How to Nurture Ourselves and Others In This Tumultuous Teaching Time

An outline of the material presented at the 2020 Virtual Infant and Toddler Learning Series sponsored by the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children, an affiliate of the NAEYC.

 It makes sense to shine a light on the ECE profession during COVID and acknowledge that what’s happening to everyone is, in fact, grief. We need meaningful encounters with self-compassion so we can take care of ourselves and others in a sustainable way.  

The intent of this presentation  

• offer ways you can position yourself to be strong enough to continue to deliver reflective and emotionally inclusive care for children and families while preserving your own well-being. 

• teach how self-compassion while caring for others by applying both outward and inward calming strategies benefits everyone. 

• outline practical, day-to-day ways to nurture yourself, the people you work with, and the children and families you serve. 

Exploratory questions  

1. How do you claim a portion of compassionate care for yourself? (Yes you, the giver?)

2. What is a reflective listening pose and how do you practice this with the adults you work with to help them process loss? Everybody is stressed and hurting and managing losses. 

3. What are calming signals and how do they relate to helping communicate and foster safe feelings for infants and young children? 

Lessons in balance 

I want to share a personal story about equilibrium. I learned about work-life balance in the twilight of my teaching career. Until recently, I taught young children at Allen Creek Preschool in Ann Arbor where I learned to value myself professionally and prioritize my time. It took a long time to get here. At this school, things like respectful boundaries on staff time and teacher-child ratios being small enough to ensure both children and teachers thrived (not simply survived) are in place. Each classroom team has a rare, third resource, a therapeutic practitioner available for counsel, and referral if needed. Staff professional development is regular, relevant, and draws on the highest levels of developmentally appropriate practice. Within this intentional setting, I learned to value myself as a teacher and as a human being. I carry this with me today. 

I have no idea if the kind of preschool teaching setting such as the one I found at Allen Creek Preschool exists anywhere else but judging from the vast numbers of people drowning in the profession, I believe it’s rare. And like everybody else, they, too, are now treading water through COVID, being careful and nimble. I’m telling you all this because I believe we teach people how to treat us and if you value yourself, others will too. If you don’t work in a supportive environment you have to work that much harder to maintain dignity within the profession and emotional well-being.

How do you claim a portion of compassionate care for yourself? (Yes you, the giver?)

How do you find refuge and sustainability during this insane time? With stress levels so high, how do you manage the feelings of fear and panic while giving children and families your best? These are big questions and very hard to answer. Let’s first think about the endless fight or flight loop we’re all in these days, understand it better, then explore manageable options.  

Psychotherapist Jonathan Kirkendall practices in Washington DC. area. Among other accomplishments, he’s worked alongside the homeless as well as supporting military families and children grieving the death of their loved ones. Kirkendall specializes in traumatic grief support and has a really great way of explaining hard things in easily understandable and compassionate terms. In a recent workshop, Adapting to Change, teaching about how to approach fear with gentleness toward ourselves, Kirkendall taught why after so long we humans haven’t yet evolved past those involuntary fight or flight responses within our bodies when something scary happens. Paraphrasing Kirkendall,

‘So why do we still respond with all the physical responses to fear humans needed for thousands of years to survive? Why do we still feel the rush of adrenaline, increased heart rate, raise in cortisol level, and all the other biological responses to a danger that were just so necessary to save us from being eaten by predators? When you think about it, only in the last 50 years or so has life been safer for most of us. 50 years is just not enough time for the evolution of our bodies to catch up with our current status of greater physical safety and well-being. We’ve needed fight or flight to survive for thousands of years and five decades is just not enough time for humans to grow beyond involuntary physical responses to stress.’

It makes sense to say the evolution of human development has just not caught up to our present-day safer lives…and then along comes COVID. What a paradox. Now we find ourselves regressing, living in a time of constant fear for our safety again, for our physical and mental well-being. No wonder our bodies are coursing with stress responses. 

