hampshire i am trying to help kids who have significant challenges with social skills with emotional regulation with their behavior and i've been doing this work for more than thirty years in a variety of different settings residential care out in the woods with kids and i've been at my current current place for about fifteen years or so i love adolescence i love working with kids between the ages and we really understand how that adolescence goes from about twelve to about twenty four or so in terms of the developmental changes that are occurring so it's a really long period of time and it's a very dynamic and important period of time as well get into tonight i'm really happy you're all here i'm sorry i know this is a reschedule of a reschedule and i know that there were some people that thought it was last night so thank you especially if you're coming back tonight after getting turned away last night appreciate your your stick to it  we often wish that we could follow our kids around and help them sort of navigate what goes on right we wish the least idea that we had a g p s for conversation sometimes do this don't say this start with this go here while you're getting a little excited comment down now you know you're sending off the wrong messages right and it would be really nice if kids could have a little their ear buds in which they have in any way and  the message the messages they could be receiving were to direct them about how to be socially successful because when they're not socially successful it has an enormous impact on them right one incident of being socially unsuccessful can be really hard for a kid several incidents of being socially unsuccessful can be traumatic really traumatic for kids so i want to talk tonight a little bit about adolescent development why i kids tend to both struggle and struggle with and rely on their social lives in adolescence and what we can do to be helpful turn to somebody near you and have a conversation please turn to each other go ahead have a conversation this will take a couple minutes so if you need to move together closer together just have a conversation ok let's let's wrap it up and bring our attention back that was great you guys how did you do that how did you do that how did you have a conversation so you sort of opened up the broadest sort of common experience you thought about what might tie us all together right ok that's a safe safe place to start right what else would you do  smiled right yeah yes to question you try to engage somebody right let's figure out what they're thinking about what's going on with them what else yeah yeah so you drew on past experience whether you knew that person or not you sort of called up past sort of memory files and my what we call mine files sometimes in the field and we would drew on those we took some safe bets about stuff that was going to be expected to talk about right right we didn't launch into aunt may and the bunyan surgery right we talked about expected things to talk about was the beginning to the conversation sort of maybe started with those safe things then maybe shifted maybe to a little bit something else and then you had to close it up right so there was a sequence to the conversation  i noticed everybody kind of turning and facing each other right because we needed to figure out who was going to talk to who here we needed to do it pretty organically the thing about social skills certainly for the kids i work with who have real severe impairments and social skills that thinking about what how we're going to do it doesn't come naturally my thesis tonight is that all the lessons we've learned to help kids who have more significant social difficulties are actually a political to what we call neuro typical kids and i think you know at least in my household that that neurotypical labels a little questionable but we'll we'll go with it tonight right ok kids who are nerd typical are also learning these lessons they don't intuitively know everything they intuitively know some things but they don't intuitively know everything and often times the that very desire to have a g p s for conversations and follow them around and direct them is because they need to wrecked teaching so we'll talk a lot tonight about direct teaching i want to talk about adolescent development from a neurological and psychosocial perspective in sent me an email on the fifth grade puberty unit earlier this week and said hey what do you think of this right i think it's great i think we have to be talking about puberty we have to be talking about hormones we have to be talking about sexual development but the real deal most get into it tonight the real deal about what what drives emotional changes family changes social changes in adolescence is not the pubertal changes it's not the hormonal changes and that's what we talk about all the time it's the neurological growth it's the growth of the brain and integration of the brain and the changes in what happens in the brain so i want to i want to give you guys that information because it i'm passionate about it and it's so important i'm passionate about it in part because it's the real deal it's really what's happening i'm also passionate about it because we now know that the way we respond our relationships with our kids and our relationships with all kids all people deeply influence the structures of the brain right so when we talk about social development we're really talking about neurological develop and that's what i want to spend a good amount of time because as much as we want the information about puberty and hormones sex and all that other stuff to go to our kids this stuff is actually arguably more important and we'll talk more about it i want to talk about social skills as definable and teachable they're not some nebulous thing out there that we're sort of like wondering about we know we can break down social skills into component parts and we can teach the component parts and we can teach most importantly for adolescents how to begin to integrate and synthesize those component parts and then i want to talk about very simple very practical strategies about what works when and lastly i want to have a little conversation and answer people's questions we are being taped for cable t v so if you guys have questions or comments at the end of the night