Unbabbled
Unbabbled
Greg Santucci, MS, OTR: Supporting Sensory Regulation | Season 5. Episode 4
In this episode, Stephanie and Meredith sit down with the Keynote Speaker from The Parish School’s 2022 Giving Voice to Children Luncheon, Greg Santucci. Throughout the episode Greg discusses ways to see beyond a child’s behavior by supporting their underlying sensory and safety needs at home and in the classroom. Greg uses specific examples from his life and clinical experiences to illustrate the importance of being curious about a child’s sensory needs to support their learning potential. He also discusses how his focus goes beyond in the moment changes to the goal of empowering children to be resilient and successful. Greg’s biggest takeaway is that these changes start with us- the adults teaching and caring for our children!
Greg Santucci, MS OTR, is a Pediatric Occupational Therapist and the Founding Director of Power Play Pediatric Therapy in New Jersey. He has been working with children and families for over 20 years, providing OT services in schools, homes, and outpatient therapy centers. Greg is certified in Sensory Integration and has been lecturing nationally for over a decade on topics related to sensory processing, child development, and behavior. Greg has dedicated his career to promoting neurodevelopmentally-informed, relationship-based, interventions to help parents and teachers support children of all abilities and learning styles with the goal of improving a child’s participation in daily activities.
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This episode of Unbabbled is sponsored by Soccer Shots Houston. Soccer Shots was founded in 1997 after recognizing a lack of quality soccer programs for children under 8 years old. Their program was formed under the guidance of childhood education specialists, professional soccer players and experienced and licensed soccer coaches. They use a developmentally appropriate curriculum, and the coaches place an emphasis on character development and skill building. To learn more about Soccer Shots visit their website at www.soccershots.com/houston.
Hello and welcome to Unbabbled, a podcast that navigates the world of special education, communication, delays and learning differences. We are your host, Stephanie Landis and Meredith Krimmel, and we're certified speech language pathologist who School in Houston helping children find their voices and connect with the world around them. In this episode, we sit down with pediatric occupational therapist Greg Santucci. Greg is the founding director of Power Play Pediatric Therapy in New Jersey. He's been working with children for over 20 years, preventing services in schools, homes, and outpatient therapy centers. Greg is certified in sensory integration and has been lecturing nationally for over a decade on topics related to sensory processing, child development and behavior. He has dedicated his career to promoting neurodevelopmentally informed relationship based interventions to help parents and teachers support children of all abilities and learning styles. Throughout the episode, Greg discusses ways to see beyond a child's behavior by supporting their underlying sensory and safety needs at home and in the classroom. Greg uses specific examples from his life and clinical experiences to illustrate the importance of being curious about a child's sensory needs to support their learning potential. He also discusses how his focus goes beyond in the empowering children to be resilient and successful. Greg's biggest takeaway is that these changes start with us, the adults teaching and caring for our children. Welcome today our guest is Pediatric Occupational Therapist, Greg Santucci. We're also honored to have him as this year's parish school giving voices to children luncheon speaker. So we are excited to welcome him here to our podcast and to the parish school. So welcome Greg. Thank you for having me, Stephanie and Meredith. So just to get the conversation rolling, can you tell us a little bit about what got you into occupational therapy and kind of like where your passion within that lies? Oh, it's been a fascinating journey. So occupational therapy found me. I was an exercise and sports science major at Penn State. Went through four years. I started out thinking I was gonna be a pediatrician. I found chemistry was not gonna make that happen, so I had to take an alternative route. So I went through four years of Penn State without knowing what OT was. Went to work in a physical therapy facility and the PT told me that I was an ot. A gentleman had come in with a hand injury and I was fascinated at what this man could no longer do. And then was focused on how do we get him back to what he was doing beforehand, which is exactly what OT was for me though, it was always kids. So my mom always described me as the pied Piper. I was the kid in the neighborhood that all the kids would follow around and wanna play with and I would come up with these creative games. So as I was exploring OT and I found this