HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND HELP WITH REGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR IN CHILDREN BY NIKKI MILLER, MFCT PRESIDENT ACADEMY SWIM CLUB
Children learn in stages, within their current developmental physical abilities, moving from the inside, outward. Meaning that their physical development starts with the trunk, moves to the limbs, and then the fingers – gross motor first, then fine motor, through each stage of development. Learning progresses until they are disrupted by distress or trauma. This may be in the form of a death, divorce, move, or pandemic. These can halt development, disrupt it, regress physical, emotional and intellectual development, and can even change the brain makeup or chemistry. They may lose skills they have previous learned, and struggle to relearn them. Not like “riding a bicycle.” They may also regress to an earlier stage of development. Even though we have all been exposed to this pandemic, every child, in every household may have experienced it differently. Normally, parents can protect their children from stressful situations, but when stress is pervasive in the home, even very young children can feel it as their own, and release cortisol in the brain in reaction to the stress around them. Follow up studies comparing drug use in siblings where one sibling uses and the other has never used, but otherwise were raised in the same household under the same conditions, found that the drug user was exposed to a high amount of stress “in utero”, and struggled with stressful situations throughout their lifetime, more than their siblings. 28 | USSWIMSCHOOLS.ORG
As teachers, we can’t assume that every household has had adaptive parents and a healthy home. During this past year, diagnosable mental health problems went from 10% of the population to 25%. Drug and alcohol use went up 450%. Some relationships got closer, but many will, or have ended broken, with the added stresses of work, home and school under one roof. Parents are overwhelmed, and their children can feel it, even if they don’t hear it. When children don’t feel safe and protected, they come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with them, or they are crazy, because this is safer to them than the alternative: that something is wrong with their parents, who they depend on for survival. Children will often blame themselves when parents break up, because they were the targets of the yelling, or they caused some stress by not doing something right. This leads to feelings of inadequacy & failure. When these feelings are repeated too often, children give up. They stop trying. They just exist.
