There are children who throw chairs when cornered, children who slip quietly out the door or hide behind the portable, children who don’t speak for hours, who go limp, who answer every question with “I don’t know,” and children who nod and smile and say “okay” to everything—until they collapse at home, trembling and broken, far from the eyes that called them “fine.”
All of these children may be responding to the same thing—not a task or a teacher or a tone of voice, but something deeper and older and harder to name: a nervous system’s memory of being hurt, dismissed, misread, or made small in a place that was supposed to be safe.
Their bodies are not disordered; they are honest.
More than behaviour
The dominant frameworks in schools still cast student actions as choices—isolated, observable, controllable events that can be shaped with the right combination of praise, pressure, and consequence—but for neurodivergent children, whose bodies often move faster than language and whose stress responses have been finely tuned by repetition and survival, what looks like misbehaviour is often the visible edge of an invisible threat.
When a child enters fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, they are not being manipulative or defiant or unmotivated—they are responding predictably to a world that has repeatedly proven itself unwilling to bend to their needs, and in doing so, they are trying to live.
And when we treat these responses as disobedience or dysfunction, we don’t just miss the message—we deepen the harm.
The nervous system comes first
The nervous system is not a metaphor or a feeling or a soft science abstraction; it is a complex, embodied system designed to detect threat before the brain can name it, and for neurodivergent children—especially those with sensory processing differences, trauma histories, or a lifetime of being coerced into compliance—threat doesn’t always come in the form of violence or danger, but in unpredictability, loss of autonomy, disbelief, or being seen as a problem.
School may present as ordinary on the surface—a bell, a hallway, a worksheet—but for a child who has been overwhelmed before, or punished for expressing need, or restrained for trying to leave, these neutral-seeming things can become cues of impending harm, and the body will react accordingly, often without conscious thought.
What we name “dysregulation” is often a deeply accurate response to an environment that feels hostile, chaotic, or impossible to endure—and while the child may not be able to explain this in words, their body will speak for them.
What schools misread
| Survival Response | What it looks like in class | How it’s often misinterpreted |
|---|---|---|
| Fight | Yelling, hitting, throwing, swearing | Aggression, disrespect, violence |
| Flight | Leaving, hiding, pacing, eloping | Avoidance, noncompliance |
| Freeze | Silence, shutdown, stillness | “Fine,” disengaged, lazy |
| Fawn | Over-helpful, compliant, perfectionistic | “Well-regulated,” people pleaser |
These responses are not chosen in the way most school behaviour models assume; they are reflexive, patterned, embodied responses to perceived danger, yet schools continue to meet them with rigid plans, sticker charts, suspension letters, and behaviour contracts that aim to suppress the signal rather than understand its source.
Fawning may look like success—a child who sits still, smiles, hands in work on time—but underneath that compliance may be a child who is hypervigilant, desperate for approval, and afraid that even the smallest mistake will result in rejection or shame.
And when we reward fawn and punish fight, we aren’t regulating—we are grooming children to disappear their distress.
Zones of regulation don’t fix unsafe environments
There is no shortage of school-based programs that claim to teach regulation—deep breaths, colour zones, emotion wheels—but when these tools are delivered inside an environment that remains overwhelming, unpredictable, or coercive, they become just another way of telling a child to silence their body in order to be acceptable.
A child is told to “use their strategy” while sitting under flickering lights in a room that smells of bleach, surrounded by constant noise, expected to make eye contact and track the speaker, even as their whole body is telling them to run; and when they fail to “regulate,” it’s framed as a lack of effort or skill rather than a failure of environmental safety.
This is the central lie of many school-based regulation models: that emotional control can be taught in isolation, that safety can be simulated without listening, and that the child’s dysregulation is something to be fixed rather than understood as a message about their environment.
What safety really means
True safety is not the absence of yelling or the presence of visual schedules; it is the felt sense that your needs will not be punished, that your no will be heard, that you can retreat without shame and return without penalty, and that the adults around you will respond to your distress with softness.
Safety means slowing down—not just transitions but expectations and reactions and institutional rhythms that leave no room for breath—and it means reducing unpredictability in ways that honour the nervous system’s need for coherence, routine, and meaningfully offered choice.
It means letting children leave before they explode, letting them protest without being seen as oppositional, letting them go quiet without being forgotten, and letting them know, in your tone and your posture and your consistency, that you do not see their survival responses as a tedious or a personal insult.
The child is not the problem
A child who fights is saying this hurts, even if they can’t tell you what “this” is; a child who flees and climbs to the top of a tree is saying I need space; a child who fawns is saying please let me be enough; and a child who freezes is saying I am overwhelmed beyond words.
These are not excuses, and they are not manipulations—they are messages from a body that has learned it must protect itself, even when no one else will, and if we can stop punishing the signal long enough to hear it, we may find that what these children need most is not correction, but care.
We say we want students to feel safe—but safety is not built by ignoring the nervous system’s wisdom or demanding that it perform stillness in unsafe conditions.
Safety is built by listening.
And listening starts by believing that the body is telling the truth.
