Belonging Before Children's Behavior with Steven Foster

What if the key to better behavior isn’t punishment, rewards, or stricter discipline — but belonging?

In this thoughtful and practical conversation, Yogi Patel sits down with Positive Discipline trainer and educator Steven Foster to explore what children truly need in order to thrive emotionally, socially, and academically.

Drawing on decades of experience in early childhood education, social skills groups, and special education settings, Steven explains why children misbehave, how adult stress affects our responses, and what it really means to be both kind and firm.

Together, Yogi and Steven unpack the deeper meaning of discipline, the role of attachment and belonging in behavior, and why emotional safety changes everything for children.

This episode includes real classroom stories, practical parenting tools, Positive Discipline strategies, and powerful reminders for teachers, caregivers, and school leaders.

In this episode:
• Why belonging comes before behavior
• The real meaning of discipline
• How adult stress leads to punishment and reactivity
• Why routines matter so much in early childhood
• Secure vs anxious vs avoidant attachment explained simply
• The difference between punishment and respectful leadership
• Why play is essential for learning and development
• How to support neurodiverse children with dignity and connection
• What kindergarten teachers actually want children to know

Guest:
Steven Foster — retired educator, Positive Discipline trainer, and co-author of Positive Discipline Early Childhood Education Manual.

Host:
Yogi Patel — Montessori school leader, Positive Discipline Trainer, workplace trainer, and host of Now What? Podcast.

Resources Mentioned:
• Positive Discipline in the Early Childhood Years
• Circle of Security
• Adlerian Psychology
• Becky Bailey’s attachment work

Learn more:
http://bio.site/yogipateltte

Subscribe to "Now What? with Yogi Patel - Transformation Through Empowerment" for more insights on Positive Discipline, Traditional Early Childhood and Montessori Education, and Raising Teens.

• Visit www.yogipateltte.com for additional resources and training for parents, teachers, and leaders
• Questions or topic suggestions? Email us at yogi@yogipateltte.com
• Follow us on Instagram and Facebook @Yogipatel_tte for updates and community discussions.

Let me know topics that you would like to hear in the future. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is placeholder media that you'll see if you add a layout to an empty scene. You can go ahead and delete it.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

We're going to be talking about belonging. Why do children behave the way they do? What do they really need when children struggle? Often as adults, we want to fix it, manage it, stop it. But I have Stephen Foster here. He's a colleague from Positive Discipline, and he's going to share about behaviors and much more. This is a conversation I've been looking forward to because Stephen wrote Positive Discipline's early childhood education manual with Cheryl Irwin. I had this keen interest of talking with Stephen to understand his work and how to support children. Stephen, thank you for being here today. When you hear belonging before behavior, what comes to mind?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

It seems to me that to the extent that schools are able to create an atmosphere where the kids who come there feel emotionally connected. That's what belonging is. It's the feeling of emotional connection to where you are, to the group of people you're in. It doesn't ever go away. When we're looking at the behaviors that kids do that cause adults to be concerned, a positive discipline perspective is get an idea of how this behavior represents a kid's attempt to belong. If we can frame what we see in terms of belonging, then we are less likely to frame it in terms of blaming.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

