Growing a reflective child

As a teacher in a behavior support room I have seen my fair share of maladaptive behaviors. What I have noticed about each behavior is that the all were a method of communication. So often we speak to what the child is doing by saying, "that is unacceptable", " I am going to count to ___ and I need you to calm your body", "Do you want me to call your parents" and with these words we end up with one of two possible situations.
1. A child who learns that the way they are feeling is unacceptable so they suppress it until they explode again and the explosion is worse.

Or

2. A child who continues to perform the maladaptive behavior because they are not capable of suppressing it and they are more willing to release their feelings and accept the consequence 

But what if we did things differently and instead of our goal being to build a submissive child, our goal be to grow a reflective child. Reflection is a learned skill and unfortunatley many adults don't have it which often cause volcanic behavioral erruptions well into adulthood. So how do we grow this reflective child:

1. Speak to the reason they are doing what they are doing, "I see you are crawling on the floor and I know that you have a strong emotion that you want to share, but crawling on the floor will not get you what you need..."

2. Give them reflection options in your classroom or at home:
                      a. Set up a reflection zone with a chair, journal, color pencils, markers
                      b. Put up reflection tickets where a child can set an appointment to reflect with you, or the   school counselor.

3. Talk to them about expressing their feelings after they have calmed down, "I am so glad you shared, now I have a question for you did crawling around on the floor help you feel better or did getting your feelings out feel better.

4. Give them the consequence by seperating the emotion and the behavior: "Unfortunately you still have a consequence for crawling on the floor and knocking things over, you will need to clean up what you messed up. What could yo do next time to get your feelings out? Yes, you can go to the reflection corner and really get your feelings out or you can come to me and talk because I want to hear about whatever makes your heart sad."

The reflective child is not built over night, especially the longer the child has gone believing that what the feel doesn't matter. So let's be intentional about our speech and actions and also teach reflection when they are not using a maladaptive communication mechanism... More on how to including a reflection lesson in your daily classroom morning meeting, or at your evening family dinner coming next week, so stay tuned!