Kaiser – button pushers

A button-pusher is when a teacher feels that a child’s behaviour is just making them feel like they want to explode because they are just – it touches something that they haven’t dealt with yet.  It’s the behaviour that they are almost afraid of and when they do respond to it they usually respond in an out of control manner because it was something-sometimes it’s an unexpected behaviour but more often it’s a behaviour that they just don’t know how to deal with it, like running away.  What do you do?  If you run after them then you’re playing the game. If you don’t run after them when the parents come to pick them up at the end of the day and you say “Well, at 10:00 he was in the block area but I don’t know where he is now,” you run in to a bit of a problem.  So for me, that’s a button-pusher because I’m just not sure how to respond to it in a way that will support the child.   

Well what research has shown is that when our buttons do get pushed we have something called an amygdala hijack.  And when that happens, our cortisol level really rises.  Our blood pressure goes way up.  And what the research has also shown is that it takes about six seconds; it takes about six seconds for your brain to reorganize itself.  So when you feel that you’re starting to see red and oh, I can’t believe she did that, if you take a deep breath and one way to kind of get the rest of your brain, the thinking part of your brain to function is to maybe create a math problem where you need to have your frontal lobe active, in order.  So even just something in your mind as 5+3=8 will encourage your mental process to change.  And what I suggest to teachers often is that when the children are out of control, they’re often experiencing their own mini-amygdala hijack so that if you actually share with the children-“this behaviour is making me really angry; I’m going to take a deep breath and I’m going to count to five or I’m going to, you know, 5+3”..or whatever you would say out loud, you’re role-modeling a strategy as to how they can deal with when they’re having that behaviour as well. I think our biggest job is that of a role model and so if we can demonstrate the importance of self-regulation they begin to see that they can achieve it as well.  If we lose it then we’re role-modeling behaviour that we don’t want them to engage in.