As parents, we want to teach skills. Both of us have parents, and one of the first things is when they do something, stop it because we want to teach them something different. So what is misunderstood about discipline, especially in early childhood?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I think what's misunderstood in early childhood is that discipline is about teaching. If you went onto a city street and interviewed a hundred people randomly and asked them, what does discipline mean? You'd get pretty close to a hundred versions of punishment. When someone says about a child, that child needs discipline, they're not talking about teaching. The word discipline comes from a Latin word. It's the same word that disciple comes from. And a disciple is someone who goes and learns from a master. Discipline really is about teaching. But what often happens for us as adults, we get easily triggered by behavior. We take it personally. When we're under stress, I think we go back to what we know how to do. All of us grew up in settings that were top-down, kind of vertical power systems. There were people on the top who told people on the bottom what to do. Positive discipline prides itself on working with horizontal relationships, looks at power in a different way. It's not power over, it's power with. When we get stressed, we retreat to what we know how to do. So we get punitive. I've heard the phrase, because I said so come out of my mouth with children. It takes a while to remind ourselves that this is a teaching moment. Even though I'm really angry, it's still a teaching moment. That's crucial.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Sometimes it doesn't have to be in that second when we're so furious because nothing but our past experiences is going to show that pause or to walk away and allow that brain to calm if you're thinking about the brain and if you're in the red zone, you've got to be able to get to that yellow or the green part before they're going to make any sense. I'm guilty of where I wanted to make my child learn something. And the energy that comes from it, even when you're role-playing, it's exhausting. Like as caregivers, we are already tired. And sometimes that exhaustion is added by that approach versus doing something different.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

One of my favorite stories came about during a class meetingslash circle time that was running in my social skills group. It was a disaster. It was bedlam. I put my hands up and said to the group of kids, I'm too mad to finish this. So I'm going to go sit in the cave. The cave was a big old refrigerator box. And I left, I got up and I wedged myself into the box and sat there with my arms folded, breathing. They came over like little ducklings in a row. And one of them said, Are you mad at us? I said, I am not mad at you. I'm frustrated because our meeting was so loud and it hurt my ears. Another one said, Are you going to come back? I said, I am going to come back as soon as I feel better. Then I'll be able to be back in circle. A third kid said, Do you feel better? I laughed and I said, Well, as a matter of fact, I do. I came back to the circle and it completely changed how circle was. They were still really loud and disrespectful to each other. All of the things that had raised my level of frustration were still going on. What had changed was my ability to cope with it. With good modeling. So the kids got to see an adult be angry and handle it in a way that for many of them was not typical of the adults. Many of the children that I worked with had experiences with adult anger that were not pleasant. Some were abusive.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

I think the self-regulation is definitely important to model because I'm sure these students, their behaviors are coming a lot from being stressed and looking for safety on a constant basis. Speak about hosting these groups for social skills. What are some of the things that you did to help them along so parents or teachers listening to this conversation could get a what you do when no one's in trouble?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Enjoy yourself with children. The kids came and they were in a space where there were three of us, three adults, and all three adults clearly enjoyed being with them. Um, even in more chaotic moments, we enjoyed being with them. We listened quite a bit. We labeled feelings quite a bit. So when we say you were really frustrated, you kept trying to make that tower stand up, and it wouldn't. That's frustration. So we're labeling in the moment, helping them learn words for feelings so that later they can say, I'm really frustrated because this tower stay up. So labeling feelings, brainstorming for solutions. So what do you think you could do next time? Probably your friend's going to take your toy again and probably gonna get mad about it. So what do you think you'll do next time instead of hitting them? So brainstorming for the future. Part of the issue is when you're talking with a child who's already done something, it's already happened. You can't undo it. So the concept of what'll you do next time is crucial because I want kids to start thinking, there may be a better way to do this. And then when we brainstorm, the last thing that I used to do was practice. I said, okay, let's pretend I'm your friend. And I would grab the toy out of the kid's hand and say, so what are you gonna say? And then my thought being that at the end of this interaction, the child had brainstormed an alternative way to do something next time and had practiced it so that kid's memory of the interaction was positive. I hoped. It was practicing asking for a turn instead of taking the toy, or being able to say, I'm not done with that, instead of hitting. So listening, label feelings, and to me, label feelings is about empathy, it's about communicating to children. You get what it's like to be in their shoes. People worried about labeling feelings. What if that's not the right feeling? I cannot think of a time in my career where when I was wrong, a child didn't say, No, I'm not mad, I'm frustrated. I once said to a little girl who was crying, you look really sad, and she screamed at me, I'm not sad, I'm mad. People cry when they're mad too. I think it's helping them see that we get them and that we can communicate getting them. Because I think that leads to a sense of feeling safe with those people, and therefore a sense of belonging.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

