesn't change the fact that it's happening. And it blows my mind a list of along the same lines. I don't want to get the education system. There's so many advancements. There's smart people like you, companies like yours. We have so much information now that's changed. And arming our teachers, arming our parents and getting knowledge and turning knowledge into action into change that then has an impact on our children. Is there anything more important? It's cute. No, and it's so cute. We look at the mental health crisis today. And again, no one knows how their brain and body work. We're just like shooting in the dark paws and take deep breaths. I don't even know what it feels for these kids. They don't know what it feels when it's building. My son calls this the volcano where it's like building inside before you explode. And then afterwards these kids can tell us what they should do, what they should and do. They might know the rules, but they can't put it into action because they don't know the precursors for what's coming before it. They don't know what that kind of volcano as it's building feels like. And you're right, there are so many factors that are also coming into play. The homelessness or poverty and how that's factoring into even how they're showing up at school or in everyday life. And so we get to come in and be the detectives and help create that. And one of the things we as a business created was a lot of schools have like a behavior tracker where they kind of track kids' behaviors. And really we use it predominantly for disciplinary action to see like, oh, this kids have X number of behaviors support calls. They're going to get whatever the disciplinary action is in correlation to the policy. And we came in and said, how about we actually use that information to change behavior? We pair it up with the kids. We have everyone's nervous system regulation questionnaire information that lets us know how their brain and body work. And say Jackson gets a behavior support call three times in a week. We get pinged and it says on our end, we have to create a behavior support plan for this kid to meet their need. And it pulls in Jackson's information and makes a customized behavior support plan to actually meet the need that's driving the behavior. So we're not just focusing like a whack-a-mole getting these behaviors over and over and over on the surface. Interesting. Let me play the other side of the coin. Play my wife's role or the teachers. I'm sure you hear this. It all sounds cheers and that. All that makes sense. If I could work one to one and if every kid at that level, boy, that would be a wonderful day. That might be an excuse. We'll give a precedent to reality and to reality. Probably some truth and some false to that. How do you balance that? I'm sure. You probably hear that. All this is great, but if I had four children in my classroom, this is manageable. How do we make them invisible? We are not doing individual support for almost any of our kids. In the school systems, we often use what's called multi-tiered systems of support. You look at the baseline is called tier one and that's like universal supports that everybody gets. Tier two is like maybe a couple customized things for some kids. Some specific tools in place. Tier three, they have special meetings. They're getting certain services provided all that jazz. We do the bulk of our work in tier one and tier two. For us, when we're creating a behavior support plan, that doesn't mean it's individualizing this kid's getting one to one support. What it means is that they're getting the tools in place and the things that they need to not see this behavior happen. Let me give you an example. We got a kid who every time they're at lunch, we're seeing these huge behaviors. They're getting in trouble in the lunch room every day and it flagged in our system. Yeah, about the same time every day, this kid's getting a behavior support call and it turns out it's at lunch time. What we know about this kid from their profile is that they're sensory sensitive. What that means is that they are the kids that notice the details in the space. My husband's like this. If I put something down in the counter, he's like, don't put it down, put it away. The clutter is annoying for him. If there's bunch of sounds in the space for these kids, it can also be the feeling of certain clothes. I want to be comfy and cozy in my clothes and if it's too tight or too itchy or there's a tag, that starts to drain them. All these things start to add up for their nervous system. So you put them in the lunch room or it's loud and it's busy and all this is going on and they're losing their cool. The schools that we work with, we accessed some grant funding. They got access to little kind of essentially mini iPod things that connected to the Bluetooth in the cafeteria and kids can just pop it on and listen to some music and then they're in control of the sound and this kid didn't have another lunch room behavior support call for three months and all we did was say, yeah, his nervous system needs some help during lunch and he would wear headphones and listen to music instead of like being in the crazy loud lunchroom that was too overwhelming for him. Yes, you and my wife have a call. It's validating that of nothing else. It's always a gamble. All their big kids, bigger feelings. Alyssa, as