sensory thing, I realized that I had that and I am a sensory hot mess and I'm gonna be really good at being OT because of my own neuro diversity. So I'm like, Wow, okay. I needed OT as a kid and I didn't get it. And my mom is basically a pseudo ot. She was so great letting me wear shorts to school through November because of my own sensory issues. And so that's kind of how I got home. So I don't consider OT a job. I consider it a blessing. I it I have focused my career on trying to see things from the kids' perspective, knowing that they're seeing feeling things differently from the average person. And that's kind of guided my practice. I care so much about this topic that I don't care anymore. I'm willing to <laugh> make some adults uncomfortable in the process, calling us out. What we were talking about before we went live is that a lot of improving behaviors in kids is kind of reflecting on ourselves first. So I love those conversations and any way possible I could help a kid just be the awesome kid that they want to be. Let's go there. So in reflecting upon ourselves, what are some of the key points that you bring up with parents to start thinking about changes that they can make to their own behavior or the environment or changes that they can do starting with them? So regulation has become a buzzword that everyone's talking about regulation, the kids dysregulated, the kids dysregulated. And as the father of, I have two teenagers in my house, which explains my lack of hair. But as a father of two and an OT for 20 plus years, regulation starts with us. And having been in classrooms for 20 something years now, and I still work in the schools, what I notice is that the adults escalate the behaviors often unknowingly before that big behavior, that big emotional outburst happens. So we get triggered and look, I get it, you gotta get in the car, you gotta get the lesson in. We get triggered, we get hot and we react. So what I've found is that if we can kind of curtail that reaction and understand where that young child's behavior is coming from and their developing brain, if we can use our fully formed frontal lobe to calm ourselves down before interacting with a child who doesn't have that neurodevelopment yet we can get to a better place faster. So whether it's getting to the car or getting to the dinner table, we all have the same goals. It's just how do you get there? And I just think that there's a more empathetic way to get there that kind of honors the brain behind the behavior as opposed to threatening to take their phone away or unplug the internet to get the same result. Yeah, I think about so much easier said than done, but leading with curiosity. If you try to understand why is it hard to get to the table, why is it hard to get to the car? And I have two children and one of them just graduated from ot, which I'm super excited about, but he was a sensory seeker and OT really helped me understand why he was doing the thing. He was jumping out of trees and throwing his body all over the place and he could never sit at the dinner table. That was a really hard thing for us,<affirmative>. And so once I started trying to figure out why, I was able to come up with little tricks and strategies to support him which OT was super helpful for, cuz I don't think I would've been able to do that without that. And really reflecting on the goal. For example I see this a lot. So when my son was young, we wanted to get him to bed early. Eight o'clock was the bedtime. So he's down at 7 45, 8 o'clock, Legos are all over the living room. And rookie mistake was to have him clean up the Legos, which turned into a fight before getting to bed. But cleaning up the Legos wasn't the goal, the goal was the bedtime. So what I have since learned is to say, Hey, I'll take care of the Legos, which he appreciated to hold that goal of the bedtime and then the next day, start the cleanup a little bit early, make the cleanup fun, celebrate the fact that we cleaned up and that we still got to bed on time. But the first thing that I did was I checked myself and I'm like, What's my goal? Cause when you have three different goals, well I've gotta finish his plate and he's gotta get his homework done and he's gotta get to the table. You got too much going on there. Focus on one thing first, have success with one thing and then add on from there. Once you adjust your own adult behavior, first stop blaming the kids. To make sure everyone listening is on the same page. Can you give a elevator pitch of what sensory integration is and how that might impact a child? Sure. Wow. So every.