So this language building, the emotions that you talked about in early childhood were to three until the age of four, all of that language acquisitions happening. We also have children in eye care with multilingual things going on, multicultural, multilingual. So what we are giving them these tools, my background's in Montessori, and one of the biggest things is we just flood children with different words. And why would emotions be any different? Speaking about the classroom setting, a lot of parents are concerned sending their children to the childcare setting for the first time. When you're in the childcare setting, we have children who have different abilities and different temperaments and different ways of communicating. The biggest fear is their fear that someone's other child might bite them or hurt them. We're always watching. We have this multi-movement classroom, emotional needs, visible things going on. We're trying to nurture, make sure they're eating. So the teacher's role is a really difficult one. They're not just caring for one child, they're caring for a whole group. What is the role of firmness and kindness? How can a teacher acknowledge everyone's needs within a classroom and still being able to say at the end of the day that I did these five things because it's hard.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

There are days you can't say it up until the last days that I was working directly with children. I would go home and think, I could have done this a lot better. So I want to go back to something you said about the parents worrying that their child's going to be bitten or their child's going to be hit. I have a different take on reassurance. And what I would tell parents is, well, of course they are. They're going to have moments where they're with someone who hits or someone who bites, and it will be unpleasant. As teachers, we will do our best to make sure that doesn't happen. But the likelihood is that it will. And know that we're working with both kids on responding with the child who's done the hitting or the biting. We're working on how can you let someone know this without hitting or biting? And with the child who is hit or bitten, how can we help them be something other than a victim? I would often say things to kids like, Do you want to tell Yogi something about hitting? I'll ask you, Did you want Yogi to hit you? Because I know the answer is no. They'll go, no. So what could you say to her so she knows you don't want her to? So that the child ends the interaction, having learned a step they might take. Back to kind and firm. Empathy is at the top of the heap of skills that we need to be utilizing in our work with children or in our parenting of children. The one that goes with it is kind and firm. It's really when people hear, oh, you have to be kind and firm at the same time, people don't think about it as complex or difficult. But it can be. We're much more used to being kind and firm consecutively, meaning we'll start off being kind and then we watch our kids develop a sense of entitlement, but give me what I want then. And then we swing to firm because we've decided that child now needs limits. And so when the child starts acting entitled, in that moment, we're thinking, I don't really like you much in this moment. And when we swing to firm or go beyond firm to rigid, that piece in our mind is now saying, I don't really like myself very much. And we go back and forth between kind and firm. Kindness and firmness at the same time. If people can do empathy well and kind and firm at the same time, anything they're doing from parenting to teaching with children will get better. To me, those are the two foundational skills.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

So in your classroom, let's say I'm a child and I'm constantly moving around, touching other people's things, and maybe taking them won't kind and firm look like as a teacher. What would you say to me?

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Well, I'm thinking of a child that I worked with who just could not refrain from knocking over towers that other children had built. I remember it happening repeatedly one day, and my saying to him, you know what, I really cannot stop you from knocking towers over. This is something I learned from Jane. It's that admitting when you don't actually have power, like unless I'm willing to tie you up, I can't stop you from knocking things over. So you're gonna keep doing it. I said, if it happens again, I'm gonna ask you to play in a different part of the room where you won't be near the kids who are doing the towers. The kind part was not getting angry about knocking things down. The firm part was saying, and this is what will happen. And then following through without blaming, without shaming. So when he did it again and I asked him to play in a different part of the room, I asked him, What did I tell you would happen? Sorry, after I had said to him, I'll ask you to play in another part of the room. Then I reviewed it with him. I said, What will happen if you keep knocking things down? He said, I'll have to play in another part of the room. So then when I went back to him, I asked him, What did you tell me would happen if this happens? And he cried and he wants me to change my mind and give him another chance. And I said, You'll get lots of chances to do this, but not now. Now you really are done. After lunch, new game. Scoreboard change scoreboard goes back to zero. Tomorrow morning, new day. You don't start off under a cloud. In the early childhood manual, there's a handout on crafting kind and firm statements with children. The first part being a statement of empathy. I get how you see the situation. So I know you don't want to come in from outside to go to lunch. And clock is telling me it's time for lunch. You don't want to come in, and we have to go in because it's time for lunch. Do you want to stomp into the classroom like a dinosaur, or do you want to roar into the classroom like a lion? So the first part is, I get how you see the situation. The second part is, and here's the needs of the situation. The third part is here's a limited choice. You can do this or you can do that when you give limited choices, what the child really wants is off the table. And by saying you can decide, reminding them that even in this situation that they're not getting what they clearly want, which is to stay outside, that they still have some power. Everybody needs power.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

