Seeing Beyond Behaviour: the film

1. The child cannot change the room (0:00)

Hello, I am Dr Scott I-Patrick. I am an educational psychologist and this is Seeing Beyond Behaviour, a short series for parents, for school staff and for young people about what is really going on when a child struggles. It is based on the written guide of the same name and everything in it is either evidence based or clearly labelled as my professional view.

I made this because of what I see most often in my work. Children who are quietly holding it together at school and falling apart at home. Children who cannot get through the front door in the morning. Children whose stomach aches and headaches are real but have no medical cause that anyone can find. Behind almost all of it is the same story. A child has struggled with something for long enough without anyone changing it that their feelings have learned to fire before the day has even begun.

Here is the whole series in one line. We start with the nine feelings we are all born with. We look at how repeated struggle turns them into a script. We look at how one feeling sets off the next and how feelings spread between people. We look at shame, at masking and at why staying away from school feeds itself. And then we turn to the adults because the answer in the end is a trusted adult who changes the room.

Imagine being asked to work all day in a room where the lights flicker, the chair is the wrong height, the instructions arrive too fast and someone keeps checking whether you have finished. You would leave. You would ask for a different room. At the very least you would turn the lights off. An adult in a bad environment has choices.

A child at school has almost none. They cannot change the timetable, the teacher, the seating plan, the noise, the pace of the lesson or the way their work is marked. They cannot decide to skip the lesson that frightens them. They are the only person in the building who is required to be there and has no say over what happens there. That is not a criticism of schools. It is simply the position a child is in and it means that when a child's environment keeps causing them distress, the child is not the one who can fix it. The adults are.

I often put it this way. If a plant is wilting, we do not tell the plant to try harder. We look at the soil, the light and the water. Children are the same. When a child is struggling, the first question is not what is wrong with this child. It is what in this environment is not fitting this child and what can we change?

Everything that follows is about learning to read the signal a child is sending us and the signal is feeling.

2. Feelings are alarms, not choices (3:32)

Chapter 2. Feelings are alarms, not choices.

The psychologist Silvan Tomkins argued that a small set of feelings is built into every human being from birth and shows on the face before any learning could account for it. He described nine. Two of them draw us towards the world, interest and enjoyment. One, surprise, wipes the slate clean so we can deal with whatever just happened. And six are protective. Fear, distress, anger, shame, disgust and dissmell, which is the wrinkled nose feeling that keeps something bad at a distance. The protective feelings are unpleasant on purpose. Their job is to make us stop, escape, push back or get help.

Notice the balance. Six of the nine are unpleasant. That is not a design flaw. For most of human history, missing a danger was far more costly than missing a pleasure. But it does mean that a child who spends most of their day with the protective feelings switched on is living in a state their body was never designed to stay in for long.

Here is the picture I would ask you to hold on to. A smoke alarm does not think. It does not ask whether the smoke is from a fire or from toast. It goes off, loudly and it will not stop until the smoke clears. Feelings work the same way. They fire before thought. They are loud on purpose and they cannot be reasoned with while they are sounding. You would not tell a smoke alarm to calm down. You would deal with the smoke.

When a child's face closes down, when they go red and look at the floor, when they shout or run or freeze, an alarm has already gone off inside them. It went off before they had any chance to think about it. So the behaviour is the tip of the iceberg. The feeling is underneath and it got there first. Responding to the tip while ignoring what is underneath is why so many well-meant strategies do not work.

Feelings are not only in the head. Each one has a body signature and this is where stomach aches and headaches come in. In broad terms, when the protective feelings fire, the body gets ready for action. The heart speeds up. Breathing gets shallow. Blood moves away from the digestive system towards the muscles. The gut, which is in constant conversation with the brain, tightens or churns. Do that once and you feel butterflies. Do it every school morning for months and you get a child who is sick before school, has a stomach ache that eases by mid-morning or arrives home with a headache. These symptoms are real. The child is not making them up.

So take physical symptoms seriously in both directions. First, see a GP because it is not for a teacher or a psychologist to rule out a medical cause. Second, notice the pattern. Symptoms that are worse on Sunday evenings and school mornings that ease once the pressure passes and that vanish in the holidays are telling you something about the child's environment, not about their stomach.

Both things can be true at once. The pain is real and the cause is the school day.

3. How a script is built (7:33)

Chapter 3. How a script is built.