and you really want to take a risk and say something that's that's personal and you don't want it out on t v just let us know and we can we can pause the recording ok there are many integral factors that are not going to be the focus of the discussion tonight ok but that play just what's a few sophisticated terms super duper important roles ok and we're just not going to have time to get into all of them tonight orientation identity issues race class culture gender these issues are all interwoven into this but there are these neurological realities that are happening under the surface that if we can attend to those help kids organize their social development so that they can make meanings which are inherent in these parts of the discussion they can make the meanings a little clearer to them ok so i want to take it down on one level to this this very very basic foundational level of neurological functioning if you have questions about this stuff i don't want you to shy away from them we can talk about them in the context of of social skills development and what we're going to we're going to go for with i want to show you a picture of  adolescent brain and it is not pretty ok and you might identify so if you're squeamish here's the adolescent brain the adolescent brain is in reconstruction it is having a renovation anybody lived through a renovation before raise your hand if you live through a house renovation of  what are some feelings that come up when you're renovating your having worked on frustration why it always takes longer than you want right you know what else everything's disorganized you can't yet nothing is where it's supposed to be it's loud it's in the way right what else anything else yeah totally totally things pop up and you're like well i thought we had planned for this right if you're in adolescence or you are entering adolescence you might understand some of those feelings right because the adolescent brain is in renovation things aren't working exactly the way they're supposed to and we'll talk more about the specifics where we're going home fully is a much more efficient much more user friendly structure that reflects identity that reflects just who we want to be right this is where we thought we were going but we have to go through this first we have to go through this first to get here there's no way around it you can't get a magic new kitchen and you can't proof get a magic new adolescent brain and you can't just close your eyes and pretend it's not happening until you get to the other side you have to live through it and you have to be thoughtful as you live through it so i think of the adolescent brain as restructuring as i said development in the adolescent brain drives behavioral changes drive social functioning drives family changes ok and and that these other aspects that we talk  about hormones sex development all the rest of it it's important but it's not the real deal so let's talk about the real deal and we're we're not just getting through it we're not just white knuckling it through adolescence this will be over someday ok really that nice new kitchen that identity that adolescents are forming that place we're getting to is really really important so we're not just getting through adolescence it is the time where we're helping to shape all that stuff that's going to come and if we don't pay close attention to if we don't really engage with it as much as we might not want to as much as teenagers might push us away etc we'll talk a little bit about that we're not just getting through it it's a better functioning kitchen after the renovation it's going to work better from a evolutionary perspective we depend on adolescents we wouldn't survive why not because everybody would stay in their family group right adolescence and all the stuff that happens in adolescence drive kids drives kids out to expand otherwise we're all we're just you know inbred thats it that's not a healthy system evolutionarily we needed our young people to go out and meet new young people and form their own groups and keep going i'm going to borrow tonight liberally from a number of different sources primarily dan siegel who has written a book many books the developing mind brainstorm the power and purpose of the adolescent  brain and i'm going to draw a very liberally from michelle garcia winner who is a speech and language pathologist out of san jose california who runs a program called social thinking i'm going to i'm just going to use their stuff directly and i'm i'm deeply indebted to them for all the research and work that they've done if you reach under your chair and this is dan siegel anybody that's seen him he does exactly this thing i'm sorry reach under your chair you have to have a hand out under your chair rejoinder there and pull out your hand out ok this is your hand out and it is a model hold it up like this you gotta put your thumb in here and fold your fingers over this is a model of the human brain and it's a very very good one there are three basic sections of the human brain we're going to talk about and the changes that occur in them in adolescence right the a make in the brain stem is down here and this is really what we call the the lizard brain the reptilian part of your brain that controls breathing physiological functions it controls fight or flight and the fear response ok it's very basic we then have the limbic system ok which is about memory and attachment that's really like the dog brain and then we have all this great stuff up here all the other parts such as the reptile brain it touches the dog brain and it touches the human brain this is where the integration occurs ok and this is the active part of the brain for in adolescent development adolescents are learning to wire all these different parts of their brain right fight or flight and emotional realities relationships and memory and identity is helping to integrate all of those and all of those each one of those separately is absolutely critical to positive social functioning each each region of the we need to know for in danger we need to have that response you need to understand fear we clearly need to be related to one another and have understand each other's thoughts feelings and emotions and we clearly need organization and language  so i said frontal lobe development particularly in the prefrontal cortex here dramatically increases the potential for integration for the adolescent this is where the growth has really happening hopefully growth in the limbic system drive social and emotional stimulation ok and particularly interest in peers very interesting finding is that during adolescence there's a decrease in dopamine dopamine a sort of excitability and pleasure right that's the neurotransmitter associated with those things adolescents drop in their dopamine levels drop tipping which results in the famous adolescent saying i'm bored i'm bored and when you stimulate an adolescent you give them something exciting and new guess what happens their job i mean response is actually accentuated they feel really excited and it's really pleasurable for them so new exciting things are what they seek and this results in risk taking and this combination of i'm having this growth of relational the relational part of my brain and i'm having this desire to go out and seek new exciting risky things that sound like adolescence right that drives a lot of the behavior we see in adolescence i'm a get with my friends i'm going to drive the car eighty miles an hour down the cape and we're going to take off all our clothes i'm going to jump in the water we're going to get back in the car when t drive back and mom and dad will never know we left pruning of excess neurons the the brain is full of nerve neural material right and kids before adolescence are interested in many things they have what thousands and thousands of neurons floating around they they get they're interested in this they're interested in that we have our kids play instruments running around the soccer field playing hockey we all know the story especially those of us in belmont right we have our kids doing a million different things then when they get t neurons start to prune and they start to bundle and mylan me which means that they they get together around playing the violin or playing hockey or history and the mile a nation and the pruning and the bundling means that they get really really good like three thousand times as efficient ok so that there's a loss of some neural material and there's an increase in efficiency and if you think about it that's sort of identity right i'm really interested in this in a narrower set of things and i'm much much better at them like i'm precocious at some things you watch adolescents and they can do gymnastics you know like where did that come from and they can't keep their rooms clean right and they can't remember they can't organize their binders because they pruned a lot of stuff but they've also gained a lot of stuff that's part of that renovation that can be hard because we're confused it's frustrating we don't know why a part of it works better and part of it doesn't so as we said integration is the key during all of this and it's the key for social success the emotional the relational the rational must all work together we have to integrate the up stairs brain this is also dancy or the up stairs brain and the downstairs brain we have to think about our feelings to get have more control over them we have to think about our relationship and as we talk about in a minute that increase in the relational parts of the brain and that increase in dopamine can mean that teenagers are really susceptible to over emotionality right and also sound familiar to anybody ok that growth in that part of the brain really can can lead to over emotionality that can get teenagers into trouble we'll talk about it in a sack ok so injured grading helping them think about that stuff and exert that good human or dolphin brain control over the emotional parts of their brain really really critical we also and most of us have had some exposure to the ideas of left brain and right brain thinking right and and we also have to help them integrate that also have to help them integrate the organizational language mind with the with the more intuitive spiritual emotional mine  the research is really encouraging that when we do the right things as adults we fire the neural pathways for our kids we help them fire the right neural pathways we help them fire when we're talking to them about the right things when we're setting the framework for the right kinds of activities when we're encouraging healthy relationships when we're talking them through a difficult moment we actually firing helping them to fire neural pathways that will then wire together in a in a more systematic way especially in this prefrontal cortex the other thing that we have is what's called mirror neurons which means the kids don't have to do it themselves they can just watch us do it or watch their peers do it more likely and if their peers are doing it in healthy ways the mirror neurons are going to fire and they're going to start to create those pathways it's really important research because it means that the brain is something we can grow and we know now that we can grow it you'll be thankful well into our adult lives we can make changes we can fire new neural pathways that actually wire together in different ways any questions about that renovation it all makes sense pretty clear the various individually and certainly varies according to gender somewhat but basically we're talking about between twelve and twenty four and the it is a highly socially determined phenomenon actually because we know that adolescence never used to be twelve years right two generations ago adolescence wasn't a twelve year period one hundred fifty years ago it was like a two year period and we don't have the functional m r i s from one hundred fifty years ago to confirm it but we know socially we we didn't see the same kind of adolescent behavior right as much shorter period of time so whatever's happening socially and we don't know all the reasons for that is really affecting the the length of that a less impaired it's now a really long period of time and i'm sorry about that but i am it's not my fault i'm just reporting a move everybody out move everybody like a transplant yeah that's a different lecture yeah  it is it is still there but the structure of it changes the structure of it changes and in fact some of that some of that pruning of the neural material means that some of it isn't there any more it gets much more efficient but some of the pruning of them and i don't i'm a social worker so i don't fully understand the all of the neurobiology of it but the research shows that there's actually this decrease in  how they communicate very helpful thank you great so we have the current research here the social tasks most associated with adolescence that is individuation from your family i den a sense of identity and personality appear focus and risk taking as we've talked about these are all directly related to the teenage brain restructuring this is the information we should be teaching the hormonal stuff we should have the fifth grade puberty unit i'm not dissin the fifty fifth grade puberty unit right but we should also be teaching this stuff to our kids about what happens because it's really the determinant stuff and all the stuff they're going to experience i want to get away from you mom and dad i don't want to listen to you anymore i'm going to make you mad you're going to make me mad i want to go hang out with my buddies i want to drive my friend's car eighty miles an hour down the cape and go into skinny dipping and get back before you're awake all that stuff it's very helpful to teach this stuff to kids because we teach the other stuff why not teach and this integration of the brain is related to an integration of skills right when you're in flux and correlate directly to the neurological development feeling relating and rationalizing or think we must approach social learning needs like we would approach any other learning he's right reading writing arithmetic you wouldn't assume that kids knew how to do that and you wouldn't just teach them how to do one problem you would teach them how to approach the problem and think about the problem so that they could generalize from one problem to the next and he teachers in the room that's what we try to teach right right we have to teach social development just and social skills just like we teach other skills and luckily there are people that have done this right and they know about direct teaching of social skills so we have to teach the how to think skills and the how to do skills right garcia when his organization is called social thinking it's not called social behavior because if we teach the thinking skills we give kids a flexible set of skills to approach any social situation and attend to what's going on and attend to the right things in what and what's happening this gives kids a real flexible set of tools to move through their social lives with we don't teach them what bad and what's good what's right and what's wrong what we teach some of that we teach them what's expected in a situation and what's unexpected because what's what's expected when you're driving eighty miles an hour down to the cape with your friends is not what's expected when and janine is coming over for easter brunch and you don't want them to have the same skills you want them to have a flexible set of reading the situation and applying social skills to the situation so we have to teach the how to how to think skills and how to do skills perfect example of this make eye contact we say to kids all the time look at me when i'm talking to you right why why should why should kids look at me when they're talking to me and say well it turns out there's actually really good reasons behind it right i'm not actually asking you to look at me i'm asking you to think about me just like all of you when you turn to each other at the beginning and had a conversation thought about your communication partner even before that you thought oh i'm in belmont i'm with a group of parents we've got stuff in common right make eye contact actually means think about me attend to physical presence and body language and think about perspective so we can teach make eye contact or we can teach a whole set of skills that are inherent in that statement which are really foundational social skills really important and kids don't necessarily understand this stuff  by breaking social skills into distinct tasks we can help build each one separately we can we can teach separate skills and we can teach the integration right and i want to introduce a slide here that's a little out of place but i think it's important speech and language pathologist study this stuff and i've heard it because illian times of not exactly sure where it comes from but i am taking it as truth i believe everything i read on the internet to the the communicative moment is seven percent the words that are said right and about twenty three percent prosody prosody is rage tone pitch volume and seventy percent body language seventy percent body language so when you ask a kid to make eye contact with you what you're really doing is saying pay attention to seventy percent of the communicative moment right you have to read it read the situation this lecture would be much different and you would get a different message if i delivered it like th you would not have the same feeling if i delivered this lecture like this i would not be communicating the same thing  i again i think there are huge cultural differences here right i spent years and years living in africa and in societies where you would never meet somebody gaze my point is i think ian's point that when we tell kids to do something socially there's often an underlying set of assumptions about what we're asking them to attend to that given the cultural context you're in i think as ian suggesting you might you might have that same underlying stuff the social behavior the socially expected behavior actually reflects a set of communicative needs which oftentimes go unexpressed or untaught directly and i agree saying make eye contact i'm i'm sure that's a that's a terrible thing to say in some cultures you would never do that you would be setting people up for failure but you're always setting kids up for success if you're saying let's unpack this moment of what's expected physically and let's pay attention to that right because body language no matter what's expected in the situation body language makes up a huge part of the of the communicative moment that makes sense and i wholeheartedly agree and in fact the point of we'll talk about the point of this is not everybody needs to make eye contact the point of this is that we have to think about what's expected in any given social situation particularly around body language which we don't do a lot of teaching of necessarily we have to think about what's expected in any given social situation so that we can have social success if you are in a culture where eye contact is rude and you say might make eye contact you're not going to have social success you can have the opposite right but you still have to attend to body language so the underlying messages are still very important if you want to have social success i think it's a it's a great we know that there are three debase it demands of social functioning we're going to break down social functioning into these demain so that we can take a look at how do we teach them right and they all relate to those different sections of the brain that are getting rewired and reinte rated in adolescence self regulation the ability kind of maintain an even keel executive function initiation planning organization sequencing ending all that stuff you guys did as part of your initial conversation there was a flow to it you had to think about that flow and perspective taking and my understanding that everybody has a different perspective in my understanding that simultaneously to my own adolescence is a time in adolescence are way more narcissistic during this developmental phase they're much more self focus so perspective taking is something you really have to to continue to teach throughout us that perspective taking are what some people call theory of mind or mind side we'll talk more about it is really this is part of the brain here i'm understanding that i'm in relationship to i mentioned before the neural restructuring of the teenage brain makes the teenager susceptible to increased stress right and when stressed teens send out on an intended and unexpected messages and their impulse control boom goes way down right so let's go back to the brain what happens stress especially chronic stress or threat ok the amidala can just simply take over and when the mega send senses threat what happens seals off seals off all this nice thinking part of the brain ok and it sends danger and if kids aren't integrated they're not able to think about their emotions and they're having a very strong emotional experience right dan siegel calls it flipping their lid they flip their lead they don't have access to this part of their brain anymore all they're doing is feeling and reacting and we get into the basic problem behaviors that we that we see all problem behaviors sort of fit into these three categories fight flight or freeze there's actually a fourth one faint but we don't see that as much and because kids are feeling more strongly they're more susceptible to flipping their lives and getting into a fight flight or freeze what happens when kids are under chronic stress and they flip their lids repeatedly right so they pour mice or mice put a cat in with a bunch of mice and they measured the neural activity of the mice right and what happens the mice flip their lid that their fear response does exactly what the reptilian part of the brain is supposed to do get out of here very few mice fight right mostly it's fully paid or freeze but it's exactly what the brain should do in that situation cat is here real threat real danger boom i'm out here and we depend on that if that part of our brain didn't work we would be dead ok we need that part of our brain they remove the cat and the mice who have been under chronic can't stress they sprinkle a little cat here in the cage and guess what happens boom the mouse flips its lid there doesn't need to be an actual threat there there needs to be a reminder of a threat there so kids who are under chronic social stress and who are chronically flipping the lid right all they need is a whiff of social stress and they're having a response that seems really unexpected really disproportionate to what the stresses in the moment and why we have to help kids who are under chronic social stress and it's really hard because kids are under chronic social we have to help them regulate specially if they're flip in their lives all the time chronic stress is detrimental to the integration of the brain healthy stress management is job number one ok so that's one set of skills that really impacts social social functioning emotional regulation executive function is the next one sequence part whole relationships gestalt thinking and abstraction now but they need help understanding that and they need help understanding that part whole relationships famously a fifteen year old walked into a group of kids who were all talking about green day the band and that the kids were all talking about being at the green day concert and the kid wasn't picking up on the gift all to the situation he says i hate green day he thought he was being honest and had something to contribute but he wasn't picking up on what was going on so how do you teach kids to attend to  knowing what fits where and this is where expected vs unexpected comes in right the same social skills don't fit in every social situation it's really common sense and yet we teach kids so directs social skills distinct social skills and and what do they do they go practice them in the wrong places or they're using is its famous use your please use your inside voice well you don't use your inside voice when you're outside you use your outside voice but that goes for lots and lots and lots of social skills and social prisoned they fit one place they don't fit in others are teaching kids to attend to the context and then match the skill with the context that's the flexible thinking that's solving different math problems using the same set of skills thinking skills somewhere between six months and nine months kids start doing this what am i thinking about the piano the kid knows that you know what they're thinking about and they know you're thinking about what they're thinking about their thinking about what you're thinking about right that's what they call theory of mind and from that moment grows all this great intuitive sense we have that we we understand that other people have their own thoughts emotions responses and as we grow we develop the skill to think more and more sophisticated ways about what the other person is thinking about and we don't have to think about it right but kids need to be taught this skill they develop it and that's their kid sort of on the autism spectrum and oftentimes this is a developmental task that's missed but most neurotypical kids develop this skill and it needs to be grown needs to be nurtured and they can't always practice it especially in intergroup in adolescence and especially if they flip their lives they can't do it adolescence complex neurological development challenges them to apply perspective taking and theory of mind consistently and questions about that so what works the thing things to practice share this information increased awareness of the neurological development what's happening in the brain how that drives behavior feelings really important manage stress proactively and productively we have to teach kids how to manage stress and luckily we know how to do this  so if you have a candy take your candy close your eyes but you can't in your mouth and just pay attention to the candy close your eyes just pay attention to the candy if you don't have a candy and you like to close your eyes and pay attention to your breath or sensation of just sitting in the seat it's also fine and if your mind starts to wander you start to have thoughts bring yourself back to the candy really taste the candy feel its texture notice how it begins to dissolve change shape this is a mindfulness exercise kids love they love it and instead of using the breath as an anchor you can use the candy as an egg and if you don't want to give your kids candy give them something else that they like mindfulness is the critical skill to building this part of the brain the critical skill to integrating and i'll share some resources at the end about how to do that exercise is incredibly important for the healthy release of adrenaline kids that are chronically stressed need exercise channels the adrenaline releases the adrenaline it also has regulatory effects on serotonin dopamine and other neurotransmitters and healthy relationships are critical in the presence of healthy and caring relationships neuropeptide called oxytocin is really released and this also helps with neural integration healing and actually when oxytocin enters a brain that's flipped its lead you can see the brain begin to reintegrate a you can do that through neural imaging it's really important to have healthy relationships and water adolescents doing to their families right here right here in fact the separation of adolescence doesn't work very well if there's not some anger in it  if there's not some of you know i'm out of here oh yeah we're going to create there's going to be some anger in it it's necessary emotion for the separation to occur  dare doesn't have to be lots of irreconcilable anger right but there's usually has to be some to get that distance so the healthy relationships right have to come from somewhere else peers therapists basketball coaches right and i love this slide because kids need coal regulation they can't regulate all on their own right they need to herbal tea party ok they can't just oftentimes when kids are upset what do we tell them to do go to a room go chill out right for lots of kids that's not the answer because they know they still need that co regulation sometimes we can provide it some times a friend can provide it sometimes a trusted adult who's not you can provide it but often times they need the herbal tea party they need others to regularly  provide time to preview and process help kids organize their social lives write imagine their social lives are like that folder that comes home on friday right what goes where what is going on here right some kids are really good at keeping an organize most kids need our help with it and they made our help organizing their social lives thinking about sequence and initiation and follow through and all the things we help them with in terms of academic tasks we also have to help them think through social talk about what's expected and unexpected most important skill of all hand is out there ubiquitous everybody has one on their phone it's a pause button right i showed it to a kid the other day goes a pig snout why do i need a pig snout i said no it's a pause button right stop the buddhist master said don't just do something sit there ok stop freeze especially if kids are revved up stop pause let's think through this let's organize let's regulate let's think about perspective and remember that we have to teach them how to do skills as well as the how to the how to think skills right which are even more important we have to teach kids a flexible set of cognitive skills that they can take with them to apply in different social situations help your team build a network of trusted adults these are your allies there won't going to want to move away from you help them find other adults provide manageable risks they want that dopamine rush they're going to find it right so get them involved in something that provides that for them understand if they're seeking that out that they have a need for it and of course set necessary low limits and understand and encourage independence where possible so the take homes tonight are that understanding the restructuring of the adolescent brain is really important this helps us guide behaviors that we might otherwise want to stamp out right especially socially helps us understand all the stuff that's going on why they want to move away from us why they want peer groups how to help them feel think organize better and what some of the struggles are that they're going through as they restructure their brain approach social development from a science based practical standpoint that promotes skill building and this is a much deeper and more effective way to approach social skill development than just rewarding positive behavior and punishing negative behavior and there's nothing wrong with rewarding positive behavior and punishing negative behavior but it is one part of teaching what goes where and helping the adolescent brain integrate and then have some resources think why teach social thinking is a great book that's michelle garcia winner i mentioned dan siegel bunch of times you can read anything by h brainstorm is a really good place to start the whole brain child is a really good place to start the revolutionary new science of exercise great book and my friend dr chris willard just came out with a book called growing up mindful