But we are not helpless. In the same Adapting to Change workshop, Tamera Bouret asserted we can help calm ourselves through targeted and practiced self-talk,

“There are things I can do to help me stay safe.”

“I can choose how to react to things that worry me.”

When you feel yourself physically reacting to something that upsets or frightens you notice how your body reacts. Is your breathing more rapid, does your heart race? Remind yourself you are in control. Choose what phrase you want to use ahead of time to remind your fight or flight responses they’re not needed at the moment. I borrowed my own phrase from someone I love, 

“It’s not a thing until it’s a thing.” 

 I say this out loud, I have it written down where I can see it a lot. I breathe in and out and center myself when the stress level rises. It helps. 

How else do you practice self-care when you’re feeling most vulnerable? By giving yourself permission to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as your needs allow during a pandemic. In fact, you should definitely say ‘no’ to some things during a pandemic. 

Say ‘yes’ to any help offered. ‘Yes’ to joining forces and sharing resources. If someone wants to make something for you, loan you materials, let them. Say ‘yes’ to things people want to give you, do for you, complete for you. We are in a vulnerable time and accepting help is a strength, not a weakness. We’re so used to doing it all, turning down help because, after all, we are ever the cheerful and boundless givers, us early childhood providers. In a pandemic or otherwise, we can and should say ‘yes’ to anyone who wants to help us. And if people don’t offer, ask for what you need. It will be up to that person or entity to set their own boundaries. After all, you’re thoughtful and reasonable and they can be, too. Asking for all dirty dishes to be placed in the dishwasher, help to pick something up from a store, or borrowing a lesson plan is reasonable, especially during a pandemic. 

You can say ‘no’ during a pandemic, in fact, please do. Say ‘no’ to things you feel might harm your well-being. Selectively choose where you’re able to direct your energy best and do that with your whole heart. You’re working the hardest you ever have in your life, so guard your personal time. If it feels good to connect with other people in a zoom meeting at night, go for it. But if the sound of that just sucks the life right out of you, take a polite pass. All I’m really saying is that you have the obligation to reevaluate regularly what brings you joy and relief or what brings you additional stress. Then, set boundaries accordingly. Your feelings about this will fluctuate and you have every right to make changes to how you handle outside obligations whenever you need to. 

The Dougy Center is a national center for grieving children and families. Their mission is to provide support in a safe place where children, teens, young adults and their families grieving a death can share their experiences. The additional resources they offer the online community are exceptional. Below you’ll find one of their tip sheets, Cultivating Calm and Equanimity, a brief outline teaching about the functions of our nervous system and strategies to manage stress. It includes exercises to strengthen the vagal tone, increasing our ability to remain calm and think clearly under pressure:

Cultivating Calm and Equanimity, The Dougy Center 

Here’s another resource.  ‘Preventing Compassion Fatigue’, an article excerpted from NAEYC’s upcoming book, Trauma and Young Children: Teaching Strategies to Support and Empower Children, by Sarah Erdman, Laura J. Colker, and Elizabeth C. Winter. The authors talk about the dangers of compounding stress and teaching-related stress. They offer healing, hope, and practical ways to manage the many responsibilities we face in the classroom today: 

Preventing Compassion Fatigue 

What is a reflective listening pose and how do you practice this with the adults you work with to help them process loss?

  Now let’s shift from gentle self-care (inward care) to helping people you work and live with manage stress and loss by practicing reflective listening (outward expression of care). Everybody is stressed and hurting and managing losses. We need to help one another. 

Reflective listening is the most generous way to communicate with another person. When you reflectively listen, you signal to the person talking they can be fully free to feel and say whatever they need to at the moment because they are directing the conversation and you are not. Reflective listening is just as it sounds, reflecting, and/or repeating back to the person what they are telling you without trying to change or direct their feelings. You’re an open book, a puddle without a ripple. When you practice reflective listening the person or child feels fully heard. They have control of the content and you are not redirecting them to something more comfortable for yourself (like advice, or cheering-up). No one can tell another person how to feel. It is hard to sit quietly with someone in their sadness or anger. But that is your one job when you reflectively listen. 

