The ABCs of regressive punishment

How school discipline harms neurodivergent students—and what needs to change.

Discipline in schools is often framed as neutral: rules are rules, consequences follow. But for neurodivergent students, it is rarely experienced that way. It is felt as coercion—as something imposed rather than understood. Often, it’s not support but a system of harm, disguised as order, wrapped in policy, administered without reflection.

This isn’t just about one form of harm. It’s about a whole spectrum of tactics used to force compliance at the expense of autonomy, dignity, and safety. Below is a glossary of sorts: a primer on the most common regressive punishment practices still used in schools across British Columbia—and far beyond. Many of these are still legal. Some are even praised as “innovative.” But for neurodivergent students, they are experienced as betrayal.

What follows is a kind of glossary—a neurodivergent lens on the most common disciplinary practices still used across BC schools.

A is for “alternative rooms”

Framed as calm-down spaces or sensory breaks, alternative rooms are often presented as a supportive intervention. But in practice, access to these spaces is deeply uneven—and often shaped by a mix of funding constraints, behaviour narratives, and bias.

Some children—especially those who are visibly dysregulated, racialised, or labelled as “disruptive”—may be removed frequently and placed in these rooms without consent, support, or meaningful reintegration. More likely, they’ll be placed on an “alternative schedule,” which may included infrequent hours that can be afforded within limited staff hours.

For others, particularly autistic students with high-masking traits, access to an alternative space may be withheld entirely. Children may be denied this form of support, even during moments of clear distress, because meaningful access requires one-to-one staffing—which schools are increasingly unwilling to fund in BC, even in cases of sustained behavioural escalation or dysregulation. Instead, these kids offered “universal” accommodations—tiny castle-like corners or play tents in the middle of overstimulating classrooms—that become more of a novelty than a refuge. These are not trauma-informed spaces. They’re a workaround. And they fall short of what many neurodivergent students actually need.

“Finally, my daughter refused to go into the classroom, if insufficient support was available to make her safe. She spent 7 months in a hallway.”

Anonymous Parent

The underlying issue isn’t just how these spaces are used or withheld—it’s that access to regulation is rationed. Decisions are made not based on need, but on staffing formulas, behaviour labels, and systemic assumptions about whose distress deserves accommodation.

B is for behaviour charts

Public charts tracking who is on “green” and who has dropped to “red” might look benign to adults, but they create a constant undercurrent of surveillance and shame. They turn emotional regulation into a scoreboard, punishing children for nervous system responses they cannot yet control. For autistic students, it becomes a daily reminder that they are watched—and often found wanting.

Behaviour charts are often framed as visual tools for encouraging self-regulation. Colour-coded. Point-based. Public. But for students with profiles like Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) or Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), they can have the opposite of their intended effect. They don’t build capacity. They escalate resistance.

For PDA-identified students especially, the visibility of demand is itself a threat. The moment expectations are externalised and tracked, the nervous system registers danger. A chart becomes not a support, but a scoreboard of pressure. A public surveillance device. A silent dare.

One parent reported her child expressing a desire for a classmate to “die” because that peer’s behaviour was jeopardising their team’s standing on the chart. That is not evidence of cruelty—it’s evidence of the emotional intensity these systems generate. High-stakes pressure. Social competition. Desperation.

Most dangerously, behaviour charts redefine success as compliance. Not safety. Not connection. Not understanding. They pathologise distress. They reward masking. And for children who experience demands as physiologically intolerable—even when they long to meet them—behaviour charts make full participation feel impossible.

C is for “consequences”

The word “consequence” is often used as a soft replacement for punishment, but the function remains the same: to impose discomfort in response to undesired behaviour. Logical consequences can have their place, but in practice, they are often arbitrary, disconnected from context, and designed more to assert authority than to teach skills. For neurodivergent students, who may not connect cause and effect in linear ways, consequences often feel confusing, frightening, and unjust.

