Hello, smel how are you hope? You're great? So poor old Monts has had a bit of a setback with the old head situation. I will let her explain all that when she's back, which shouldn't be more than a week or two. But until then, I was going to say I'm a one woman show, but I'm not, because today I'm so bloody excited to bring you a conversation with an incredible psychologist, certified behavior analyst, and best sister in the world that would be mine, my sister Rosina.
Will just give her one name like Madonna. And I'm not just saying that she's the best because she's mine, but she is actually the best human being that I know. She's also very smart, and very kind and very excellent at what she does. And I think that's, of course, because she genuinely cares about the kids and the families
that she works with every day. I'm very proud of her, and even though I do take the piss out of her once or twice, I was really excited to share a bit of her and her brilliance with you guys. And finally, just a warning before we kick off, everything we talk about is very generalized so if it doesn't apply to you or your child specific situation, I get it. You don't have to take any of it on board. So please enjoy this conversation with my brilliant sister. So
it's bring your sister to work day today. Imagine you had to do that, fuck bring me to work with you as a psychologist.
It would be like everyone told prefer you be there because they'd be like, yeah, she's so much more interesting than you.
I doubt it. Remember Dad had that dream of you know, me following in your footsteps and us having Natali and Natalie psychologists. Imagine the complaints, Oh every time I go in and see Melissa, she's running late and she just tells us about her.
Problem is No, that would not be the case at all.
Anyway, I gave you a glowing intro that you'll be able to listen back to. I didn't want to say that to your face. That felk awkward, but I thought just to set the vibe that today's conversation would start with the little game of true or false.
You could have prepped me for this.
No, you'd be able to answer these They're easy. They're easy. You don't need a degree for these or how many degrees have you got?
Well, they need to know you tree, It's not that many.
Three just three? Okay? True or false? Is it true that back in nineteen seventy nine, when I was a tiny, defenseless baby and our mother noticed that I was full of bruises that she caught you red handed, let's just say, abusing me by pinching me with your big four and a half year old hands. Is that true or fulm?
I can't recall it. This was only a little child.
Nah, And well I can't recall it because I've blocked out the trauma.
Oh okay number two?
Yeah?
Yeah.
Is it true that I, despite not having completed UNI too busy having good times, I scored a very impressive result on an intelligence test?
True?
Could you tell our audience what your ange? Sorry, superior, Superior? Does you IQ change with age?
It should be consistent if it's a true representation of your IQ.
So like once a genius, always a genius, you're saying, yeah, yeah, that's what you're saying.
You're but you can grow because you have such a high level of intelligence that it means that your ability to garnish more information and new information should really just be there for you.
Okay, so I can, I can grow, but I'm not going to go down. If you drink too much and kill the brain cells, well that's not going to happen. Is it doesn't work well with my infant moons? And finally, is it true that you once asked myself and our dad how long the television program sixty minutes goes?
For you are unbelievable?
Is it true?
I'm just setting up some that's true. That's true. I did say, yep, whatever.
Yep, Okay, not sure what this has done for your credibility.
You're good, got that out of his system.
Okay, just did that to take you down a peg. But you are extremely qualified at what you do, and perhaps you can explain exactly what it is that you do.
So I'm a qualified psychologist, and I've been a psychologist for twenty plus years. I don't know, twenty four to twenty five years, but since two thousand and eighty I've decided to have a little bit more of a specialization in the area of behavior. So I've done a master's and also a period of supervision you have to do of a certain number of hours. And I'm also registered now as a certified behavior analyst.
Okay, and you work with school age kids, we'll say.
Hinder through till the end of year twelve. Mainstream, special settings everything, I'm real, second dream, Yeah, you're a real all round up, I really am. Okay, So we've got the qualifications down, pat, Maybe a good place to start is asking what behavior actually is because despite my incredible IQ, like, my simple idea is, if someone says to me, oh, what would you say, behavior is?
I think good or bad? Like compliant or you know, fucking annoying? What is exactly is behavior? Well, there's going to be different definitions, but basically I would say behavior is anything that we say or do that can be measured from some degree. So we have, you know, from my perspective, from the work that I do, I would say that we have a few different types of behavior. We have those external behaviors, which are the things that we can see, so they're measurable. There are actions that
you know, me talking to you is a behavior. Me picking something up is a behavior. And then we've got the things that are internal behaviors, which are more things like feelings, thoughts, memories. They're internal behaviors. And they're the things that are a little that are harder to access because we often rely on somebody being able to tell us about those. So do feelings become behaviors?
