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

On today's episode of Write 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. 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 happen. We're 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 a perspective of my wife, who is a principal at a middle school. It's a fascinating discussion with Alyssa Campbell about all of these things. Enjoyed this talk, and I know you will, too, right now.

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 burying it down or building resentment.

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Hey, guys. What's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's right, what's now, what's here today. And it is here today, folks. I'm telling you, literally here today, a new release. We got Alyssa Campbell. She's author of Big Kids, Bigger Feelings, and the book just came out. So here we are.

What's up, Alyssa? Hey, I'm excited to get to hang with you today. Thanks for having me.

I know. You're on the book tour. It just came out yesterday. I know we're recording this be a few weeks from now, so it won't officially be one day. We'll ground this in a little bit of your reality today.

Yeah, for sure. It's a whirlwind today. That's for sure. I started Press & Media yesterday at 5: 30 in the morning and ended the day at 11: 00 PM. We're in it.

Ceo of Seed & Sow, Collarative Emotion Processing Method. That's a mouthful, but it's an important one.

That's right. We call it the SEP method for short.

Talk to me about Seed & 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 child care programs and teachers and then organizations on how to understand how to actually create spaces that are calm and regulating. 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.

How to be a human. We need more of that sometimes. It sounds basic, but sometimes I do worry that we've lost our humanity, especially with AI and everything else. A little worrisome and just overall development. I'm a father four boys, and it's not lost on me the role that I play in bringing them up. But as parents, it's you don't feel like you always know every answer. I don't know this about being perfect, but we do want to raise good human beings.

That's it. There's so much information out there right now. It can be hard to know what actually to pay attention to. So we're just here to distill, basically get nerdy with you, but make it make sense.

Yeah. Talk to me. It's your second book?

It's my second book, Tiny humans, big emotions, was a New York Times best seller 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. Something told me it's a little deeper than that.

Yeah, this one is for the 5 to 12-year-old age range, those elementary school kids. And it's parents, it's 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 was schools doing bulk orders for families to have access to it or for their teachers to have access to it, to dive into work looked like to do in tandem with each other.

It's interesting you say that my wife is a principal at a middle school.

Well, we should chat.

She's a progressive. My wife's all the book. Obviously, he talks to a lot of authors, and we have them on the show. She's used to that, but maybe the topic per se. The title, Big Kids, Bigger Feelings, Playing into your first book, you can work your way there, but let's set the stage. What are we talking about and what are the big takeaways? Yeah.

What we do that's different than what's happening is that we look at your nervous system as a whole. 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. 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 walking by the table and you bump into it, your proprioceptive sense is. It's having a hard time letting you know, Oh, there's a table there. You should move over a little bit. We have our interceptive sense that lets us know if we're hungry, if we're tired, if our heart's beating fast, if we're anxious, any of those internal cues. Then we have our neuroceptive sense, which is 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're like, Oh, this is awkward, that's your neuroceptive sense at 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 loud and annoying and 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 myself through it. Just the other day, they were bickering in the car on the way to school, driving each other nuts. I was like, 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 Am I cool on them? We're looking at these nine senses and helping you understand 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 dad of four. This is stuff that's so overlooked. We have a school that we work with that's high needs. Most of their kids are high poverty. A lot of them have at least one incarcerated parent, a number of homelessness, situations going on. We came into that school last year. 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 disciplinary action, not that reactive cycle, but proactively supporting it. We saw a 60, 6,0% 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 sitting here and thinking about my 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. It blows In my mind, Alyssa, 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 in 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 huge. I don't think there is.

No, and it's so huge. We look at the mental health crisis today, and I'm like, Yeah, no one knows how their brain and body work. We're just shooting in the dark. Pause 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 building inside before you explode. Then afterwards, these kids can tell us what they should do, what they shouldn't 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 volcano as it's building feels like. 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. We get to come in and be the detectives and help create that. One of the things we as a business created was a lot of schools have a behavior tracker where they track kids' behaviors. Really, we use it predominantly for disciplinary action to see like, Oh, this kids had X number of behavior support calls.

They're going to get whatever the disciplinary action is in correlation to the policy. We came in and said, How about we actually use that information to change behavior? We paired up with the kids. We have everyone's nervous system regulation questionnaire information that lets us know how their brain and body work. Say Jackson gets a behavior support call three times in a week, we get pings and it says on our end, we have to create a behavior support plan for this kid to meet their need. It pulls in Jackson's information and makes a customized behavior support plan to actually meet the need that's driving the behavior. 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 teacher's. I'm sure you hear this. It all sounds cheers from the back. All that makes sense. If I could work one to one and every kid at that level, boy, that would be a wonderful day. That might be an excuse. We'll give up precedence 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 it manageable?

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 1, and that's universal supports that everybody gets. Tier 2 is maybe a couple of customized things for some kids, some specific tools in place. Tier 3, 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 lunchroom every day. It flagged in system. Yeah, at the same time every day, this kid's getting a behavior support call, and it turns out it's at lunchtime. 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 something down on the counter, he's like, Don't put it down, put it away. The clutter is annoying for him. If there's a 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. 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. You put them in a lunchroom where 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 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. This kid didn't have another lunchroom behavior support call for three months. All we did was say, Yeah, his nervous system needs some help during lunch. He would wear headphones and listen to music instead of being in the crazy loud lunchroom. That was too overwhelming for him.

Yes. You and my wife have a call. It's validating that if nothing else. I'm with Alyssa Gamble. All of her big kids, bigger feelings. Alyssa, as we We're going to start to close out here. Walked me through, I always like to ask this with 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 talk about kids and their feelings these days. I think a lot of people think that it means that it's permissive and kids are going to be soft and they're not going to be able to 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 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, 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 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.

We see this huge mental health crisis where kids are drowning in adults who don't know what to do with their emotions, and they're just losing their cool, and they can't have conversations with each other because they don't know what to do when they're in the hard space. 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 bearing it down or building resentment.

That's a big one. Or boys. I mean, in my nine-year-old, who's the youngest, who'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. When you were talking about that, that was what I said, we don't get it out of his... I grew up with a military father. My wife and I both played D1 team sports. We're We're go-getters. We're not easy parents. Trying to figure out exactly what's going on when I was hearing you talk, what's being processed right now that's causing that? Even as adults, we know these are children, but we 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 why we have books like yours to help us figure it out.

That's right. It's not a one size fits all. You know that as a dad of four, all these kids are different. 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 I grew up in a family of five, all athletes and high achievers. It was also definitely not a soft household. And when I look at things from 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 in my childhood that I'm like, Yeah, I'm going to leave that to the wayside 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, a because I said so culture.

It's, yeah, you get to ask why and be curious. And I'll let you know why. Again, it doesn't mean the boundary changes, but we can have a dialog in this. And so when we're looking at these things, there isn't one right way to it. 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.

Yeah, keep doing the same thing. You get the same results. That's right. That's what Smart told me. That's right. Including my own desk. It tends to be the same. Where can I find the book and learn more about what you're doing with Seed & So?

Yeah, we're at seedandso. Org. It's our mothership. The book is wherever books are sold. It's published with Harper Collins. Anywhere you get a book, and I read the audiobook for big kids and then for tiny humans as well. Just not that bad boy.

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 know where to find us, rianisright. Com. We're going to sign up that meeting with Alyssa and 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. I just 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 rianisright. Com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.