Feelings are the alarm system we are born with. Scripts are what we learn to do with them. Picture a field of long grass. The first time someone walks across it, they leave barely a trace. The second time, they take the same route because it is slightly easier. By the 20th crossing, there is a path and by the 100th, nobody even thinks about the route. Their feet take it. That is a script. Every time a child meets a situation, their brain records what happened and how it felt. Meet the same situation again and the same feeling fires a little faster and a little stronger. After enough repetitions, the situation and the feeling are welded together. The child no longer needs the bad thing to happen. Seeing the worksheet, hearing the teacher's name or just waking up on a Monday is enough to set the alarm off.

A script is not just a feeling. It comes with a story the child tells themselves and over time, the story becomes what they believe. Children have said these things to me in their own words. I am the stupid one. Everyone else gets it and I don't. If I try, I'll get it wrong and everyone will see. These sentences are not opinions the child has weighed up. They are the words that ride on the feeling. They arrive with it. That is why telling a child you're not stupid so rarely works. You are arguing with the caption while the alarm is still sounding.

Adults sometimes describe a child as lazy, defiant, attention-seeking or just not bothered. I understand why. From the outside, a child who will not start work looks like a child who has chosen not to. But a script is not a choice. The child did not decide to link maths with dread any more than you decided to feel your stomach drop when the phone rings late at night. It was learned automatically from experience and that is good news because what was learned from experience can be unlearned from experience.

How long does it take? Shorter than most people think and this is the point I most want schools to hear. A script does not need years of trauma. It needs repetition without repair. A child who finds reading hard and is asked to read aloud in front of the class twice a week without anyone changing that can build a solid script of shame around reading within a single term. The key phrase is without repair. Struggle by itself does not build a negative script. Struggle that nobody notices, nobody names and nobody changes does. Children can tolerate a great deal of difficulty when someone is alongside them. What they cannot tolerate day after day is difficulty they are left alone with.

4. The spiral, the ripple and four rules for a life that works (11:05)

Chapter 4. The spiral, the ripple and four rules for a life that works.

Two things happen once a negative script fires.

I think of them as the spiral inside the child and the ripple between the child and the people around them. Tomkins described feelings as amplifiers. Once fear fires the child's attention narrows to whatever is frightening. That brings up the memory of the last time, which brings up the shame of the last time, which brings up the thought I can't do this, which makes the fear louder. Within moments the child is not thinking about the maths problem at all. They are thinking about every time they have ever failed. Parents call this going from nought to a hundred. Teachers say she just shut down. That is the spiral.

Once a child is in the spiral, three things follow and I want adults to expect them rather than be surprised by them. The child cannot think clearly, so this is not the moment for explanations, consequences or problem solving. The child cannot hear reassurance because reassurance is aimed at the caption, not the alarm, and the child will reach for whichever escape their script has taught them. We come to those escapes in the next chapter.

The second thing is the ripple. Feelings pass between people. Babies cry when they hear other babies cry. A room full of tense adults makes a child tense. A frightened child makes a parent frightened, and the child who is watching that parent's face far more closely than the parent realises becomes more frightened still. This is why mornings go wrong so fast. It is not that anybody is doing anything wrong. It is that fear is catching, but the ripple runs the other way too, and this is the hopeful part. Calm is catching as well. Not false cheerfulness, but an adult whose own body is settled enough for the child to borrow that settledness. Psychologists call it co-regulation. In my view, it is the most powerful tool any adult has.

Tomkins believed that underneath all our differences, human beings are built to follow four simple rules. One, have as much interest and enjoyment as possible. Two, have as little of the protective feelings as possible. Three, do not have to hide or hold in what you feel. And four, the one that is usually left out, have the power to make the first three happen. Adults have that power. Children largely do not. So for a child, rule four has to be carried out by the adults on their behalf. If the adults do not do it, nobody does.

Try this with any child you are worried about. Walk through their day with the four rules. Where is the interest and enjoyment? Where are the alarms going off? Where can they show how they feel? What say do they have? In my experience, the answers point straight at what needs to change and usually the child could have told you if anyone had asked.

5. Shame and the four escapes (14:52)

Chapter 5. Shame and the four escapes.

Of the nine basic feelings, shame is the one I want every parent and teacher to understand properly. It drives more of the behaviour I am asked about than any other and it is almost always misread. Tomkins made an observation about shame that changes how you see a struggling child. Shame does not fire because something bad happened. It fires when something good was happening or was wanted and got interrupted. You were interested and you were shown you had got it wrong. You were enjoying something and you were laughed at. You reached for connection and it was not returned.

That means shame only ever fires in a child who cared. The child who blushes and hides when they get a sum wrong is a child who wanted to get it right. The child who tears up their drawing is a child who wanted it to be good and the child who says I don't care loudest is very often the child who cares most because if they truly did not care there would be nothing for shame to interrupt.