The next day, it's like the slate is clear. I'm bringing up what happened yesterday, it's just forgotten. And to me, that builds a lot of trust. Like, okay, I'm learning a lesson, but it's not punitive. Because in the beginning, if we're like we're going to that area because we're taking things away, sometimes we think that we're punishing children. However, you're teaching a lesson, and that's that difference we have to follow through because they will cry.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

I believe that in that moment he wishes he could take back what he did. I do have empathy for the kid in that situation.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Having that empathy, had you given him a second try, that would have been confusing. You're not going to do it again, and then you get a second chance. You can't trust what the parents say anymore, or the teacher says, because it constantly changes.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

Consistency. I like to leave a space in my interactions with kids where I will change my mind sometimes because they've convinced me that something will be truly different. In addition to all the other things we need to model for kids, flexibility is one of them. If I'm always rigid, then how am I teaching flexibility? People complain that it's complicated. People are complicated.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

So it's respectful for the other person, yourself, and the situation. That's one of the definitions, as I understand the firm and the kind, depending on what the situation is, context helps. I like what you talked about in terms of rigidity and flexibility. That brings me to routines. We could have routines and then we stick to the routines, but how do you create routines when you don't even have any?

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Cheryl said routines are the closest thing to magic in early childhood settings. Jane Nelson has a saying, letting the routine be the boss. If children get to be part of creating a routine, like if they come into a classroom and they're new, to go out of your way to help this new child understand that this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Um it's powerful to say to kids, go check the routine chart and tell me what's next. Instead, we often say, okay, now we're going to do blah, blah, blah, which is us speaking for the routine. As much as possible, you want to let the routine speak for especially in home settings. Kids should be included in coming up with the routine. Older kids can brainstorm the pieces of a routine. Younger kids may not be able to do that as much, but they can help you put them in order. Routines really create a sense of safety, which contributes to the sense of belonging.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Belonging, it's a term frame in psychology. We talk about belonging and how are behavior belonging related.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

I am not necessarily the best person to go into depth on Adler, but one of the things I do know is that when he was developing this psychological construct, he was working at the same time as Freud. They knew each other and were part of a group together for a while. People who know Freud know that he was focused on the individual psyche. What Adler did was to say, no, it's not that that's not important, but that we spend all of our time from birth to death, we spend in groups. The sense of being connected to that group contributes to our psychological well being. It's within our family at the beginning, it might be with one caregiver, one parent. We want to help parents build that sense of safety and emotional connection at home. One of the things that I Adler doesn't get credit for is that attachment theory is an Adlerian concept stemming from belonging. Attachment is that sense of belonging you have with another person. I think groups that stress belonging help kids feel connected to that group in a way that promotes psychological well-being. I think that there are teachers I've known and consulted with over the years. Some of the teachers thought that keeping the kids in line and making sure they did what they were supposed to do and didn't push limits was the secret to a well-run classroom. So if you listen at the door and watch through a window, you might see things proceeding pretty quietly. What you don't necessarily see are the sounds of kids having fun. Because that's not always quiet. The only way out of it is for those of us who are working or raising young children to help them develop the sense of belonging because it leads to critical thinking skills. Kids who have been taught to have an opinion, that their opinion matters, even if I don't accept, I'm going to accept the fact that you're contributing an idea. I remember a dad told me once, I was on a home visit, and I said, What decisions does he get to make at home? Your four-year-old. He said, He doesn't make any decisions. He's four. Then we had a conversation, the dad and I, about how will he learn to make big decisions when he's 14 or 24? He's not getting practice at making small decisions when he's four. I think it was a significant moment for the dad who hadn't thought about it from that perspective.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