So I'm going to give general responses to all of this. Yeah, of course, I can't obviously give there's a whole lot of you know, different areas, especially if we're talking about because even you know certain mental health conditions, we could also look at that there are learned components within that as well. I would say that feelings are behaviors. When we feel a certain way, we only know what that is because we have learned. So behavior really is about
a whole lot of learn processes. So if I was really sad when I was little because I was accused of pinching my sister and I really felt that I hadn't done it, and I started crying and I was upset, someone may have come up to me and said, oh, Razina, are you okay? You look really sad, and so I learned to then label that as sadness. So behavior is really about something that we learn. The way we behave is we are the product of our environment and those around us and our experiences.
I was I was going to say, well, then, how is it that I know everyone has different experiences, but let's say you've got siblings brought up by the same parents, Like, would their behaviors be similar up until they're sort of exposed to more people. But then I thought, you know that you know that guy, doctor Gable Matte. Have you heard of him?
Yeah?
He saw this thing on Instagram of him talking and he was saying how sometimes when people say, how can two siblings be so different? Like you and I are really different? Right, But he was saying, I would say that you were raised by different parents in that Mum and dad were in a certain time of their lives when they were raising you, and then different when it was me, and then different again when it was Andrew.
Our experiences are different. So my ability to access, for instance, individual attention was probably a lot more available than yours was because you had to have shared attention. Yeah, and my motivations to do certain things would be different to your motivation. So when we talk about behavior and we talk about our learned experiences, there's also a whole lot of other variables that come into play that determine what we learn and how we learn. So we have to
think about what behaviors are reinforced. So when we engage in a behavior, what happens after that? The consequence determines the probability of the behavior occurring again. So if I put on a certain eyeshadow and the consequence of that is I have heaps of people say, oh my god, your eyeshadow looks amazing today, my behavior after that is going to be to probably where that I shadow every
damn day, fucking oh yeah. But if I had not one person comment, or I had people go sure about your eyeshadow choice today, Razina mum would says, probably that would change my behavior in then you less likely to see me where that eye shadow color again in the future. That is a really general way of explaining what would happen with all sorts of behaviors.
So does birth order influence your behavior? You reckon like it would, then I think.
It makes sense that it would because there are different variables at play. So, you know, the same as a third child, they might not be motivated to fight for their parents' attention as much, for instance, because they've got the attention of in our situation, to older siblings. Or they may be more motivated to escape certain situations. And when I say escape, I don't mean oh, get me
out of this house. I mean avoid a situation. Because, for instance, you think about our brother, He's had to be exposed to two crazy sisters in a household, and so he might want to escape that situation, and so his behavior will show that, whereas you, for instance, when you were born, you would never want to have wanted to escape that situation because you wanted to be around me so much.
Well, I mean true, I can't argue it. I can't argue it, even when you're pinching me. So what is it you do on the daily with your job or what? Okay, so what circumstances would you be asked to work with a child? And like what things do you see and how do you treat them? And all that sort of stuff as a big question?
Sorry, sor right. So my work is quite diverse in that what I do is I do individual work with young people, and so that work for me is always very inclusive of the child person and the family or the caregivers and any external people that might be involved,
any educators, anybody who's part of that person's life. I try and work closely with them to really work from a behavior science perspective, where what we do is you observe and you collect data and you use that to determine what the problem or challenging behavior might be, and then you put in place strategies to support that challenging behavior. It may be to modify it in some way. It's at no point changing what the need of the person is.
