Shanker – Shanker Self-regulation Method

There are five elements and the five elements are reframing behaviour, so everything you and I have talked about. Distinguishing, for example, between misbehaviour and stress behaviour, between oppositional defiance and what we call ‘angstbeisser’ which is what a cornered animal does when they’re threatened. So we have all these distinctions and they’re very important and reframing ourselves, reframing my own impulses, reframing my own- recognizing that these distinctions that we’re drawing for children are every bit as relevant for ourselves or whoever. 

The second step is recognizing the stresses.  And really what we mean here is deepening our understanding of not just overt stresses but hidden stresses and often it’s a sort of tandem exercise between reframing and recognizing. The better you get at reframing, the more you start to recognize. The better you recognize, the more you reframe also. 

Then we talk in the third step about reducing stress and so there are many, many ways of doing that. To give you a very simple example, if a child is finding it very stressful in a noisy classroom and this is one of our major stresses for little guys, there are very simple techniques for reducing the stress. We have used headphones, earplugs, a quiet area in the classroom, a quiet area in the hall. So there is all kinds of ways of reducing stress once you actually know what the stresses are and here we emphasize that every single child is different. And equally, so what’s stress for one child may not be for another.  

Then the next step is we talk about reflecting and really what we want the child to learn is we want them to develop their awareness not just of when they’re over-stressed. We want them to learn to recognize when they’re becoming over-stressed, when they’re getting close to that point of being over-stressed in order for self-regulation, the last step, to be really successful. The last step is responding. In order for the fifth step to be really successful, it’s very hard to do much when you’ve gone past your point, when you’ve lost control or whatever, when you’ve had a meltdown. I mean think about the toddler who’s had a meltdown. There’s not much you can do at this point other than just soothe them. Is it possible to actually get a toddler to understand when they are approaching that point? Yes it is. Well if I can do it with a toddler, I can do with a teenager.