We love our kids, and sometimes that age appropriateness to understand because they're so eloquent and they speak and mimic the wording. It's almost like they're little adults, and knowing that expectations, sometimes we have high expectations and they can't meet, that can rock their significance and belonging at times as well. You mentioned attachment theory in positive discipline. Henry Davis does a lot of work on a secure attachment and insecure attachment. Can you speak about what is considered an insecure attachment? What's a secure attachment?

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Becky Bailey, founder of Conscious Discipline, has a visual model. If you picture a triangular rock and a board across it, if you put things of equal weight on both sides of the board, then it will balance. So what she talks about is the interplay between the individual person that's me and my relationship with my significant attachment figure. That in a secure attachment, I and we are balanced. Each gets enough. Then there are two kinds of insecure attachments. One is anxious. What happens there is that the board gets out of balance. There's too much we and not enough I, meaning I am so focused on needing to be with and hear from my attachment figure that I get lost. And the second kind of insecure attachment is called avoidant. And it's when the I gets elevated. So those are the kids that they're going to do what they want. You don't have anything to tell me. I don't care if you approve or not. So that's always been a really handy way for me to think about a secure attachment. It's when the I part of the relationship and the we part of the relationship are balanced. Doesn't mean it doesn't fluctuate, but in general, there's a balance to those two things. And then you have kids who the DSM refers to a condition called reactive attachment disorder, where basically what we're saying is that this child's history has been so traumatic and chaotic that they are incapable of building or having an attachment at all. There's an intervention model developed in Spokane, Washington, called Circle of Security. It's now international. From a training that I took with them, I learned they believe that there really is almost no child who cannot form an attachment. They're biologically driven to do. And what they talk about instead of reactive attachment, i.e., no attachment, is disorganized attachment. And that's where the source of nurturing for the child is the source of pain. It's unpredictable when they go to their attachment figure, will they get the nurturing or will they get the abusive behavior? That has always sat better than thinking, oh, that you just can't do it. Because that's quite hopeless.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

No matter which setting we're in, from the day that students come to us, there's always movement and growth. The time they come to us and till they leave, sometimes the expectations get in the way. And when the teachers and parents have the same expectations based on the development of this young person, it's a win-win. But when we have this power struggle of expectations that are not the same, that's where we then go to the child, trying to expect them to mold to whatever that might look like. So in the classroom, play in early childhood, they're learning all the time through the naming the emotion to interacting or even getting hit or not getting a turn. Everything is a learning opportunity. What is your thought about play and learning through play in your manual?