What it's about is helping them still get their need met, but teaching them how to make that request for that need in a more appropriate way. So, for instance, a child who may scream because screaming means they get to leave the classroom and they want to break it might be about being able to understand that and teaching them not saying, well, we don't want them to leave the classroom anymore, but teach them how to leave the classroom by making a verbal request, which maybe they've not known
how to do. So there's that perspective from a challenging behavior, but then there's also the other behaviors that we want to grow more behaviors and build the skill set. So any behavior that we're looking at modifying, it's not something that's because as a society, it's being decided that, well, that's inappropriate. You know, toiling your hair is inappropriate. It's distracting, and so we want to change that behavior. The sorts of things that I would work with are things that
are socially significant for that person and their family. So if they're engaging in certain behaviors that are going to be limiting them in the future or limiting them to gain additional skills, I want to work with them understanding why they do it, helping to prevent the impact of their environment, and also give them the skills that they need. So that's if I'm working one on one with child.
The other thing that I do is that I do go in and coach professionals, teaching staff parents how to work with the young person because quite often what happens is people struggle to separate the behavior from the person and they're two very separate things, and so a lot of people underestimate the impact that our responses have on a child's behavior.
So is it if I'm understanding it correctly. It's like, say, for example, your trial, and like, obviously there are spectrums of everything, right, but let's say your kids thing is that I don't know every time he sees a book, he screams, let's say right, And some people might say, well, that's how my child deals with it, and you know the world has to make space for him to deal
with it that way. Would you be saying, Know, what we need to do is get him to a place where he knows how to appropriately say.
Which I probably should have said at the stat is that anything that we talk about. I'm just mindful that anybody who listens in needs to be aware that, as I'd said, what we're talking about is general, it's not individual, and that everybody has their own experience of certain therapies, certain professionals, certain streams of work. I mean, behavior science is rooted does come from a ABA therapy, and ABA
therapy got a really bad name for itself. Was going to say historically it did, and it was because it was. I mean, there's a couple of things. One, there's a lot of people who don't really have the adequate skill in the space. They might do a short course and
then think that they understand it all and practice. And the other thing is that in the past it was really about trying to change behaviors and making young people and adults for that matter, especially in institutions, just have to wait it out until they actually changed their behavior,
which could become quite traumatizing. Now, when I explain this to people with the work that I do, I'm quite eclectic in my approach because, as I say, I've been a psych for a long time, and so there's lots of other things tools that I feel like I bring to the work that I do as well. But I mean, you don't have to look too far in psychology as well to realize that there was some pretty horrendous stuff that was done in the past for the sake of learning.
So whether it's psych or ABA or whatever else, it's all had. I mean, the first person who did brain surgery or can probably botched it up as well. But we get better, we evolve, and you can't be arrogant to think you know everything you keeping constantly. So I think what I was what I was going to say about that is that if we're talking about you know, because of the age group of kids that I work with, most of them are in some sort of educational setting.
Schools are pretty inclusive places now. But here's what I say, and this is my take on it. Parents want to protect their kids parents, caregivers, loved ones. You don't want your child to suffer. And so what we do is we have a natural tendency to try and put some cotton wool around them, protect them, say let's change everything around them. The only thing that I say, and you know people can challenge me on this, what I say is one day we won't be here. And I think
that all of us. I know for myself, my own children, what I want is for them to be happy, fullyfunctioning adults in society one day. So I think that the work that we do has to be trauma assumed. We have to assume thatever we're working with has experienced some level of trauma in their life, whether it's trauma of not being able to do something in a classroom academically, or trauma of a bad therapist, or trauma because something we've come from from our family history, cycles of abuse,
whatever it might be. We have to consider all of those things. But we also need to remember that inappropriate behavior, or challenging behavior or problematic behavior is just that. So if what you do is slap somebody to get attention, we have to remember that at some point, maybe we accept it a little bit more when they're little, when they're really little. But at some point we have to understand that that's going to impact their ability to social
with other kids. It's going to impact their access to different settings because people will struggle with having them in that setting as they get older. If they don't learn another way to socialize or gain attention. If you start slapping people as you walk down the street when you're twenty, you're probably going to get charged. So we have to think about all of those really significant behaviors when we're saying but that's just the way my child is. I get that, But I think that we also need to
try and help them build skills. And so if that Blue Book is triggering for that child, I would say, don't expose them to the Blue Book right now. Find out what drives that. What is it about that blue Book that does really trigger them, And let's work on do they need to be exposed to blue books in their life? Is it important? Is it important? Will they need to do that? Will they need to be exposed to those books to be able to progress and learn more?