<Laugh> easy question. How long is this elevator <laugh>. To the 40 seconds floor? So every bit of information we get comes in through our senses. So you see things here, things about things taste things, you move through the world. That's how we get everything. So everything is sensory from that standpoint. So let's take an example of walking down a hallway. Okay. Real simple. And talking about the integration that has to happen just to walk down a hallway of a school. So you have to be balanced, first of all. You have to be able to walk in somewhat of a straight line. There's gonna be people walking past you and things on the bulletin board that could distract you or you can tune them out and keep going. There's bright lights, there's conversations in the hallway that could distract you, but you're able to filter them out and keep going. So that's hearing feeling. And oh by the way, your sock may be crooked and you feel that, but you can keep going. I can't keep going. I would actually have to stop and fix that, but you can keep going. So that's a lot of sensory processing, just walking through the hallway of a classroom. If you throw it into a shopping mall where now every store has different music playing and a different smell and it gets more complicated. So when you are integrated, you can kind of tune out the background stuff and keep moving forward. When kids have problems with sensory integration, those little ambient sight and sounds really throw a monkey wrench into getting from point A to point B. So if a child doesn't have good sensory integration, they're gonna have a hard time meeting our expectations and it's up for us to figure out why to put your sensory head on and figure out why. So you can tell if a kid is distracted by auditory sounds, you can see it in their face, turn on the vacuum. And if they cringe or they run to the couch that they may have auditory sensitivities. If they've decided that they're not eating what you're cooking while you're preparing it because they can smell it, well that's good information. Or if there's only three shirts in their entire wardrobe that they'll wear cuz everyone else is itchy. That's good information. Are we at the top floor yet? Cuz that's basically sensory integration in a nutshell. I do. Yeah. You did great. And I feel like you described my household <laugh> where mine too, I used to have to turn the stove fan on and open windows so that my son couldn't pre smell the food. He can't it. Mm-hmm. And my daughter has three items of clothing that we buy in bulk because she won't wear the others and only one type of sock that she'll wear because she can't play softball if she's wearing the softball socks because they just don't feel comfortable and she can't even attend to the softball game to play. So we just let her wear the regular socks. When you said that I completely flashed back to the early eighties when I was playing baseball in little league and they used to have the stirrups on the socks, it was that strip that goes underneath. I stopped playing baseball, I couldn't concentrate on the field because I had that stupid thing underneath my sock. It was messing me up. I play tennis now <laugh>, I switch, I'm pretty good at tennis, but I went right there. And it's that shift environment, don't force it, but you can find a different environment. So if you're noticing your child or a student in your classroom is having some of these difficulties, are there things that we can do to try and set them up for success? So the biggest thing if we're talking about in schools and creating a sensory safe environment depending on the communication level of the kid, how you can have that back and forth with them. They need to feel safe. So if the environment is too loud or it's too busy I like to collaborate with the kids and come up to a place in the room where they actually can feel safe. So I like to give them options and opportunities to create a sensory environment for themselves that will allow them to access the thinking part of their brain. That could be headphones, it could be the table in a table in the back of the room instead of a desk so that they can stand up and walk around. Or it could be a beanbag chair in the back corner where you can block off a little bit of the visual stimuli so that they can listen to the teacher. There's no rule saying you have to look at the teacher in order to listen and then you can get really elaborate with it. But once you determine that child's sensory preferences with them, hook 'em up and you'll see that when they have those opportunities instead of tipping over the table or the chair or really being disrupted, if you give them the option to stay in the game, they would prefer to stay in the game and do well. So yeah, creating that sensory safe environment based on the kids' unique needs is helpful. And then the other thing I'll say is universally movement universally helps kids. So putting on a brain break, taking a moment to get outside all of those little things that don't take a lot of time really help keep kids regulated. We spend more time trying to manage behaviors. If we were to take that time and actually be proactive, we would get our lessons in smoother. You have this nice infographic on your website about requiring kids to sit crisscross applesauce. Can you talk a little bit about your thoughts around that and how flexible seating options can really benefit our kids? So my favorite part of that is the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with