SPEAKER_00 28:45

When we were researching what we were going to write at the introductory section of part of the manual of play, there are commentaries and opinions about play that go back at least to Plato more than 2,000 years. There have always been people among us who have known that play is important. It is what children do to make sense of their world. Kids are learning all the time through play. Adults sometimes believe play is the thing you let kids do when they're not working. To me, play is when they're working. If I'm playing house with a bunch of kids, everybody's working on some kind of skill. Sometimes the skill they're working on is communication. Sometimes the skill they're working on is understanding of the different roles in the world. In early childhood settings, in America, preschool means from three to five. In much of the rest of the world, when they use the term kindergarten, they're talking about a three-year process. Like it used to be true in the US that three-year-olds went two days a week, four-year-olds went three days a week. And then when they went to kindergarten, they went five days a week. In China and in other countries, kindergarten is all three of those years together. Prior to that, kids have learned by exploring their world around the time that kids turn three, they begin to do play that is more than imitation. Early on, the play is them acting out what they have seen happen in their world. It can be monotonous and repetitive, but they're just trying to understand what they see. After up three is the development of language. When kids have enough language, then their play becomes more thematic. So we're playing house, I'm the mom who has so many things to do, and you are the baby that is not listening to me, and you are the grandma adopting roles and interacting in ways to help them understand how people get along in the world. We underestimate play at our peril. There's a concern in the U.S. kids' skills are getting worse. Kids are tested, and those scores are getting lower. Our response has been to think if they're not ready to learn when they get to kindergarten, we should be introducing these academic concepts earlier. So you now have kids in three-year-old and four-year-old classrooms doing worksheets and doing academic learning because the adults in their life are worried about what kids are able to learn later. When kids left our program, they would go to a kindergarten classroom and we would have meetings with the new teacher. And I remember I was in a meeting with a teacher, the parent, and the mother was worried about what her son didn't know yet. So he's about to go to kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher's response was beautiful. She said, look, kindergarten teachers don't actually care yet if your child doesn't know all their letters or isn't coloring within the lines yet. They honestly don't because they're good at teaching that. Circle time. The ability to move smoothly through a day, the ability to interact positively with other children, resolve arguments peacefully with other children. That kids who can do those things, even if they don't know their letters and numbers yet, will be successful as they move into school age classrooms. Kids who can't do those things are gonna bomb in school age settings anyway, because they can't be part of a group. They don't have ways of peacefully interacting yet. So to me, the emphasis on teaching kids academic skills earlier is misguided.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

The worksheets, we know that developmentally the children they're born with 100 billion neurons and they're gonna fire and wire, but we need an environment where they can use their senses that play the manipulation, cause and effects. It's like singing a song, one, two, three, four, five, six, two times two is four. Those concepts come later, and when they learn that information, they learn it well.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

I find what we've seen happen in preschools is using circle time to do direct teaching. So we're teaching kids things at circle time. What I think that class meetings and circle time should be about creating belonging, interactions with kids during the day, or kids are going to have interactions with each other during the day where they pick up math skills naturally. I might be playing with a child at a table and we have marbles in front of us. I might say, Can I have three of your marbles? And if they don't know how to count three, then I will take one, two, three. We have those interactions every day where moments of real life are used to help them make sounds, learn to count. We have social emotional learning programs with children, and some of them tend to be as good as the teacher teaching them. The teacher who can make them come alive is gonna help children learn. But to me, it's those interactions with the child throughout a day that help them learn emotional skills. Back in the 1960s, they called it life space interviewing. It's what we do all the time with kids. So tell me what happened. Oh, well, what did you want? Oh, you wanted a turn. How did you try and get a turn? You took the truck. Well, what happened when you did that? Those what and how questions are building those skills of social emotional learning, as is are labeling their emotions in the moment. I think kids get more when they have those kinds of interactions than when they have it in a circle time.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

But absolutely. What you're just talking about is that executive function skills. How do we have delay gratification? How are you going to sit and do things you don't want to do so that you can learn? Stephen, how does positive discipline look at children who learn differently or diverse children in our classrooms?