And if if that is the case, then we need to work out what's their tolerance for the Blue book, and can we in some way motivate them. So the issue with this is that when it's not understood fully the way it works is a lot of people refer to this as bribery and that this is a lot of people have an issue with ABA because they say it's bribing. It's not bribing, it's what's their currency. How
do we motivate them? So if they say I actually don't want to be looking at that book for ten minutes, we want to motivate them by saying, you actually don't need to look at the book for ten minutes, but at some point that book has got something in it that you need. So do you think you could look at it for twenty seconds and then we can move on? And if they can do that, we support that, We reinforce it, we reward it, and we just helped slowly build their tolerance for it.
I mean sounds like a plan that makes me think as well about how important schools are and teachers. And I do also think though the pressure on teachers having to be in a classroom with maybe twenty eight kids
of varying levels of needs. What's the solution to that to help teachers know how to deal with it, but also parents knowing when to step in and sort of advocate for their child as well, because, like I would say, some teachers are amazing, some teachers like some teachers shouldn't be teaching.
Yep, I agree.
Is there a solution like more LSOs in the classrooms.
Or always advocate for your kids? No matter what I think, be involved, be part of the team. It's not just the school team as people who care for You know, if we're talking about a student with additional needs of some description, you know so much about that child because you're with them day in day out. The information you have is valuable. You need to share it and that
information should make up part of the plan. If you're working with a good school, with a good teaching team, a good leadership team, they should be considering all of that when they work on a plan. The student, as I said once again, should be part of that plan. We should be sitting down and talking to them about
what their needs are. I think the difficult thing that's occurred for teachers is that there have been some allowances made and there's been this accidental learning of challenging behavior from an early age, and then it's progressed, and it gets a lot harder in a classroom. And one of the main things that I say when I do go into a school is to be mindful that those one, two, three students in a classroom, they're not just the responsibility of that teacher and that lso in that room, they
are the responsibility of the entire school. So everybody needs to be prepared to step in and support where is needed. Some of the stuff that I talked about that I do if I go in and do coaching is around setting up things in the classroom as well to manage that. So you know, if you've got a child who's really anxious and wants you to come back to them, it might be about setting something up that they can see, a structure to say, Okay. You might start off saying
you're going to you do this for two minutes. Can you manage this for two minutes on your own? Yet I can, Okay, you do that, and in two minutes I come back to you. And so in that time, the support person's going off to do something else. But when that two minutes is up, they have to honor that. We can't go breaking trust. If that student knows you're coming back in two minutes. You absolutely have to go back in two minutes. Otherwise they won't trust the process.
Okay, and then that sort of undoes all the work, right.
Because what it does is it teaches a lot of kids, teaches them to be gamblers, like, will they is now the time they'll come back when they said they would, or maybe they won't. Well, maybe I need to make sure. Well, I know, if I turn the room upside down, I'm pretty sure I'm going to get their attention. So I'm going to do that. We need to get better at understanding that well being and curriculum are not separate. They
go together. So if you have a student who has some specific learning difficulties and you've just said, hey, everybody, we're going to do some reading, and you know that there is a child in that room who struggles with reading, don't put them on the spot because they're going to do whatever they can. Yeah, they're going to do whatever
they can to get out of that environment. And if that means they in a way that they get sent out of the room, which is often what happens when kids are disruptive and they get sent out of the room, it's because they don't want to be there.
Yeah.
Yeah, So if you know that's an issue, set them up for success, pull them aside two days before, a week before, give them the passage of reading, and say, hey, see these two sentences, we're going to do some reading in class. I'm going to call on you to do the reading. And you've got a week to practice these two lines. But I won't ask you to do anymore. Or if they're that nervous about it, don't call on them. I find them in some time with them one on one.
I find that personally a really big thing. Like just I'm sure my daughter wouldn't mind me saying like, she's not you know, she's your niece. She's not the most sort of extroverted kid right in big settings. And like every time I have a parent teacher interview, they say to me things, great, she's such a great student. We just want to push her to contribute more in class, to put her hand up more to you know, And I'm like, the last one that I did, I said, actually,
don't care about that. Like, if she's doing well and she is learning and she's understanding, part of that confidence comes with time. If your kid's not the sort of person who just you know, like I know, I know the answer will be leave them.