applesauce. Look, it rhymes. Although if you're in Australia, I believe it actually doesn't rhyme depending on your dialect. So yeah, I would say to any adult get on the floor, sit crisscross applesauce and sit up tall and see how long you can sustain it. It's hard. You're gonna slouch, first of all, you're gonna roll over or to the adult, I'll say this to put it in our world, sit in your car, sit up nice and tall and adjust your rear view mirror to that perfect posture and watch how fast you can't see outside of that mirror because you slouch forward. So you start slouching, that leads to wiggling this, which leads to attention issues and the whole thing kind of falls apart from there. The kids being bad, No they're not. They couldn't meet the expectation of sitting crisscross. So yes, you can change positions and I feel that kids should be encouraged to change positions to make them comfortable with the understanding that it can't disrupt everybody. That's the conversation you wanna have with the kids. Make yourself comfortable. But I have to teach the adult concern matters in all of this. And when you give kids that responsibility, they really own it. I mean, I've been in preschools and kindergarten classes when I give them the opportunity to get creative with their seating, they're like, All right, this, I'll lean up against the bookshelf. Or they'll lay on their stomachs with their heads towards the teacher. And I always tell the teachers, Well that's putting their ears closer to you. That may be a good one. So flexible seating is important. And I always encourage teachers to, before you come into the classroom and just set the rules for the year and just say, Okay, these are my rules and this is what we're doing. And go give them some skin in the gate. Let them help with flexible seating options or different, I mean you can have all the beanbag chairs, rocker chairs, tables standing, whatever you need, but give them some choice in the process. And then you create a community of building an environment where all of these different learners needs can be met. And then the teacher can teach. If the teacher thinks that it's gonna be one versus 18 kids in a class and they're gonna control all these 18 kids. Good luck. I haven't seen it work yet. <laugh>. What about in the home? Do you have any tips for that in the home? I, I'm just thinking as you were talking about flexible, sitting in my house, my daughter is a sensory seeker. When she watches TV at the end of the day, she climbs up and she purchases on the back of our wing backed chair. And she has such great balance that she just purchased and she's fine. If I did it, I'd fall against the wall. But she will watch 30 minutes of TV perched on the top of our wing back chair. And I had to eventually be like, Eh, it's a hand me down chair if she breaks it, I don't care. <laugh>, when we go to grandma's, we can't do that. But I guess in our house, yeah, fine, we can watch TV that way. And it led to a lot less battles of what was happening after the TV went off. Sure. My wife hates the fact that when I come home from work that I'll have something to eat laying down on the floor and I'm like, I'm just changing. I'm like, I got an old back. I'm like, I'm just changing my postural demands. I'm giving myself a break. So the first question to your point is you gotta ask yourself who's it hurt? Even though it's against the norm, my rule is whatever, when the door shuts, whatever goes on behind the house, I can't judge. I just do. You do what it takes to get it done. Again, as long as it's not hurting anybody and everybody in that family unit is okay with it, I'm not judging so so me laying on the floor or your child, obviously the chair can't break in. You can bring that concern up to them and if it does become a safety issue, you want to kind of problem solve it together. But there's no rule saying that homework has to be done at the kitchen table at a dining room table. There's no rule saying that it has to be complete silence in order to do work. Our kids are not raised in a world where they have complete silence. We may have, but they have the internet and marketing all the time. So they may not silence work with them to figure out not only where they wanna work, but when they wanna work. Some kids have a hard time coming home from school, taking a break and then lifting themselves back up to do homework. So other, it's like some kids have to do homework right away, some kids need the break and some kids, if you give them too much of a break, you're never getting them back. So there's no ironclad rule here. It's understanding what your child needs, bringing them into the process as much as possible. And as we were talking about, just creating an environment that works for the family with the adults concerns, mattering just as much as the kid's sensory needs a middle ground there where everybody can win. It takes some time and some effort and some patience and some regulation, but you can get there. Yeah, we had a similar