Digging into the idea of well-nourished lives, we know it doesn’t look the same for everyone. Ruth Ayres and Becca Burk discuss the importance of offering well-nourished lives to help strengthen emotional regulation. They define three questions to support well-nourished living in our classrooms and our lives.
Show Notes
Choice Literacy sponsored this episode.
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Quotables
“There are so many ways that kids need to be nourished in order to be able to be able to be successful and be able to positively interact with the world.”
“There is not one way to help a child be well nourished; there are many.”
“All humans, no matter their age, can live well nourished lives. The difference when they aren’t and when they are well nourished are quite drastic.”
“There’s not one way to help a child be well nourished.”
“There’s a vast continuum of needs for them to be well nourished.”
“The role that teachers and coaches have in nourishing children is critical.”
“The power that teachers and coaches have to help kids heal is remarkable.”
“What does your heart need?”
“There is a whole gamete of things that our heart, brains, and bodies need in order to be well nourished.”
“What am I actually asking of them in that moment?”
“The work really begins with ourselves.”
“Helping kids understand how our actions are connected to our thoughts is some of the earliest work to do.”
“Behavior is just a sign of how children know how to interact with the world.”
“So much of being well nourished is knowing and being aware of your own needs and then the needs of others and being able to respond to both.”
“When you’re in a well nourished state, you’re able to identify your own needs and seek appropriate ways to have them met and to help others appropriately meet their needs.”
“As the teacher in charge of these incredible children, it’s your job to start identifying children’s needs and meet them.”
“There are so many factors that play into how well nourished people are.”
“It is critically important that we remain well nourished so that we can step in and help nourish the children who walk through our doors.”
“The choices that we make and the ways we engage with them to nourish their hearts and minds are some of the most critical choices we can make to help children be well nourished.”
“Spend some time really asking ourselves what am I doing for my body, my heart, and my brain to be able to really begin this work.”
“What would that look like if their bodies, brains, or hearts were nourished.”
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
[00:00:00] Becca: Yeah, that phrase you use, well nourished or that descriptor. And thinking about how kids come to school, maybe not well nourished is something that makes me stop and think a lot because there’s so many ways that kids need to be nourished in order to be able to be successful and positively interacting with the world. And I feel like this could be a whole other conversation, this idea of what well nourished life looks like.
[00:00:30] Ruth: Digging into the idea of well nourished lives. We know it doesn’t look the same for everyone. There is not one way to help a child be well nourished. There are many. We define some categories to support well nourished living in our classrooms and in our lives. This is sticky hope.
Hey, Becca. So I am excited to pick up this conversation that stemmed from when we talked last time and we kind of stumbled across this term a well nourished life. And when we were thinking about kindergarteners and suspension and just how we’re interacting with the world and really noticing that kids who have been well nourished their whole lives oftentimes will interact in the world differently than those who haven’t been well nourished. And then you kind of just expanded that concept a little bit and thinking a lot about how all humans, no matter their age, can live well nourished lives and the differences in when we are and when we aren’t really are quite drastic. I just think about my own life. Like it’s not like I wake up every day and every single day I can say I’m living a well nourished life, or I think about seasons, and there’s seasons where I’ve definitely lived a better nourished life than other seasons. So just think like it’s not just this conversation about kids, but about just humans in general. So as you’ve been thinking about well nourished, what have you been thinking about?
[00:02:20] Becca: Yeah, I think you introduced me to that term or reintroduced me to that term in these conversations. And it really made me stop and think about not only like my life and my kids at home, but also the kids who enter into my classroom. And as a kindergarten teacher, I don’t know a whole lot about them before they come into my room and really thinking about what kind of nourishment they’ve had and what their life has looked like. And I think an important part that, that we need to acknowledge is like, there’s not one way to live a well nourished, well nourished life. And there’s not one way to help a child be well nourished.
But there are some like, key points that we can identify that help people become well nourished. And it really for me breaks down into three kind of different categories, right? Like a well nourished body, so like a physically healthy body, but also like thinking about what a body needs to, to be able to do all that you want it to do, but also a well nourished brain and what brains need to be strong and healthy and able to do what we want them to do. And then a heart, right, Like a well nourished heart.
And I think a lot about my, my kindergarteners, but also my kids at home who are a variety of ages. Like the needs that they have so that they’re not. They’re heart is well nourished are hugely different. Right. There’s a vast continuum of needs for their heart to get the nourishment that it needs. But it starts with being able to like, stay regulated and express their emotions and be able to like, communicate through the feelings that they’re having and also to feel loved and understood as who they are.