It takes practice to be a good reflective listener. Be mindful enough not to make suggestions, not tell how the same situation may have happened to you (that’s called hijacking), not offer silver linings, or otherwise prevent the person from having the right to feel what they feel, and you’ll be able to help a lot of people. You can say things like,

“Can you tell me more?”

“What does it feel like to be you right now?”

“It makes sense that …(repeat what they told you they feel)”.

Leave space, silences, for as long as they need, to form their thoughts and express what they feel. This is a real gift. You can learn more about how to practice the art of reflective listening and other support skills by connecting with children’s grief support network, Ele’s Place.

What are calming signals and how do they relate to helping communicate and foster safe feelings for infants and young children? 

Before we can begin to help infants and young children feel safe we need to feel safe ourselves. Learning how to remain and express calm helps vulnerable people around you feel secure. Combine gentle self-care (inward care) with reflective practice (outward expression of care) to foster reassurance for infants and young children. 

‘Calming signals’ is a term coined by Norwegian dog trainer Turid Rugaas. Rugaas categorizes behavior patterns that she says dogs use to avoid conflict, to prevent aggression, to calm other dogs down, and to communicate information to other dogs and to people. Why can’t we transfer this term to human behavior? (I think we can.)

The term, ‘calming signals’ has me thinking more deeply about the relationship between human anxiety and the ways we transfer these feelings to infants and children. Not surprisingly, there’s a large body of research targeting the connection between behavior patterns in anxious adults and the effect this has on the well-being of infants and children. It should come as no surprise to anyone cultivating a calm temperament in adults benefits children. 

The Child Mind Institute is an independent, national nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders. They’re a great resource for research related to adult anxiety passed to children and offer practical application to help prevent this stress transfer. Researchers suggest adults:

• come up with strategies in advance for managing specific situations that trigger your stress

• intentionally and consistently use a calm voice

• stick to simple one-step directions, celebrate together and build on successes

To learn more: How to Avoid Passing Anxiety on to Your Kids

Child Mind Institute offers this COVID-specific advice to help prevent the transfer of stress from an adult to a child: 

• avoid exposing yourself to catastrophic, doomsday-themed news reporting

• focus on what you’re doing at the moment, practice mindfulness 

• be aware of your breathing by practicing measured, deep breathing in quiet moments together 

• rely on routines, staying as close as possible to repeating rhythms and patterns of activity in the day

Read more here: 

Anxiety and Coping with the Coronavirus

Takeaways 

• work inward using healthy self-talk to bypass the fight or flight responses, practice physical exercise, positive visualizations, and breath work to train the vagus nerve to help remain calm in stressful times. 

• work outward, practice reflective listening to enable you to authentically nurture people you work and live with. 

• there’s more; work outward, cultivating a calm voice, practicing breath work in quiet times with children, and keep the rhythm of the day as close to regular as possible. This will signal to infants and children things feel safe. 

Resources 

www.childmind.org

www.dougy.org

www.elesplace.org

www.naeyc.org

Jonathan Kirkendall & Tamera Bouret, Adapting to Change Workshop, August 16, 2020. (Learn more about the work they do at  DCDA  

Copyright (2020) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved.

Teachers are hurting. How do we help?

Our shared humanity and capacity to empathize with our teachers are getting lost in the political rhetoric during this time of urgency to ‘get children back to school’. I’m feeling protective of my teaching tribe. Usually, I talk about children’s grief. Today I’m really thinking about teachers. They’re calling out for help. Don’t you hear them? Teachers are hurting and they have been since March. I want to tell you why we need to respond to their pain and how to take better care of them. 