issue in our house. Like I said, my son would stand for dinner and eventually I just had to ask myself, why do I care that he's standing at the dinner table? It's not hurting anything. Now the social norms, when we went out to a restaurant, we kind of had to be a little bit more creative about that. And he's come a long way and now he does sit at dinner, but it's also, you have to remember it's a phase. So he was standing at that point, we worked through that and now he can sit. But yeah, it was just the fight every night at dinner time, I felt like I said 500 times, Sit down, sit down, sit down. And then I finally just asked, why do I care that he's sitting down. And even so at home, like we're training for the restaurant and you can have that conversation in the restaurant. First of all, I always go for the booth versus the chairs. And if all of us, we've all been to sports bars where we've been standing up eating wings and drinking beer. So I'm just saying there are some standing options. So there is a social norm to it anyway but in the restaurants, setting that up for success. So I'm very big into bringing the blank paper and the crayons to keep it busy into, I try to stay away from screens, but it depends where they are at the moment. If I know they had a tough day, I don't care if they're not having a conversation or Ellen DeGeneres made it famous. The game heads up, we'll take a screen and we'll play heads up at the table where you have to describe something almost like charades or something like that. So we'll get everybody involved and we're still using a screen. I get creative, but at the restaurants I explain the expectations and if they could meet them, great. If they can't, there's a problem to solve. So we just gave some strategies there. If I feel like my kids are losing it a little bit, we we'd go for a walk outside, I would change the sensory environment. They're not in trouble. Anytime we went outside, they knew it was just we were regrouping, we were just recharging. And we would go outside and hang out and see the landscaping around the restaurant and we would get back in and I'd have 'em for another 15 or 20 minutes and that was fine. So it's funny, we're talking about the restaurant. I have gotten myself to a place of calm, not necessarily worried about what everybody else is thinking about my parenting. Y'all just eat your food and le let me be. But keeping kids in the game regulated and integrated so that everybody can get a meal in them on that piece with it went well. That part of my life went well. And now I'm to the stage where when I can actually get four people together for a meal, it's a miracle <laugh>. But that part went well. Hey, this is Stephanie jumping in really quickly to tell you about our sponsor's soccer shots. Houston, the parish school has been lucky enough to have a group of students participate in soccer shots right here on our campus for the past couple of years. And it has been an amazing way for our students to be a part of a team. Soccer shots began programming in Houston in 2009 with a goal of positively impacting children's lives and supporting their learning of their favorite game soccer. Their program was formed under the guidance of childhood professional soccer players, and experienced and licensed soccer coaches. They use a developmentally appropriate curriculum that meets children where they are, and the coaches place an emphasis on character development and skill building. The coaches use words like respect, confidence, and determination in their weekly classes. To learn more about soccer shots, visit their website@www.soccer shots.com/houston. Again, that's www soccer shots.com/houston. Yeah, I think it kind of goes along with what we've been talking about, but one of the great articles you have on your website is about the difference between forcing compliance and finding regulation. Can you kinda expand a little on that? So yeah, so people think that if you're not forcing compliance, that you're permissive. And that's not what this is. Permissiveness, just letting the kids do whatever they want is not helping anybody. And what I find a lot with people who are overly aggressive with their consequences and their punishments, they end up being the most permissive ones cuz they just give up. And then the kids know that if they hold strong that the parents are gonna bail. So regulation versus compliance, Compliance is not the goal. Regulation is the goal because if you have a regulated kid who can do their best, you're gonna get cooperation. So I'll say this a thousand times in a thousand different ways, like parents, a lot of times like the gentle parenting literature, it'll seem like fluffy and soft. And we have the same goals. We both wanna get to the table, get in the car, how you get there. If you focus on regulation and you're telling your child that I am your partner and we are going to get there together, not your friend, I'm your partner and we are gonna ride this wave and I'm gonna ride it with you and get there. That pays such