And is that affecting her learning ability? No, she not making gains because she's not questioning things. She's fucking awesome, you know is And if she keeps questioning, then you're probably gonna They're gonna sit down and say the dominicqu's got to learn that other people have the opportunity to speak as well. She's sort of got to stop and just you know, maybe sit back and let the other kids talk more.
How much was that in my reports? Malice has to let other people have a chance to contribute to conversations as well. We've been going for a bit. We might do a part two. Maybe we'll get some people to send in some questions that you could help answer. Again very generally, because this work you do is very individualized, right, Yes, like it's tailored to every kid. It's not like a that's right handbook. But I remember you said to me
once how important it is. Sometimes with we'll use the word tantrum, which I always think of a little kid, but even now having teenagers, do you call it emotional dysregulation? I don't know what you call it. But you know, big feelings, however you want to word it. You said to me once one of the keys to managing it is sort of paying attention to what sets them off
and then trying to jump ahead on that. If say, the only example I can think of is, say, for example, you have to take a kid to the shop, and you know that every time you go to target, your kid has a meltdown in the toy aisle because they on a new truck, and you're like, fuck this, I'm not buying the truck. What's a strategy that a parent could put in place in that case?
I think on that the thing is, like you said, whether you call it this, regulation, tankering, whatever, the labeling of it isn't as important as it is understanding exactly what it looks like. So when whoever's working with that young person, everybody needs to be on the same page so you can be consistent. So if it is that the idea of tantrum for this child is that they're going to start screaming, crying, drop to the ground, whatever else, if you know the situation that always sets that up.
And so the trigger is when you walk past the lego aisle, there's a couple of things that are within your control. Firstly, I always say if you can come at something preventatively, come at it preventatively. So if there's either that you decide if you have the ability to not take that child with you shopping on that day, don't take them. If you feel that, you still need to do some work with them around being able to tolerate no not.
Now say you're a single mum and you've got no one to leave your kid with and you're like, I have to go to Target.
The fuck am I going to? Okay, you've got to take them with you. If you can avoid that, I'll avoid that aisle. If you are going to go past that aisle, you might set up a couple of things with that trial where you might say, Okay, what I needs you to do is sit nicely in the whatever and the trolley. I'm going to do this. Once we've done this, then you can pick something if it's within you know what you can afford, what you've decided, you're
going to get whatever it might be. The important part around that is for the child to understand that today we're getting it, but we can't get it every time. Now, the worst thing that you can do would be that the next time, and you say, yes, we can get it another time, but not today. The best thing to always do is try and avoid saying no, because once
I hear know, they hear nothing else after it. But you can say yeah, one hundred percent, we can get another one, just not today, Yeah, just not today, and
they start going off. The worst thing you can do is because of the sheer embarrassment and stress that you are under at that moment and the judging eyes when you've got a child that's having a tantrum and people are walking past sneering at you, the worst thing you can do is get that toy, because unfortunately, what you then do is teach that child I've got them every time I want that toy, I'm going to put that
tantrum on and then I'm going to get it. And often what I get is people ask me, what's the difference between a tantrum and a meltdown? Now, wherever you want to go with it, you go with it. For me, tantrums often resolve themselves pretty quickly as soon as you go, oh was it this toy you wanted? Yeah, and they stop. So they were engaging in a behavior to get them.
A lot of the time, what happens with and once again this isn't always, but what happens with the meltdowns is usually it's when someone has just become so overwhelmed by you know, it might be there sensory integration. There's just so much going on and they just actually drop the It's not even about going on for them, it's not even about the toy. Now I can't cope. I absolutely can't cope. Yeah, so they're quite different as well.
Is it difficult to spot the difference between when your kid actually is because I think it can be hard to know the difference between when they're really struggling or when they are sort of manipulating you a bit. Because kids are smart too that maybe they go, oh, I know, if I really fucking she's not going to want to listen to me going on and on about this, so I'm just going to keep pushing it until she gives in. Can you is there any things that differentiate between those two?