SPEAKER_00 36:59

I think it is true that there are kids, neurodiversity is a long continuum. I come from my last many years of work was in a special education program. We were trying to determine whether children qualified for services because how children qualify for services is based on eligibility. There are kids with attention deficit disorder. There are also kids who just are busy who don't have attention deficit disorder. There are kids who qualify because their constellation fits a description of autism spectrum disorder. The worry is about labeling children. The problem is that currently and for the foreseeable future, it is the label that may be what allows a kid to get appropriate services. So, from positive discipline perspective, the label describes a ballpark. The ballpark of children who have autism spectrum disorder is really big and within it really diverse. Our job becomes to understand the label, but that's just the beginning. The important work is understanding the individual child who comes with that label. That's what positive discipline does well. We don't get hung up on a child being labeled with a condition. We try to help that child achieve a sense of belonging and significance, no matter what condition they have. In our classrooms, inclusion is a buzzword now. And the reason it is, is because it makes sense. You want kids to be in a classroom with lots of other kids who bring different things to the table. Important to remember that as of 1975 or so, principals could still tell parents of children with special needs that they couldn't come to that school. They could just say, no, your child is too something for us to handle. They have to go someplace else. Special education law came about and told us, no, we have to teach every child who is of a certain age. Special education law came about as a result of parents saying to school districts, you got to follow the law. The law says you got to do this, this, and this. I think one of the problems in places like China is that they have laws that say all children should be allowed to go to their neighborhood schools.

unknown 40:08

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

But there's no legal resource for parents when that's not happening.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Talking about supporting positive discipline and children in the classroom.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

I know that inclusion actually works quite well. We know how to do it. It's not rocket science. What we lack, though, is the will to make it possible. So I remember there was one school district that 20, 25 years ago decided we're going to do full inclusion. We're not going to have different classes for children in special education, and we're going to make sure that every class is staffed with a regular education teacher and the support people they need to make sure all children can learn in their classroom. Then they took budget cuts. And when budget cuts happen, the things that almost always get axed first are those support services. Now you had general education teachers with special education children in their classrooms and no support to help the child stay in the classroom. So if we want to do inclusion, we have to support it. All of the preschools that are run by the district are full inclusion. They all have a general education teacher and support services from their special education department. Kids get to interact with children of all different stripes. We know how to do it. We don't follow it through with financial commitment.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

It's also financial and speaking as a head of school, the buy-in from parents, the community, creating resources because each state has their own services, and you don't get the needs assessments and OT appointments. It's labeling that gets you through the door to get the services. The system is a challenge. However, positive discipline tools will allow us to guide, support, give the opportunities for all children to have relationships. Every child is learning from one another. In workplace, we're going to have different personalities, abilities.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

Positive discipline with children with special needs. There's three big concepts. One is perspective, and that is adults remembering. Remember, this child is a child with ADHD or post-traumatic stress because of early abusive experiences. The perspective piece is important. We lose it because when kids challenge us, we're not remembering that in the moment. We're mad because now I can't have circle time the way I wanted it to. Then the second piece is adaptation. So we have to take positive discipline tools and adapt them for special kids with a variety of needs. So free schools are already really good at using visuals. This is a ring with six feelings on it. These are the big six, that we're helping kids label feelings by showing them pictures, might have little mini schedules so that we can show them the routine. So we're taking the positive discipline tools and we're constructing a different delivery system for it using visuals. And then the third piece is struggle. We forget that it's not a bad thing for kids to have to struggle to gain. Skills. You actually can't gain skills without struggle. So our job with any kid is to understand how much do we have expectations that the kid can go a little bit further? Encouraging kids to go a little bit further is really empowering. Encouraging kids to go way beyond what they're actually able to do is extremely discouraging. It's reminding ourselves that kids get to struggle because you can't gain skills without struggle.

SPEAKER_01 44:32

Those beautiful fine struggles, not extreme struggles, just giving them a little bit and moving them along. It's an amazing way for them to create resiliency, adaptability, variety of skills. For parents and caregivers who watch this podcast or listen to it, what is one thing that you hold that they take away from empathy and kind and firm.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

I do believe that parents or teachers who get empathy, can communicate it, and can be kind and firm at the same time. That role they're doing with children will get easier. It's what makes children tick.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

And the play, connecting, knowing your kids, all of those tools that you shared today. Everything was really helpful. Thank you as a retired educator and positive and trainer. Stephen Foster, thank you. I'm Yogi Patal. You're on the Now podcast, and if questions, let us know. It's better for us to know you need we can get the right people to share the right ideas. Steven, we'll be back.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Thank you, Stephen.