dividends in your relationship moving forward. If you force compliance, you are telling them, I have all the power, I have control of everything that you like and I can take it away at any time if you don't do what I say. So you'll get that temporary compliance, but at what cost? Okay, Because your kid is gonna be scared of you, which some people are still comfortable with and I would say that is not what you want to happen. Or they're gonna be scared that you're gonna take away the things that they like. So forget about what I'm feeling. Forget about my opinions, my emotions, my feeling. I have to shut that all off because I don't want you to take away my phone. Fast forward to kids who are older, those are the ones that are gonna hide things from you. They're gonna lie to you. They're gonna do whatever it takes because they're scared of you that you're gonna wield your power. Whereas if you start from an early age and you work on regulation, those kids when they're older know you are a safe space and we'll tell you everything. And having a 15 year old daughter, I can tell you, and I know a lot of other 15 year old daughters in town that are not exactly telling their parents what's going on. I am preaching now that it works to the end degree that I have a really strong relationship with my daughter. And I know a lot of us have reflected on it. We're still a little bit scared of our parents because of what was done to us in the past. So if you work on regulation and you partner with your kid, you'll get to that place and it pays dividends. If you focus on compliance, you'll get to that place. But there's a cost to it and it's not worth it. Man, I love that shifting from compliance to cooperation because obviously what you were speaking to about the benefits for your relationship with your child in the future, but also the benefits for the child in their adulthood when I don't want my kids to be compliant adults. I want my kids to be cooperative adults, I want them to be them to have their own thoughts, but also know how to cooperate in a group setting cuz that's what life is. Right? Exactly. And one of the things that I was picking up on while you're talking is that another benefit of working with the child and going for regulation is that it kind of empowers them. So if they're in a situation without you, they can start advocating for their regulation needs for themselves as they get older and get in different situations. And man, I am also a child who was sensory dysregulated and to get myself regulated as an adult and then even more so as a parent. And I wish that I had some of those skills so that I could have advocated for myself better or handled situations differently because I could have figured out my sensory needs and then it would've been a whole different world. So isn't that regulation is a buzzword, but isn't really what we're talking about is empowerment. Yeah, that's exactly it. So we are building resilient kids. We are building kids who can problem solve by themselves or in a group. But yeah, we talk about regulation and centuries of buzzword. The biggest thing here is empowerment. So that preschooler go in a circle time that you're empowering to find seating options. You're empowering them that pays dividends, that makes them very employable adults. That's the regulation skills, the executive functioning skills that we're building. So we're talking about empowerment and we're talking about respect. And when I say respect, respect is by definition a mutual admiration. It's not just a parent young, don't talk to me that way. Don't disrespect me. Respect is earned. And kids learn respect by us. The adults modeling respect. So if we respect their sensory preferences and we respect their emotional regulation at the time and we work with them, we are modeling the very respect that we want. It is a complete game changer. So yes, we're not talking about compliance, we're talking about empowerment, and it's just a bigger win for everyone. Again, easier said than done, right? It's a lot easier. It's a lot easier to say, I'm the adult, Listen to me, I'm in charge.<laugh>. There still, I mean, it took years to really get it, to have so many aha moments. You have to start with one small aha moment. But there's still times where I just lose it and then I sit back and I'm like, Wow, you didn't read your own stuff.<laugh> like we're human and we make mistakes. And with that you just repair the mistakes. Just repair. You go back and you own it. It's okay. It's okay to own mistakes. You're teaching kids it's okay to own mistakes. And then you move forward and you get back, you go back and you read the stuff that you wrote and you go back to staying true to your belief system. Yeah, I'm thinking we're all sitting here and you've both mentioned that you think you had sensory needs as a child that weren't met. And I'm also feeling that I've felt that for years. Is anybody out there just typical sensory regulation without support? I'm thinking No. I.