And that it looks very different for my 4 year old and my kindergarteners than it does for my 13 and 15 year olds who are in a very different season of life. And you and I were talking about the role that teachers and coaches have, especially for those older kids, in nourishing children not only their hearts, but their brains and bodies too, as. And how critical it is for them to step into that nourishing role.
[00:04:40] Ruth: Yeah, it really is. Like, I think about, you know, sometimes it’s just there’s sometimes like with our kids, you know, like even healthy eating, you know, like it might have kind of felt like a battle to drink milk and water and like those be your choices. And then when our kids were, you know, in sports, the cross country coach was like, no, Pop, it’s so important that you hydrate your body all day long, you know, And I think like sometimes it’s easy to forget or because oftentimes like kids aren’t like, oh, thank you so much for telling me no Pop. You know, like there’s not this gratitude that we forget how much that matters. And it matters a lot. And like the power that educators and coaches have to help kids heal, it’s really remarkable. I was in your classroom recently, Becca, and I heard you using this phrase. So I think it was at the very beginning of the day, kids come in and there was a student and he just was having a hard time settling. So it was Kind of bouncing around the room.
He was forgetting to do his morning tasks. And you pulled him in and you used this question. You said, what does your heart need? And I wasn’t able to hear the rest of it, but what I watched was this interaction between you. And you hugged him, and then you gave this gentle reminder of those morning tasks, and then he was able to go on. I was really struck by what does your heart need? Because I might be tempted, like, with my own kids, to say, do you need a hug? And the difference between do you need a hug? Or the question, what does your heart need? Is one that is really about empowerment. Right? Like, and helping students or people, like, of any age really ask ourselves, what does our heart need? And knowing, like, there’s this whole gamut of things that our hearts, brains, and bodies need.
[00:06:51] Becca: Yeah. So. So that there are three questions that I typically, that I go to when I see that a child is struggling in some way or showing some level of dysregulation. And I shouldn’t say child, because I was just thinking, like, my husband and I ask each other these questions, too, is like, what. What does your heart need? If you see that they’re struggling, perhaps emotionally, what does your brain need? If they’re seeming overstimulated or overwhelmed? Or what does your body need? Like, when they seem like they’re crawling out of their skin or hurt in some way?
And those questions have come to light as I have grown as a teacher and then as we have grown as parents, because at first it was like, what do you need? Right? Like, what do you need right now? Almost out of point of frustration?
And kids or adults are just like, you don’t know in that moment. Right. And so I took some time to step back and think through, like, what do I want them to say, right? Like, what am I really asking of them in that moment? And it’s actually a lot of hard work in that moment especially. But even when you’re regulated to stop and identify what your heart, mind, or body need. And so in order to be able to do that work, there’s a lot of teaching that comes, like, in a regulated state and a lot of work and, like, ability to identify what kinds of needs you might have and how to meet those needs.
And it’s a lot of, like, awareness and metacognition almost of, like, here’s what’s happening in my body, and here are the things that help me. And, like, as the person who’s asking that question, I need to be ready that the question I ask of my 13 year old. Her answers are going to be vastly different than that of my 4 year old or my 33 year old husband. You know, like the. I have to be ready for a variety of.
A variety of answers and to be able to provide that, to meet the need. Right. And or to help them get that need met. And so that little guy in my classroom came in and I could see that he was pretty dysregulated. But it in his face you could see more of an emotional response than like just a dysregulated body. Like kind of a silly. Sometimes they’re silly and they just need help like with reminders. But he needed a connection and a moment of co regulation and, and at this point in the year they’re able to say like I need your help to calm my body down or I need your help to help my heart.
And sometimes they’ll say like help my heart feel safe or we haven’t quite gotten to the conversation of like to feel a part of the class. Like sometimes they need help feeling connected to where we are and being together. But that’s what he was seeking was like he needed a reminder that you belong here too.
And so I scooped him in and gave him that hug and then a gentle reminder through like the steps of our morning routines and off he went and he did it.
And a huge amount of that I can attribute to like the work that he has, he has chosen to engage in and we’ve done together in like identifying all of those needs.