we start to close out here, walk to me through, I always like to ask this is like kind of books. I'm someone that's about to read your book and I walk in thinking something and I'm going to walk out thinking something different. What's the biggest change that I would get from reading your book? There's so much talking about kids in their feelings these days and I think a lot of people think that it means that it's permissive. I think it's going to be soft and they're not going to be able to like handle real life stuff that we're going to step in and make sure that they're not feeling hard things. And what we're doing is actually kind of the opposite. I'm not putting hard things in their way, but I'm helping you know, how do you actually support them through the hard things that we aren't stepping in? We had a, for instance, a mom reach out the other day and she was like, the friends are doing these TikTok dances. Her daughter was not included or invited. She's like, do I step in? Do I help? Whatever. Do I reach out to these parents? No. Your daughter's learning what it feels to be left out and not be included and that's going to happen for the rest of her life sometimes in different spaces. You get to create a space where she can talk to you about that, where she has a place to talk to because in the past so many of us grew up in spaces where we felt the hard thing, but we didn't know what to do with that. And we see this huge mental health crisis where kids are drowning in adults who don't know what to do with their emotions and there's losing their cool and mechanical conversations with each other because they don't know what to do when they're in the hard space. And when we're navigating this, we're not saying that we're going to snowplow obstacles out of their way. We're saying how do we teach them what it really looks like to cultivate resilience to know what it feels to be in a hard feeling to experience something hard and move through it and process it and come out on the other side instead of just like bearing it down or building resentment. That's a big one. Or voice. I mean, in my nine-year-old, he's the youngest, he's the baby. He's an anxious kid. He's like a very normal kid. He builds up anxiety over big things and small things sometimes. And when you were talking about that of his what it said, we don't get it out of his, come, I grew up with a military father. My wife and I both played teams B1 team sports. We're go getters. We're not easy parents and trying to figure out exactly what's going on. I was hearing you talk. Let's be in process right now that's causing that. Even as adults, we know these are children, but we're always think of ourselves first, how we react to things or how we do things. Everybody's makeup is different. It's a hard reality, but that's how we have books like yours to help us figure it out. That's right. It's not a one-size-fits-all. And you know that it's a data for all these kids are different. And so so much of our work is really helping you understand who's the kid in front of you and what's actually going on in their brain and how do you help them? I also grew up in a family of five all athletes and Thai achievers. And it was also definitely not a soft household. And when I look at things for my childhood that I want to pass on, respect was really important in my household. And I want to carry that on. I want my kids to have respect for themselves for everyone around them. And also there are things for my childhood that I'm like, yeah, I'm going to leave that to the way side because this piece doesn't carry on into this next part. And one of those for me is that my kids will be able to share their emotions. It doesn't mean I'm going to make it go away. It doesn't mean the boundary changes. But that they get to be disappointed about a boundary or ask why. That it's not in my household because I said so culture. It's yeah, you get asked why and be curious. And I'll let you know why. Again, it doesn't mean the boundary changes. But we can have a dialogue in this. And so when we're looking at these things, there isn't one right way to do it. And if we don't get to the root of what's going on with kids and really respond to that, we're just going to keep seeing behaviors over and over and over and over. Yeah, keep doing the same thing. You get the same results. So that's right. It's hard told me. That's right. Where do I find the book and learn more about what you're doing with Seed and so? Yeah, we're at Seed and so.org is kind of our mother ship. And the book is wherever books are sold, it published with pepper Collins anywhere you get a book. And I read the audiobook for big kids and then for tiny humans as well, just like that bad way. It's an important topic and I appreciate the work that you're doing. It makes a difference. Thanks for shining the light on it. You don't find us Ryan is right.com. We're going to sign up that meeting with a listen my wife if nothing else. But look, get out there, get big kids bigger feelings. It's an important topic if you have children, it's important to understand how everyone works a little different and that we've got the opportunity to mold the world that we want through our children. We'll see you next time right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanisRate.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.