<Laugh> the unicorns of the world. Unicorns. So yeah, I don't know what normal is or what typical, I mean the world's kind of set up for this general typicalness. The majority of people can handle it, but I think everyone has their own sensory issues. I mean, right now we have the DSM five, the book that diagnoses everything when the DSM six comes out and sensory processing disorder is, I'm guessing is going to be in there. You're gonna open up that book and my face is gonna be there. Or if S H M is a diagnosis, sensory hot mess that's me because I still blow on my food before I eat it, even if it's a salad I'm still cutting out tags and shirts and my wife's an OT and God bless her for putting up with me. So we all have our things, it's just how much do those things impact you and what kind of strategies have we come up with without having an occupational therapist to talk to? We all have our tricks. So now for the younger generation, we can take this knowledge of our own sensory issues and hook 'em up, teach them what we didn't know. Game changer. God bless the systems that are figuring out that nobody wants tags and shirts and nobody wants seams in their socks.<Laugh>, nobody wants seams in the socks. And for parents who have questions about the seams in the socks, before you buy the expense of $40 socks, just turn the socks inside out as a start. <laugh> a quick one. That's great advice. That's great advice. <laugh>, my brother is very, was as a child and still is very sensitive to his socks. And when his socks got discontinued, it was like, that was really hard. That was really hard. <laugh>.<Affirmative>, the struggle is real. I've got a story about just how much the environment and a strategy helped my son. He is in a giant public school Montessori classroom and his grades were just not great. And I would ask his teacher, I know he knows the content well, what's going on? And she was like, I can't really figure out why he's struggling to get his work done. And he kept telling me, but I wasn't hearing it because we don't hear everything our kids say. But he kept telling me, It's so loud, I'm so distracted, it's so loud. So I finally said, Okay, I'm sending you with headphones. <affirmative>. His teacher called me two weeks later and said he was completing 60 to 70% of his work before the headphones and now he's completing 85 to a hundred percent of his work daily since the headphones. And it was just such a simple solution. And he was telling me, But<laugh>, we just didn't hear it. So I'll take it, I'll, That's amazing. And sometimes it's the quickest little fix helps, but you have to go deep. You have to dig a little deeper. I'll walk into, and these are free apps, just go into whatever app store or Google play that you have and download sound meter, download a decibel meter and you can see what's going on in the classrooms. There's an entire profession that looks at this. But I started doing a little digging and I was in a classroom that was just freshly painted with really high ceilings and tile floors. And I walked in there and it was like an echo chamber and the kids were actually sitting holding their head in their hands, but it wasn't because they were postly tired, which they may have been. They were actually covering their ears. So decibel readings in a classroom should be somewhat 45 is like conversation 60. You start getting loud, This classroom was sustained 85 decibels. You couldn't think. So these poor kids with their feet dangling and the echo chamber happening, I'm like, Wow, no wonder they're distracted. They don't know what's going on. They're not gonna be able to necessarily articulate that there's an echo chamber in the classroom, but all of a sudden you do some cheap soundproofing, it goes down a little bit and the classroom's a little bit more regulated. They're a little bit more cooperative. Shocking. But yeah, those decibel meters are free online. And I was like, Wow, that's really loud. I think of that same thing when I was in a early childhood classroom here at the school, we have these beautiful windows on our campus, just walls of windows. And the sun would just hit it so nicely. And our room was just nice and bright. We almost never turned on the overhead lights because it only took me a few months to figure out when the overhead lights were on. There's so bright that it just overstimulated the kids. And I was like, Fuck, nope, we're just gonna be, We luckily have enough sunlight coming in, we're just gonna do natural light through the windows unless I have to. I am not turning those overhead lights on. They just are like instant overstimulation for these kids. And my own daughter has said her classroom is lovely, but sometimes she's just like, There's too much stuff on the walls. I just keep staring at it. So with the whole light thing, there's a game that I'll play with kids just to really drive home the point on the fluorescent lights, if you were to shut the lights off and have everybody close their eyes and say, Tell me something you hear and you can ruffle paper or move a desk and they'll describe