S3 EP16: SEL Summer Camp Week 6 - The Last Campfire: Saving Big Hearts a Seat | Skills Wrap Up

The Middle School Mary Poppins Podcast - Suzanne M. Swain, EDS LMSW

In the final episode of the socio-emotional summer camp series, host Suzanne M. Swain reflects on six weeks of exploring middle schoolers' emotional development,

Key takeaways

• Emotional regulation is a skill that requires consistent practice, not innate ability.
• Children develop self-regulation best in safe, supportive environments where they feel seen and valued.

Main topics

• Emotional regulation as a learnable skill
• The role of safe environments in child development

Notable quotes

We have to practice this. It matters. We have to practice, practice, practice.

Behavior doesn't really happen in isolation... it happens inside of a brain, inside of a body and relationships.

Conclusion

As summer camp ends, Suzanne M. Swain invites listeners to carry forward the lessons of empathy,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:13) Hello, hello, my clever little foxes, and welcome back to the Middle School Mary Poppins podcast. This is where we talk about the wonderfully awkward, occasionally smelly, frequently confusing, and absolutely fascinating world of middle school. Yay! Well, hello, I'm your host, Suzanne M. Swain, and of course, Lieutenant Steve, my good buddy, is here by my side, as always, licking my nose. Because apparently nobody told him that summer camp is ending and he's gonna have to pack up all of his little coconut operation and head on home. But we made it, everybody! This is week six of our socio-emotional summer camp series, which means that somehow we've already reached our final week together and it's time to head back to school soon and all that good stuff. But it's our last day at camp, our last evening around the campfire, and summer camp graduation. So before we get started, you may notice that a certain cohort is missing from the campfire today. My dear friend Jessica Reino is not able to join us for this final episode. She's extremely busy over at Mightier right now, and unfortunately our schedules just could not jive to make it this time. So apparently Jessica had to catch the camp bus home a little bit early. And Jessica, if you're listening, thank you. Really, truly, you've been awesome. Thanks for spending your summer with us and you're bringing your all of your massive clinical expertise and humor and warmth and honestly, your perspective to these conversations. And especially for helping us talk about children's emotions in a way that's compassionate and authentic and practical and honestly, pretty human. So I've really loved having you here and our listeners have loved having you here. And I'm just really grateful to all of you and to welcoming Jessica into our conversation and you taking the time to be part of this crazy little podcast. So I also want to thank our friends at Mightier who helped to make the entire socio-emotional summer camp series possible. We kind of noodled all this together to bring it to you at no cost and whatnot. You know, it's wonderful. We had a great working relationship together. I still think it's a wonderful company. And please know that, you know, I wasn't on the payroll. This was something that we did, you know, pro bono to provide good information and good content out to viewers. So they make a great product. And, you know, playing video games while having a heart rate monitor can really teach some great self-regulation. And I've been, you know, really genuinely pleased to provide this free promotion for my year. throughout the series because I believe that it can be a wonderful tool and we really can all use some help with practicing emotional self-regulation, myself included. I am so guilty of this. And that word really matters, though, and that's practicing. It matters. We have to practice this. So it's a skill. And like any old skill, you've got to practice, practice, practice. So we sometimes talk about emotional regulation as though children should simply just know how to do that magically when... Adults can't do that, really, sometimes. So we all just need to, you know, stop, regulate, listen, calm down, take a second, breathe, think about our choices and control yourself. But regulation is a skill and skills develop with time and skills need practice. So nobody's perfect. And certainly we have to have some patience and grace for those who have questions and have to go through their own process of understanding. Children develop those skills inside relationships and environments where they feel safe. And we've talked about that a lot. And you can practice something when you feel safe to do so. So that's one of the things I appreciate about Mighty Ear, though. I mean, it gives kids the opportunity to notice what's happening inside their body and practice bringing that activation back down while they're doing something that's engaging. Which is why, you know, for that series on technology, I went and sought out companies doing something innovative. And I came across them and I was like, wow, that's so cool. And although summer camp is ending, our MyYear coupon is still available. If you want to check it out, like I don't make any money off this at all. So, you know, I just hope they do well because they're a good thing. That's all. But you can use Mary Poppins is one word for 15 % off over there at MyYear.com. And thanks again for MyYear for believing in what we were trying to accomplish this summer. And to Jessica and everybody over there and Dr. Jason, or Jason, sorry, for all of your innovation and brilliance in, you know, inventing such a thing. And sitting beside me at our imaginary campfire and going to Hawaii and all these fun things. So, all right. Jessica's caught her bus