So when you see shame read it backwards. Look for what the child wanted. The wanting is the strength.

Shame is close to unbearable so we all learn ways of getting out of it fast.

The psychiatrist Donald Nathanson mapped these into four directions and called it the compass of shame. Withdrawal. The child accepts the shame and hides. Head down. Goes quiet. Hides in the toilets. Stops coming in. Attack self. The child accepts the shame and turns it inward. I'm rubbish at this. Rips up the work. Gives up before starting. Avoidance. The child refuses to feel it and pretends it is not there. Clowning about. Bravado. This is boring. I didn't try anyway. And attack other. The child refuses to feel it and pushes it onto someone else. Argues with the teacher. Blames the work. Walks out. Lashes out. Every one of us has a favourite direction. So does every child.

Two of the directions are quiet. Withdrawal and attack self. The child takes the shame inside and these children are frequently missed because they are not causing anyone else a problem. Two are loud. Avoidance and attack other. These are the children who end up on behaviour logs. I want to be direct about something. The loud child and the quiet child are doing the same thing. The child who calls the teacher an idiot and the child who has stopped coming to school may have identical scripts. If we treat the loud one as a discipline problem and the quiet one as fine, we have misread both.

The compass also tells you what to do because each direction is a request the child cannot put into words. The withdrawing child needs to be noticed gently and stayed with without being made to perform. A quiet, I'm here, is worth more than, come on, join in. The child attacking themselves needs their effort seen and their worth separated from the work. That was hard and you kept going. The avoiding child needs the difficulty named calmly without exposure. I think this one is trickier than it looks. Want to do the first bit together? And the child attacking others needs an adult who stays steady, does not take the bait and comes back to it later. I can see this has really got to you. Let's sort the work out when things are calmer.

6. The body's three states (19:13)

Chapter 6. The body's three states.

The feelings we have talked about run through the body's nervous system and that system has, in broad terms, three settings. I describe them to children as a traffic light, green, safe and connected, heart steady, breathing easy. In this state a child can listen, think, learn, play, make friends and cope with a setback. Everything a school hopes a child would do happens most easily here. Amber, alarm. The stress system is on: fidgety, argumentative, tearful, clingy, cannot sit still. Fight and flight live here and learning is very hard because the body is not interested in fractions when it thinks it is in danger. Red, shut down. When the alarm has gone on too long or escape feels impossible, the body goes still. The child looks blank, distant, floppy, switched off. From the outside this looks like defiance or laziness. From the inside the child has gone somewhere far away because that was the only exit left.

Once you see the three states one thing becomes obvious. You cannot reason, reward or threaten a child out of amber or red because the parts of the mind that respond to reasons, rewards and threats are not fully available in those states and the child's body does not take our word for it. Telling a frightened child that school is safe does not change what their nervous system has learned. Safety has to be felt repeatedly before it is believed.

Children do not arrive able to bring themselves back to green. They learn it over years by having it done with them. A baby is calmed by being held. A 10-year-old is calmed by an adult who sits alongside them without needing them to talk. A teenager is calmed by an adult who does not react to the door slamming. In each case the child's body reads the adult's body and slowly matches it. That is co-regulation and in practice it looks like this. Get lower than the child, not over them. Slow your own breathing before you speak. Say less and say it more slowly. Name what you see without judgement. Your body looks like it has had enough. Offer nearness without demand. I am going to sit here. You do not have to say anything and wait longer than feels comfortable. Green is contagious but it is slower than amber.

One honest note. Readers who look into this area will meet polyvagal theory which many practitioners use to explain the three states. I use its practical ideas because families and staff find them helpful but several of its specific claims about the nervous system are contested in the scientific literature. So I offer the traffic light as a widely used practical model, not a settled physiology. The facts I am actually relying on are older and uncontroversial. The body has a stress response. Children learn to settle through co-regulation and nobody learns well while their body is preparing for danger.

7. Masking: the swan and the bucket (23:01)

Chapter 7. Masking: the swan and the bucket.

Masking is what a child does when they hide how they feel or hide who they are in order to fit in, avoid trouble or avoid being noticed, holding back tears, forcing a smile, copying what other children do without understanding why, sitting still when every muscle wants to move, laughing at jokes they do not follow, saying I am fine when they are not. Some masking is a normal part of growing up. The difference is scale. The children I am describing mask for most of every day at enormous cost and usually nobody at school knows they are doing it.

