Despite dealing with neurodevelopmental disorders for 15 years, I am still moved when I hear stories of schools and groups of parents torturing families, especially mothers of children with a neurodevelopmental disorder in relation to a specific child situation. In this context, the child was, most of the time, related to some small fight or dispute, often by manifestation of impulse or even aggression. These small confusions happen more often when treatments are still being adjusted.
Of course, no parent would like to see their child involved in a fight or the victim of a major conflict. Anyone who has experienced this knows that abusive children are often asked to leave school or even exposed to the entire group of mothers who often do not react with principles of empathy or minimal understanding. It is difficult to understand, but know that both those who attack and their parents suffer as much as those who were attacked or even more and for longer. I have heard these children sometimes described as animals, monsters and psychopaths. People take ownership of names that are not always familiar with the concept, nor do they measure the long-term implications of these “labels”. It is often the case that parents and children need intervention through the school and other parents, sometimes even legal or police, to ensure that they have the right to study. However, the expulsion is gradual, forces are being overcome and the possibilities of interventions are undermined. And they would be amazed to see that adults are the ones who most participate in the expulsion process, due to our difficulty in assuming our incompetence in dealing with education in complex situations. Our inability limits and restricts the possibility of being a better society and learning from any situation, which creates exclusion.
Children are usually more generous than their parents and even teachers, and understand that their classmate has been through something and is trying to learn to control. No child should or wants to be repeatedly the victim of another’s explosion and they know it. Strategies for self-control need to be established automatically for training in times of calm. These are strategies for controlling emotional regulation that include strategies for yoga, meditation, breathing or even the use of specific interests in critical situations, any way that causes people to stop thinking and then act. Skills that can be intensively trained in the classroom and outside and that can soothe the “light of the wick” and settle regrets.
These strategies require school, teachers and parents involvement and education in the process and in the persevering activities that must be repeated until they become routine and automatic for the child. Believe it or not, aggressors commonly do not want to attack and will make efforts to incorporate the strategies, especially if we educators demonstrate that the strategies are simple and effective. The child will understand that there is no room for aggression and lack of control. We will learn serenity. Those children who would be victims will be delighted with progress, tolerant of differences and full of repertoires to control adverse situations. Those parents who easily identify monsters and animals in the children of others will definitely learn that their children can be better than themselves. And as lightning strikes and falls on any yard, I hope they learn to deal with problems better when they happen in their backyard of intolerance.
The years will pass and families who resisted and did not need to change their children from school, social circle, as they met parents and teachers who faced the challenge of helping them to adjust emotionally will have better adaptation to the world.