and my ears packed up the cabin. So Lieutenant Steve has apparently stolen one coconut. So we have one last day. here at camp. Well, you know, it's like one last campfire. And I've been thinking a lot about how I wanted to end this series. And I've been a little bit stumped and having some creative block. But I don't want to simply give you just some other lesson. I don't want our last day of summer camp to point toward like a PowerPoint presentation and summarization like it's professional development. Instead, I just want to take everything we've learned this summer and put the pieces together like a puzzle and see what beautiful thing we've created. And we have created something pretty beautiful. I mean, we've talked about the adolescent brain and technology with emotions and their tie-ins and how anxiety plays a role with thoughts and anger and self-regulation over and over. And they may sound like separate topics, but they're all interwoven together in a tapestry. And they're different parts of the same human being and what makes them tick. And that's where I wanted Summer Camp to take us all. along and to toward the understanding of the whole concept of middle schoolers, you know, as a whole person and not just the behavior that we can see and the grades and phones and, you know, anger and slamming doors and, you know, attitude and anger and that type of thing. But it's the person because behavior doesn't really happen in isolation and it happens inside of a brain, inside of a body and relationships. families and peer groups and school and culture. So it's within that community that develops the person. And once we begin looking at children that way, I think something can change. Instead of immediately asking, how do I stop this behavior? We become curious enough to finally ask, what's happening with this kid and how are they being affected by the situation? And that's a really different question. And I think it's one of the most important questions that we can ask. So tonight, instead of another lesson, I just want to take you somewhere that taught me an awful lot about human beings long before I had degrees or developmental theory or neuroscience to explain all the whys and hows and all that. It's actually a place called Camp Sycamore Hills. And I spent three summers working at Camp Sycamore Hills. And this is a Girl Scout camp out in Ashland City, Tennessee. Just absolutely beautiful rolling hills. Gorgeous. Very peaceful place. And my first summer, I was the art director and I lived in Breathe, the art barn. And yes, it actually really was a barn. It smelled like tempera paint and construction paper and hot glue, like burnt hot glue, which I still have scars. Glitter. Oh, lots of glitter. So much glitter and probably a lot of mildew and creatures. But we're not going to romanticize everything. It was still camp. But I love that place. And kids came in and made stuff and painted and experimented and they made total messes of everything. But everything was covered in paint anyway. So it just became layers upon layers of murals that had developed over time. And it was really cool. They discovered things that they were really good at and things that they were really bad at. But occasionally they discovered that glitter wasn't so much an art supply as it is kind of like a lifelong commitment to it. everything. And I think it multiplies like gremlins. But I even taught a young Miley Cyrus there in that art barn. One of the things I loved about remembering that now is that she actually wasn't Miley Cyrus then. She was a kid at camp and she was in the horse program. Her family would come usually, I think every summer for a while there. And She was one of my art students. So really, I was like, wow, cool energy with it. I knew she was a Cyrus and, you know, obviously had some importance and all that from her family. But I don't know. I just thought she was a cool kid, like a dynamic kid. That's it. She was another kid just making stuff and having experiences and becoming whoever she was eventually going to become. And I think that's something that we forget about middle schoolers is that we're meeting people in the middle of construction. And we don't know what they're going to become yet. And I always thought that was really cool, though, is that possibility factor. But neither do they. And the next two summers at Sycamore Hills, I actually became the operations director. And then I saw camp completely differently because that was a totally different, more left brainy type of job. And I was working with kitchens and maintenance and supplies. I handled deliveries and schedules. and a lot of staff and lots of problems. So I was the buck stops here kind of person. And all those invisible systems that kept this beautiful little community functioning during this tiny little bit of the year and when camp was in session. And the campers saw camp. And I began seeing what actually built camp. And years later, I realized that it's exactly what happened to me professionally when I started working with middle school. Because at first, I just saw the kids. And then I became really fascinated by everything surrounding the kids, like the system. And how their brains worked, where it intertwines with families and their relationships and school and culture and all their emotional lives. And then how their identities developed. as a result of that. It's all those invisible systems underneath the behavior that we can actually see. And that's why I sometimes describe myself as a middle school sociologist. But I mean, after all these years, I'm still kind of fascinated by the same question. And the question, it just keeps coming up, but it's what makes these wonderfully awkward little humans even, you know, what makes them tick? And what possibilities