something that they hear. It's a great little calming game to do if the kids are a little bit coming and riled up or whatever. And then if you do the same game with the lights on and you say, Tell me something you hear, they'll say, I hear the lights. I hear the lights. Because there's a buzz. And for a sensory sensitive kid to pick up on that every once in a while is enough to throw you off a little bit. Or even if they're really sensitive, completely overwhelm you. Yeah, it's true. That's gonna be one of my next kicks is trying to get more natural light in classrooms and spaces where these kids are supposed to be learning but have that kind of power. I wish <laugh>. And the lights at the parish school, they even shine up. We were even thoughtful about that in design, but it still was overstimulating <affirmative>. They weren't the harsh like that you see in public schools that shine down. They actually shine up. So it's funny you said about the hearing lights. I had a friend recently tell me that, she said, My whole life I thought everybody could hear lights. And I was like, Oh, you have high, you have some sensory meat. There's a great meme that was floating around the Google machine of those old vanilla ice cream cups and the wooden spoon. And the question was, how many people can taste the spoon just by looking at the picture? And I'm like, you can taste that wood in your mouth. It's amazing how the brain works. And that's the whole point to what I preach is all of this behavior, it all comes from the brain. So start at the brain and the behaviors come along. Yeah, that's amazing. All right. I could listen to you talk all day, and luckily I get to go to the luncheon and listen to you talk some more, but we need to be respectful of your time. So at the end of every podcast, we ask our guest if they had one piece of advice to give the audience. And it can be related to this topic or it can be Turn your socks inside out, whatever your advice is. What advice would you give? Can I give two? We'll allow it. Again. This is the longest elevator ride ever. 75Th floor. Now. That's exactly it. The first one is, whenever there's a big behavior, check yourself first and literally say to yourself, check yourself get yourself regulated before you interact. That could end a big power struggle right there. So that was a quick one. The other one that I will tell you is if you are constantly feel like you are talking to your kids and they're not listening, you're talking to them and you're not listening, stop talking to them because it's not getting in. So I do have an infographic on this about changing the sensory channel and it is huge. So my son, who is a gamer and has his own agenda in life with headphones and playing with his friends, I could tell him to put his shoes on a thousand times and he will not put his shoes on. His hearing is fine. Sometimes I feel like his ears are completely detached from his body. So as an Italian, I tend to get louder and that doesn't work either. But what I do is if I change the sensory channel and I stop talking to him and I go and I hand him his shoes, shockingly, he puts his shoes on. And if that doesn't even work, even if I so the, I visually showed him the shoes or I tactile using touch, handed him the shoes and he puts his shoes on. And if that didn't work, if I throw one on his foot again using sense of touch and then hand him the other one, Hey, puts his shoes on every time. So change the sensory channel. Stop talking to your kids. Somebody should write a book saying Stop talking to your kids. It's a weird title, but. It's not gonna be an SLP <laugh>. Absolutely not. But there's something to it. Change the sensory channel. There's my take home messages. I think that's great. Thank you. I love it. Yeah, that's great. But also keep talking to your kids because they do need that too.<Laugh>. Just selectively. But yeah, don't over talk. You know, it's all about balance. I just got pushed outta the elevator <laugh>. No, no, but that makes so much sense because the putting on your shoes thing is a huge thing in my house too. And you're right when I stop saying, put on your shoes, and I show him his shoes almost every time they go on. Yep. Yep. It's energy, it's energy saving. It's all about energy conservation. You gotta choose your battles. Yeah, That's a great, great advice. Well, thank you so much. We've really enjoyed talking with you today. This was fun. This was like so off the cuff and fabulous. You guys are amazing,<laugh>. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Un Babbled podcast. For more information on today's episode, please see our episode description. For more information on the parish school, visit par school.org. And if you're not already, don't forget to subscribe to the Un Babbled Podcast on your app of choice. And if you like what you're hearing, be sure to leave a rating and review. A special thank you to Stig Daniels, Andy Williams, Lesley Hawley and Molly Weisselberg for all their hard work behind the scenes. Thanks again for listening.