Child Family Community

Thank you First 5 Sonoma County for the grants for all 3 of our schools. Perfect timing!

We are incredibly grateful for our team of educators who show up every day ready to do this work! More now than ever their dedication is unbelievable. This is one for the history books. The stories they could tell!!

Another article including our school and the wonderful work many are doing across the state.

"Offering external incentives like stickers, toys, or even social approval won’t help many children change their behaviors because, contrary to popular beliefs,... human behaviors aren’t solely predicated on a drive to maximize gains and avoid losses. Rather, on a basic biological level, they reflect subconscious perceptions of safety and threat that are constantly in play through the actions of our autonomic nervous system (ANS). With his Polyvagal Theory, neuroscientist Stephen Porges offers a road map for understanding the ANS based on the fact that humans come hardwired to avoid threat and seek physiological safety by connecting with others. From the moment we’re born, our nervous systems are constantly searching for signs that it’s safe to connect. When we can’t connect to reduce our neuroception of threat, we experience stress responses, often in the form of behavioral challenges. Unfortunately, many well-meaning educators are unaware of the powerful force that the ANS exerts on childhood behaviors, and so they continue to rely on the binary notion that children’s behaviors are either compliant or noncompliant. This popular paradigm views all behaviors as incentivized and motivated, rather than instinctual and safety-seeking" "We can learn to appreciate that what some may see as problematic behaviors can actually teach us a lot about what children need from relationships and from the environment. When we shift our lens from viewing behaviors as either compliant or noncompliant to seeing them as adaptations, a whole new paradigm for supporting children’s behavioral challenges opens up." #neurochild #monadelahooke #polyvagal #reframe