D is for denial of accommodations

It does not always look like outright refusal. Often, it is subtle. A fidget quietly confiscated. A sensory seat removed without explanation. A visual schedule forgotten in the rush of the morning. An IEP goal ignored, dismissed, postponed, reframed as a privilege rather than a right. Accommodations that were hard-won through documentation, meetings, and professional recommendations are quietly set aside—until the child melts down, until the parent follows up for the third or thirtieth time.

When a school decides that a student’s specific support needs should be replaced by something “universal,” they are not promoting equity—they are dissolving precision into generality. And generality rarely supports the child who was already struggling. Neurodivergent children do not need less accommodation because others might benefit too; they need accommodations that are deliberate, consistent, and responsive to their actual nervous systems.

To deny accommodations is to guarantee dysregulation. It ensures distress, then pathologises the expression of that distress as bad behaviour. The cycle is self-reinforcing: remove support, provoke a reaction, use the reaction to justify further restriction. This is how systems mask harm as policy.

Accommodations are not extras. They are not special treatment. They are the bare minimum scaffolding required for disabled students to exist in spaces not built for them. Denying them is not neutral—it is violent.

E is for exclusion

Whether formal (suspension) or informal (sent home early), exclusion is often framed as necessary for safety. But it is disproportionately applied to neurodivergent, disabled, and racialised students, and it teaches a dangerous lesson: when you are in distress, you will be removed. There is no repair. There is only disappearance.

F is for forced apologies

Let’s be honest. When a neurodivergent child is overwhelmed, shamed, excluded, and then told to apologise before they can rejoin the group, what we’re really asking is for them to perform regret inside a system that has just harmed them. It’s not justice. It’s not repair. It’s re-entry on the system’s terms.

In many classrooms, apologies are treated as a behavioural endpoint: a sign that the lesson has been learned, that repair is underway, and that the student has re-entered the moral order of the group. But for neurodivergent children—especially autistic children, or those with demand-avoidant profiles—the demand to apologise can itself be a form of harm.

Forced apologies are often less about empathy and more about performance. They are public rituals designed to soothe adults, restore authority, and signal the return of control. They rarely reflect a child’s internal understanding or readiness to repair. And for many neurodivergent students, they are confusing, humiliating, or deeply dysregulating.

More than that, the concept of apology itself may not align with neurodivergent ways of processing harm. Some of us feel empathy through action, not words. Some of us need time—sometimes days—to understand what happened. Some of us experience guilt in quiet, internalised forms that do not conform to neurotypical expectations. And some of us—especially when overwhelmed or in sensory crisis—act under duress, not intention. How can you apologise for something that wasn’t a decision, but a survival response?

We ask autistic children to say sorry for yelling, hitting, running, melting down—without naming that they were pushed past the limits of their nervous systems in environments that feel, to them, like torture.

We do not ask neurotypical peers to apologise for interrupting, speaking over, infantilising, gaslighting, or creating the conditions that led to the explosion.

There is no symmetry in this ritual. Only submission.

True repair is possible—but it begins with regulation, relationship, and reflection. Not with scripts. Not with shame. Not with extracting words a child cannot meaningfully give.

There’s more

This is not an exhaustive list. It is a glimpse.

The common thread in all of these practices is the belief that control is the precondition for learning—that before a child can be educated, they must be managed. That they must first submit before they can belong.

But we all deserve to be loved for being who we are, not for how well we perform compliance.

For neurodivergent children, this often means their needs are framed as behaviours. Their distress is read as defiance. Their presence is treated as conditional.

But learning does not happen under threat. It happens in relationship. It happens when children feel safe enough to make mistakes, safe enough to unmask, safe enough to trust.

We don’t need more consequences. We need more curiosity. More training. More support. More willingness to imagine classrooms that prioritise co-regulation over compliance.

Because what we call “discipline” is often just punishment with a pedagogical veneer. And punishment, by its nature, teaches fear. It teaches performance. It teaches the most vulnerable children that their bodies, their feelings, and their differences are problems to be contained.

That must change.

Share your story

Have you or your child experienced these forms of discipline? We are collecting stories to help illustrate the real impacts of these practices. Your voice matters.