A swan glides across the water looking effortless. Underneath its feet are paddling constantly. A masking child is a swan. The teacher sees a child who is quiet, compliant, perhaps even doing well. What the teacher cannot see is the paddling. The constant monitoring of what everyone else is doing. The rehearsing of what to say. The swallowing of fear. The effort of appearing to follow a lesson they lost 10 minutes ago. Now imagine each child arrives at school with a bucket. Every alarm that goes off during the day pours some water in. A loud corridor. A task they cannot start. A friend who ignored them. A change to the timetable. For most children the bucket has a tap at the bottom. They talk to a friend. They run around at break. They laugh at something and the level drops. For a masking child the tap is shut because showing feeling is exactly what they are working so hard not to do. The bucket only ever fills.

At quarter past three the child walks through their own front door, sees the one person they do not have to mask with and the bucket goes over. Parents describe screaming, sobbing, kicking, hours of rage or a child who goes to their room and does not come out. Parents call this after school meltdown or restraint collapse. Those are phrases from parent communities rather than the research but the thing they describe is real and well documented. It is the cost of a day of holding it in paid in full at the end of it.

When a school says a child is fine and a parent says the child is falling apart at home in my experience both are telling the truth about what they see and the parent is usually telling the truth about the child. A child who is genuinely fine at school does not usually collapse at home every day. The collapse is evidence that something needs looking at. School is seeing the swan, home is seeing the feet.

Anyone can mask but the research is clearest for autistic people where it is common and is linked to exhaustion, anxiety and low mood. Children with ADHD, children with unidentified learning difficulties and children who have learned that showing feeling is unsafe all mask too. If a child is masking, telling them to stop is not the answer. The mask is there because at some point the child learned it was needed. The answer is to make it need less. Fewer alarms in the day. Somewhere safe to take the mask off during the day rather than only at home and at least one adult at school who knows the child well enough to see the feet paddling.

8. When the alarm is the school gate (27:10)

Chapter 8. When the alarm is the school gate. Emotionally based school non-attendance.

Emotionally based school non-attendance, or EBSNA, is the term I use for a child who cannot attend school or cannot attend fully because of emotional distress. Some authorities call it EBSA. Older documents call it school refusal, a term I avoid because refusal implies a decision and that is exactly what it is not. It is not truancy. A child with EBSNA typically wants to go to school or wants to want to and is often desperately unhappy about not going. It is not a parenting failure, although parents almost always feel it is and are often made to feel it is. In my case work, the parents of children with EBSNA are among the most exhausted, most committed people I meet and it is not a choice. By the time a child cannot get through the door, everything in this series has already happened. The alarm has been wired to school by repetition. The body is in amber or red before the uniform is on.

There is one mechanism behind EBSNA that every adult around the child needs to understand because it explains why it gets worse so quickly. When a frightened child stays home, their fear drops. That relief is immediate and enormous, but relief is a powerful teacher. The child's nervous system records, I avoided school and the danger went away. School must have been dangerous. The next morning, the alarm fires a little louder. The relief on staying home is a little greater and the lesson is learned a little more deeply. Meanwhile, the child is missing the ordinary experiences. A lesson that went fine, a friend who was pleased to see them that would have taught the alarm the opposite. Every day away is a day the script strengthens and nothing contradicts it.

This is not an argument for forcing a child in. Forcing a child into a building their body reads as dangerous does not teach safety. It teaches that the adults are dangerous too and it usually ends with a bigger collapse. It is an argument for acting early before the cycle has many turns on it and for a return built on real experiences of safety rather than on pressure.

Not every child stays away for the same reason and the reason changes what helps.

Researchers Kearney and Silverman describe four functions. Some children are escaping something specific at school that sets off fear. A lesson, a teacher, noise, the bus, the toilets. Find the trigger and change it. Some are escaping being looked at or judged, reading aloud, tests, group work, changing for PE, reduce the exposure and build competence privately first. Some, especially younger children, want to be near a parent or carer, predictable handovers and the parent's own calm. And for some, home has become more rewarding than school. This often grows out of the first three. That is not laziness. It is the cycle of avoidance doing what it does. Rebalance gently without making home a punishment.

Everything in this series converges in the hour before school. The alarm clock goes and the script fires before the child is properly awake. The spiral starts yesterday and the shame of being the one who cannot manage. The body moves into amber. The stomach tightens. A parent watching the clock says something brisk and the ripple runs both ways. The child reaches for their compass direction. Under the covers, I'm useless, absorbed in a game or a row about the uniform. Voices rise. Either the child goes in in red and spends the day recovering rather than learning or they stay home and relief teaches the alarm it was right. The shape tells you where to step in. The further down the cascade, the less any words can do. So the most effective help happens the evening before and in the first seconds after waking. Everything ready and visible. Decisions taken while the child is in green. A low demand start and the parent's own body in green.

You are not negotiating with the child. You are negotiating with the alarm.

9. What the adults can do (32:28)

Chapter 9. What the adults can do.

Everything so far has been about understanding. This chapter is about action. There is a simple grid from restorative practice that I use with almost every school and family. It asks two questions about how adults respond to a child. How much do we expect of them and how much do we support them? Doing things to a child is the world of consequences, detentions, attendance letters and you just need to come in. It sets off shame and fear so it feeds the very scripts it is trying to fix. Doing things for a child is the world of rescue. Removing every demand, letting the child stay home indefinitely. It is kind and it is what an exhausted parent or school reaches for. But it tells the child that adults do not believe they can manage and the cycle of avoidance quietly turns. Doing nothing is what happens when a child is no trouble and slips off everyone's radar. Working with a child means keeping the expectation that they can and will re-engage while giving as much support as it takes and involving the child in deciding how.

There is a well-supported theory of motivation, self-determination theory that explains why working with a child works. It says human beings of any age are motivated and well when three needs are met. Autonomy, some real say over what happens to me. Children have little power so adults must lend it. Genuine choices, involvement in the plan, being asked before being told, competence, feeling I can actually do things, not being told I am clever but experiencing myself managing. This is why the way back runs through the child's strengths and interests. Interest is the feeling that pulls us towards the world. A child who has spent months in fear needs to feel interest again in their own body before they can believe school could hold anything for them. And relatedness, someone who knows me and is on my side.

That is the trusted adult and in my professional view it is the single most important element of any plan. One person at school who knows the child, understands what sets their alarms off, checks in with them predictably, notices when the swan's feet are paddling and speaks for them in rooms they are not in. Someone the child can offload to so the bucket has a tap during the school day and not only at home. The research on school connectedness consistently finds that having at least one adult like this is associated with better wellbeing and attendance. It is the cheapest and most powerful intervention in this series and the one most often missing.

The words adults use either lower a child's alarm or raise it. There's nothing to worry about tells the child their alarm is wrong. It is not, it is just early. Try instead. Something about this feels really hard for you. Let's work out what. Everyone else manages. Go straight to shame. Try. This is hard for you and that's the bit we need to sort, not you. Just try. The child is already trying harder than anyone can see. Try. What's the smallest bit of this that feels possible? And calm down. Nobody has ever calmed down because they were told to. Try. I'm here. Take your time.

10. A return that holds, and where you stand (36:40)

Chapter 10. A return that holds and where you stand.

For a child who has been out of school, a return that holds follows a few principles. Safety first, then learning. The child's body has to experience school as safe before it will let them learn there. Small steps and the child sets the size. A step that fails teaches the alarm it was right. So 10 small successful steps beat three big ones with a collapse in the middle. Interest as the doorway. The first lessons back are the ones the child likes or is good at. One adult, always. Change the environment, not just the child. Because if the original alarms are still in place, the return will fail where the child meets them again. Parents and school as one team. In my experience, the single biggest predictor of whether a plan works is whether the adults trust each other and expect it to take time. A wobble after a good week is not a failure of the plan. It is a Tuesday.

A brief word on where you stand. I am not a lawyer, but parents and schools should know the shape of the framework because it changes the conversation from favours to entitlements. Under the Equality Act, a child whose difficulties amount to a disability has a right to reasonable adjustments at school and many of the changes in this series may well count. Under the SEND Code of Practice, a child with special educational needs is entitled to support and an education health and care needs assessment can be requested. The Department for Education's attendance guidance expects schools to listen, understand and remove barriers and every local authority has a SENDIASS, which is free, impartial and confidential. One thing that is beyond the scope of this series, if a child says or suggests that they want to hurt themselves or that life is not worth living, speak to the school safeguarding lead or the GP today and in an emergency call 999. It should never be left to see whether it passes.

Let me end where we began. Feelings are alarms, not choices. Repeated struggle without repair builds a script. Children cannot redesign the room. Shame only hurts because they care. Masking has a cost. Avoidance feeds itself and the way back is relational. A trusted adult who knows the child changes what can be changed and gives the child somewhere safe to put their feelings. Interest and enjoyment then do the rest because they are the feelings that pull a child back towards life.

Thank you for watching.

The written guide with its evidence notes and references is available from EdPsych Connect.