As a group, teachers are relational, interpersonal, and I know them to be deeply altruistic. The trauma prompted by the sudden quarantine last March is imprinted on their hearts. Since then, it’s been nothing short of a crisis cascade with no end in sight. Now teachers require the bandwidth to manage multiple losses, fear, and the concerns they carry for the children and young adults they care so deeply about. Many of the teaching losses are immeasurable precisely because they are intangible. The loss of goodbye, a deficit of control, and the sudden long-term extinction of their communal classroom environment, just to name a few. The scientific community tells us we will have to live alongside this vicious contagion for a long time. Teachers are in mourning, their carefully cultivated instructional settings fostering interconnectedness and community are now set aside. Enter remote learning and/or disease control strategies. Distance. We are all grieving the loss of what was and trying hard to imagine the future. In the same breath, we’re asking educators to craft a rich, safe, and functional setting with no idea what the near or distant future holds. 

To position yourself as a capable grief supporter you’re going to have to undertake a little bit of self-reflection. If you are grieving the loss of what was and yet still able to lean into a deep well of relatability and empathy sans judgment, you’re ready to be a compassionate caregiver. But if your intent is to change someone’s thinking or you can’t resist imposing your own needs, opinions, and desires, then nope, you are not ready to be a good grief supporter. Step away from the person in pain. Call in a sub. Take some advice from Socrates and know thyself very well before you wade into vulnerable territory with another person. To help, you have to be completely open, unfurled, a blank page, and listen without trying to redirect the conversation in any way. It will go where it will go and your job is to tag along for the ride.

I know, you’re emotionally tapped out and this is a lot. But you still want to help. So how do you help a grieving teacher? Here are 3 very good ways. 

Acknowledge what is lost

When you actually name what is lost (instead of pretending nothing happened) you give space for people to try to process the enormity of the situation. You honor their feelings and prevent isolation. Being alone with grief is heartbreaking.

You can do this:

• text or call a teacher you know and ask, “what is it like for you waiting to hear about plans for the school year to start?” If they don’t want to talk about it they will tell you. If they do, they do. Either way, the griever knows you’re a willing participant in the hard conversations and that they are on your radar. That feels good. 

• Send a real letter. Remember those? Write a short note or send a postcard telling a person how much you care about and value them is a tangible reminder they matter. They will put it in a place they can see it. It will be an anchor. 
  

  Speak honestly and directly about the loss

When you let a person know that you hear them and see the loss as clearly as they do (this can be different than agreeing) and you demonstrate a willingness to speak directly to it, you validate they have the right to feel what they feel. No explanation needed, you’re on their team, unconditionally. This act, being unconditional, is magic.

You can do this:

• Recall and bring up something they may have told you earlier and ask them what it feels like to be them right now. You have just reminded the person you have been listening. Ask for an update. We know when we retell our stories we understand them better, we reach a greater level of cognition. New things will come up, more things will be remembered, there will be revelations. And if the listener can correctly reflect back what is said as part of the conversation, even better. 

• Listen carefully to details within their narratives and ask more about this, “I heard you say you had one day to return to school to close-up your room. What did that feel like? Were you able to get everything home?” 
  

Listen, listen some more, and

reflect back what you hear

Giving a person the freedom to freely express what they feel is the essence of authentic grief support. Your job is to listen. And to ask, “Is there more?” No bending of wills, no cheering up, no rationalizing, no fixing, period. And leave your stuff out of it. Settle into a reflective pose and listen. 

You can do this: 

• Invite the person to go for a walk or talk over the phone. Before you connect, practice a few phrases that will help you remember to reflectively listen like, “can you tell me more” or “ it sounds like….” or “it makes perfect sense you would feel…” 

• Leave your political passion and your knowledge of what ails society at home. Period. No griever needs to hear your thoughts about the left, right, or anything in-between. You are the epitome of detente. They couldn’t pry the opinions out of you. 
  

These gestures of care when delivered with a willing heart are a start, a very good start, to helping the human beings tasked with fostering the education and well-being of our children. We need to take care of our teachers. Let’s inhabit a space of wholehearted compassion as we navigate the start of this tumultuous new school year. 

Copyright (2020) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved.