Simon Currigan: 0:45

Bullying and abuse doesn't just harm a child's emotions, they physically reshape the brain. In today's episode, we discuss the groundbreaking neuroscience that reveals how toxic environments impact brain development behaviour and long term health. Stay tuned. Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My co host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're gonna share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. Hi there. My name's Simon Currigan from Beacon School Support, and welcome to this week's essentials episode of School Behaviour Secrets. If you're new to Essentials episodes, this is where we go back in time to revisit a previous episode and unpack one specific strategy or insight or idea that can have an impact on the way that you work with the children that you support in school. Because sometimes what we need is not just to be trained on these ideas around good practice, but also to have reminders and little prompts to keep them at the forefront of our mind. Otherwise, we kinda lose them in the whirlwind of knowledge that is teaching today. If you're enjoying these essential episodes, please let me know. And, also, please make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so you never miss another thing coming down the School Behaviour Secrets Highway in the future. Today, we're revisiting original episode number 85 where we're going to explore the fascinating neuroscience behind bullying and the lasting physical damage it can do to children's brains. Listening to discover how understanding this can help us create safer, healthier environments for all our students. What is the biological impact of that kind of bullying on how a child's brain develops and functions if they're being put under that kind of daily attack. What does the neuroscience tell us?

Jessica Fraser: 3:12

This is the huge breakthrough because now neuroscientists and psychiatrists and doctors, they can see on brain scans the damage being done. They can see it in real time on an MRI, and they can see it on an EEG. They can see it on brain scans. And that's the most important takeaway, is that for us, we tend to minimize emotional abuse, and psychological abuse, and verbal abuse. We tend to minimize emotional neglect, an adult withdrawing love from a child. But in actual fact, it does incredible harm to brains. And so you can see anatomical differences. You can see neurological scarring. You can see parts of the brain that are shrunken and shriveled because they've been so badly harmed. And we have a population of children who are incredibly anxious and are incredibly depressed. And these are big warning signs that our children don't feel safe. They don't feel safe in adult communities. They don't feel safe in peer communities. And really, this is my goal. I wanna see us get far more educated about our brains and our children's brains. It's exciting and it's empowering because now the science can show us what's going on, and it used to be invisible.

Simon Currigan: 4:21

You've said a lot there. And I just wanna take a moment to to sort of think about that in terms of the bullying leaves a physical impact on the brain, and that's remarkable when you think about it. And in your book, you talk about how some adults who engage in bullying think they're doing it for the child's good, and yet they're doing all this literal physical damage to the neural networks and the very children that they say they're trying to help.

Jessica Fraser: 4:45

It's the same argument that we used to hear for corporal punishment. The adult would say, I'm doing this for your own good. Well, there's extensive brain research that shows that corporal punishment does nothing but harm brains, and it harms quite significantly the part of the brain referred to as the prefrontal cortex. And that's the CEO of the brain. It's the part of the brain that makes a lot of judicious decisions. It thinks ahead. It weighs pros and cons. It's reasonable and rational. It's such an important part of the brain and yet corporal punishment is harming it. It's going to harm the way in which a child behaves in the future. It's going to make the child unempathic, humiliated, and aggressive, quite likely. So same thing with verbal abuse or bullying in the home or in the classroom. If you're not treating a child with respect and empathy and kindness and compassion, you are not bringing that brain to healthy development. It's not gonna become as high performing and as happy and as effective as an adult as you might hope.

Simon Currigan: 5:44

And the research shows, and you go through this in the book as well, that, you know, like sports coaches who are being in their eyes ultra tough and trying to bring the person up to be the best they can be, actually, the irony is it doesn't work. Like corporal punishment, it just doesn't work.

Jessica Fraser: 5:58

One of the greatest parts of my research involved learning about a laboratory of neuroscientists in California who were working away and they developed this online gamified brain training program. And it's now being tested and assessed and researched by 100 of different independent groups. And they were working away in the lab and the goal was to stop Alzheimer's or dementia. And they knew that we could keep our bodies strong as we go through our lives, but we tend to ignore our brains throughout our lives unless there's a crisis. And so our brains would get flabby, and they weren't in shape, and they weren't high powered, and low and behold, for some of us, that leads to dementia. So they were working on training brains and seeing incredible results. Well, the telephone rings in the lab. They pick it up, and it's Alex Guerrero. He is the trainer for Tom Brady, who is the American quarterback who, if he's not known to your audience, he's one of the greatest athletes alive today. And he's 44 or 45, and he competes with 22 year olds, and he outperforms them on the football field in America. And then after he came forward publicly and said, you know what? I do your brain training every day, and this is why it gives me a competitive edge. Harry Kane, who will be definitely known to your audience, he came public as well and said, I also use the brain training program. And so for coaches, I think this is really exciting. For coaches, this is an opportunity to say, oh, you mean Tom Brady and Harry Kane don't have someone screaming and yelling at them, distracting their brain, filling their brain with anxiety when they're trying to concentrate, focus, do creative, innovative, split second strategic moves. Why is that? Oh, just a second. They actually work on brain training. They are not being lambasted 24/7 by someone who thinks they're helping them.

Simon Currigan: 7:39

I was also really interested in the research you talk about on the impact of shame and how that affects our ability to empathize. Can you tell us about what the research says?

Jessica Fraser: 7:49

Shame is a neurological response to aggression. So if somebody is yelling at you or humiliating you or physically threatening you in some way, if they're grabbing you and detaining you, holding you in for more yelling, these types of behaviour, your brain wants you to survive at all times. So it's going to respond by becoming small, hunched over, bent down, eyes cast down to the floor because your brain is saying, okay, we're dealing with an aggressive predator here. It's very dangerous. Let's make ourselves small and unthreatening so that it starts to give us some space and go away, and let's just pray it doesn't eat us. So this is part of the stress response that the brain has. And what happens in childhood, and it can happen in adulthood too, but what happens in childhood is the brain starts to predict that this is going to be a typical scenario and it starts to misunderstand lots of physical and emotional cues and sees them all as aggressive. It's predicting more harm and danger. So it starts to respond to all kinds of neutral activities even with this sort of shameful position, this hope that you won't get noticed because that makes you in danger.

Simon Currigan: 8:57

What kind of damage does that do to the kids? You can imagine in terms of their learning, in terms of their confidence, in terms of their emotional development, what kind of a long term damage do we see?

Jessica Fraser: 9:07

The kinds of stress responses that we have to bullying and abuse in all forms, they start to take over cortical real estate. The brain has limited space. It has limited cortical real estate. So if you are pouring all your energy as a child into safety, into emotionally and physically protecting yourself, you're taking away precious resources from creativity, from problem solving, from social emotional connections with others, and from your health. Really seriously from your health. Because we now know that and research is very clear that the more damage that's happening in the brain from the stress response system, your fight, flight and freeze, very primal evolutionary created systems to keep you alive. If that keeps getting triggered and tripped up by being in a toxic environment with the powerful people in your world, your adults or peers, it's also damaging your immune system and it's damaging your blood vessels. It's doing significant damage, basically, all throughout your brain and body. And so people that don't address this, when they don't understand that their body and brain are having these kinds of reactions and they're invisible to us and we don't talk about them as a society, our children aren't learning that they need to do very specific evidence based things to get their health back. And the research shows, and this is from the late 1990s, the research shows there's a direct correlation between child abuse, emotional, physical, sexual, emotional neglect, and emotional abuse, and physical neglect. There is a direct correlation between that and midlife chronic disease. So if you've grown up in a home, if you've gone to school, if you've been in a sports' programme, if you've gone to a church or a club, as a child where you've been repeatedly exposed to this type of toxicity, you are much more likely than a person who hasn't to have a midlife chronic health condition and have a shortened lifespan.

Simon Currigan: 10:59

And that was Jessica Fraser and that's where we're gonna have to pause the interview. But there is still so much more to learn and explore about the neurological impact of bullying and how it affects children's long term development. If you want to know more about the approaches that you can take in school to build kids up and help them overcome the damage of bullying, make sure you go back and check out the full episode. I definitely recommend you do. That's podcast episode number 85. I'll put a direct link in the show notes to make it easy for you to click through and access that. If you found today's episode helpful, we'd really appreciate it if you could rate and review us. Consider it your chance to award your favorite education podcast if that's what we are. Thank you for listening today, and we'll see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.