I think well, history and we would refer those things. We would refer to things as precursor behaviors. So what are the things that you see right before the main event that indicate to you something's about to happen. That's one thing that's an indicator of is this real or not. The other thing is there are a whole lot of behaviors. If you remember at the start, I said there are behaviors that are internal, like feelings, emotions, memories. There are
a whole lot of behaviors that we can't see. And so there are times where we might say she's fine, she's killed them, she's anxious, she's coping so well within this environment, but on the inside they are at absolutely freaking out, or somebody just walked past and they've just accessed a memory, because remember we're talking about behaviors being things that have learned that someone's learned, so they've been able to access a memory where they learn that people
with beards walk past and yell at you if you touch the flower, and maybe you're just going past the flower aisle and a child absolutely loses it and you say, I don't know what's wrong with my kid. There was not even a trigger. There was nothing. I can't identify what it was, but there was. But the complication with some of our kids who have additional needs is that
they may have deficits where they can't take you. Yeah, and so that's where it's really important to have a whole team of professionals who are working with a child. If it's, for instance, that they've got language deficits, you need to work on the language deficits. We need to find a way. And I'm not talking. It has to be vocal language. It could be signing, it could be
a picture exchange, whatever it is, gesture. But we need to give kids a voice in all spaces, not just in certain spaces, to be able to tell us what they need to tell us so we can support them.
Fuck, that's hard, isn't it. It's so hard. I'm picking all that, but that was very interesting. And also, like, how fucking complicated is it raising kids, like teaching kids, working with kids, all that stuff. Kids are so they're so beautiful, but they're so hard and it's so hard for them. It's hard for the parents, it's hard for everybody involved because you're.
Just so much going on in our lives. As I'm going to say from a parenting perspective, there is so much going on in our lives that makes it so hard to I am and you know, I am far from the perfect parent. I make plenty of mistakes. There are times when I go, why did I do that? She shouldn't have done it. I should have I could have managed that better. Why did I say no, I know that that's going to cause a problem. I should have worded that better. But you know what, we have
so much that's going on in our homes. We've got so much that's going on in our lives.
We've got so.
Many competing things with you know, other family members, you know, more children in the home. There's just a lot. And so I think that what a lot of people who care for kids need to do is give themselves a break and realize, because sometimes you might meet with a professional and you know what, some professionals will come off judge and say, well, really have you thought about this? Or yes, but did you let them sleep in bed with you? Well, you know what, I'm surviving, mate, I
am surviving. And I think that there needs to be more acknowledgment of that. And often, as care is, what we do is we really judge ourselves and say I could have done that better, or I should have done that better, or because the way somebody else will, somebody else might not have the emotional connection with that child to start with. And if we look at we look at our situation. For instance, I look at my kids they were they're very different with our mum. Yeah, but
you know what they're in. Our mom's in a very different space now, her stress around raising children and running a household and working nine to five and all the rest. She doesn't have all that animal so she's in a very different space to be open and remove some of those external variables that impact on us to be able to do our job, which is bloody hard.
I would always say that it's a good if you're a parent who does go to bed at night and think, fuck, was a bit hard on them? Oh I could have done that Differently, means you're a parent who gives a shit, Like you've reflected, if you didn't care, you just would go to bed and go, oh fuck them, or like in our generation and like you.
Probably wouldn't even think about it when you went to bed.
Yeah no, I know, but think of even like you know, you look back now on kids that we went to school with and you make all these diagnoses in your head and youthing fuck Like the solution back in the eighties and nineties was give them a backhander, like you know, it was in your respect. I know, and now imagine what sort of adults they are. That's hard, right, That's all right, Well, we will come back. I will put a call out on Instagram for anyone who has any
questions for Rasina. If she does, dare come back. But until then, thanks for joining me and us, and pleasure. We'll see us next time.
Thanks toodles.
I told her she was smart. I hope you enjoyed that episode. Very different to usual, but you know what they say about variety. No pressure. But if you would like to support us on Patreon, you can head to patreon dot com forward slash Show and Tell online, where we regularly post tippics. That's a joke, but we do pop an extra episode in there every fortnight or so. That's a little looser than the usual, if you can imagine.
And of course, the very best thing that you can do for us is give us a rating and review wherever you listen to us. It costs nothing except about twenty six seconds of your time, and we would truly love you for it. Anyway, I'm done, so as always, take care of yourselves. Thank you for listening. I love you,