[00:10:07] Ruth: Yeah, it’s such a, they’re such great questions but like if people are going and trying it like the first time, you’re probably going to get a. I don’t know. And I think like the, the work really begins with ourselves like noticing when we’re just feeling a little out of sorts and then just asking ourselves like going through that what does, what does my body need? Like sometimes for me I need a big drink of water. Like it’s been hours since I’ve had a drink of water. I need water or I need food or I need to take a little break.
But by starting there I was also thinking kind of a question even before those to help kids. What we would ask our kids a lot was like what are you hoping to get?
Because it’s just another way of the what does your brain need, body need or heart need? But this like what were you hoping to get in a. You know, once they’re regulated when they’re, they’re not in an emotional mind being able to say, like, what were you hoping to get? And did you get it? Because usually you’re not when you’re dysregulated and helping people become more aware of the way that our actions are connected to our thoughts, which are connected to how we’re feeling and our emotions and helping to understand that. And so some of the, like, the basic question is, well, what were you hoping to get? And then how can we help you going forward? Because remembering that behavior, it’s just a sign of how kids know to interact with the world well, how any human knows to interact with the world. Right.
[00:11:49] Becca: And I think like even just listening to you, then, like so much of being well nourished is knowing and being aware of your own needs and then the needs of others and being able to respond to both. Right? So when you are in a well, well nourished place, you’re able to identify your own needs and, and seek appropriate ways to have them met, and you’re able to help others appropriately meet their needs. And I think that it can be really tricky to put a whole group of students together who come to you with like, on this continuum of nourishment. Right. And some of them are incredibly well nourished and super aware and can like, feel the emotions of people around them and want to help with all of it. And others have, like, have no awareness of where their own feelings and needs are coming from and how to meet them. And they’re exhibiting all of these interesting symptoms needing to be nourished. Right. And as the teacher or the educator in charge of these, like, incredible humans, it’s your job to start identifying needs and teaching them how to identify those needs and then meeting all of them. And as someone who’s been in education for a decade, I know that’s kind of like not super long in comparison to others, but even just in the last decade, I’ve watched it really shift. The level of, well nourishment or nourishment that kids come to school with is very different than what I saw even a decade ago.
And there’s so many factors that play into how well nourished people are. And I think like, we have watched a lot of things change in the last decade and it just goes to show how critically important it is that we remain well nourished so that we can step in to help nourish the kids that walk into our room because we can’t control how well nourished they are before they come to us. And then we can only help to support them through the time that we have them. Right. And so the choices that we make in the ways that we engage with them to nourish their hearts and minds are some of the most critical choices we can make in order to help them become more, well, nourished.
[00:14:15] Ruth: Yeah. I love that. And I love, like, that there’s not one right way. Right. Like, being open. So I think, like, here, like, just to end.
Let’s. I’m wondering, what do you do to nourish your body? Because I know, like, that’s just one thing that we do differently.
So I swim almost every day, and I get up really early in the morning and lift heavy weights three or four times a week. And that is so good for me, but it doesn’t mean that everybody should be doing that. So what are you doing, Becca, to nourish your body?
[00:14:56] Becca: Yeah. And I think you and I are so different in that realm and in this phase of life, Nourishing my body means, like, making sure I have time to have healthy meals and protein and drinking enough water and intentionally taking time after the whole family has gone to bed to. To do the things that are on my mind. Right. And to have time in the quiet to stop and think and reflect and grow. And that’s when I do my writing, and that’s when I have time to be me. So nourishing. Nourishing me for right now means taking time to be intentional about caring for my brain and my heart.
[00:15:38] Ruth: Yeah. And, you know, like, you stay up late and. And write. I get up early in the morning and have some quiet time and write. And so I think, like, kids are the same way. And so often you’re like, what works for me then. I, like, I feel so good when I do those things early in the morning. But that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna feel so good if you do those things early in the morning.
And so I think just spending some time really asking ourselves, like, what do I do for my body? What am I doing for my heart? What am I doing for my brain? I think that’s really where this work begins. And then when we are working with kids and we’re seeing some behaviors that are tricky and unpredictable and surprising, we can then go back and ask, well, what would that look like if their hearts were nourished or their brains were nourished or their bodies were nourished?
Together, we can make a world where all children grow mentally fit and cognitively strong. But what about the days, and there are many, when we feel completely, totally, and undeniably disheartened the days that threaten joy and attempt to swipe our hope. These are the days when we need tools, resources, and mostly straightforward conversations to know hope can stick, even in the stickiest situations.