Beyond behavior plans

A transitional kindergarten teacher recently described one of her students this way:

“He’s fine until he’s not.”

The child was bright, curious, and eager to learn. He entered TK able to identify letters, count beyond 20, and navigate technology with ease. But when another student picked the toy he wanted, he screamed and hit. When it was time to clean up, he threw materials and ran. When his teacher asked him to wait, he collapsed onto the floor and kicked.

By the end of the first month of school, conversations had shifted toward behavior concerns and possible referrals.

Yet an underlying disability was not necessarily the issue.

The real challenge was something educators throughout the state are seeing with increasing frequency: children who have had limited opportunities to learn and practice the skills needed to manage frustration, disappointment, boredom, waiting, problem-solving, and conflict.

Sound familiar?

Across California, educators report increasing emotional dysregulation, lower frustration tolerance, difficulty with peer interactions, and greater dependence on adults to solve everyday problems. In our district, we’ve started referring to this phenomenon as buffering brains.

Like a frozen screen struggling to load, these children become stuck when faced with ordinary childhood challenges: a denied request, a difficult task, a transition, or a disagreement with a peer.

The result is what many educators are experiencing as a behavior pandemic.

Technology is not the villain in this story.

Families are navigating demanding schedules, childcare challenges, financial pressures, and the realities of modern parenting. Screens have become an accessible tool for entertainment, education, and, at times, survival.

Screen usage in itself is not the only contributing factor. The concern is what children may be missing when screens become their primary source of entertainment, engagement, or regulation.

Historically, young children developed critical social-emotional skills through play, family interactions, peer conflicts, waiting, boredom, and everyday problem-solving. They learned patience by waiting. They learned flexibility when things did not go their way. They learned communication by negotiating with peers.

Today, many of those opportunities can be bypassed with the swipe of a screen. As educators, we are increasingly meeting children who have had fewer opportunities to practice waiting, problem-solving, conflict resolution, self-regulation, and sustained social interaction.

The result can look like a behavior problem. But often, it is a practice problem. The child is not unwilling. The child is inexperienced. Like literacy, regulation develops through repeated opportunities to practice. Many of our youngest learners simply need more opportunities to build those skills.

Looking beyond the behavior When adults encounter challenging behavior, there is a natural tendency to ask: How do we stop it? How do we reduce it? How do we make it go away?

A better question may be: What skill is missing?

Most challenging behavior in early childhood can be traced back to lagging skills in emotional regulation, communication, flexibility, problem-solving, and social interaction. A child who hits may lack the language to negotiate. A child who runs may not know how to communicate that they are overwhelmed. A child who screams may never have learned another way to express frustration. When we shift from asking, “What’s wrong with this child?” to “What skill does this child need?” our interventions change dramatically.

Schools often attempt to solve these challenges almost entirely within the classroom. We add behavior plans. We create calm corners. We increase counseling supports. We provide staff training. These strategies matter, but unfortunately, they address only a fraction of a child’s day.

If regulation is taught at school but not reinforced at home, progress can be difficult to sustain. This realization led our district to ask a different question: What if behavior support started with families?

The Parent Empowerment Program: Rebooting the system The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District’s Parent Empowerment Program (PEP) was developed as an early intervention model designed to support children ages 3–6 before behavioral, social-emotional, or developmental concerns become significant barriers to success.

For educational leaders, PEP represents far more than a parent education class. It is an early learning strategy designed to strengthen school readiness by building the capacity of the adults surrounding young children.

The program serves children experiencing challenges with emotional regulation, peer interactions, communication, transitions, separation from caregivers, and other foundational school-readiness skills.

At the center of the program is Parent-Implemented Intervention (PII), an evidence-based practice that positions caregivers as active participants in intervention rather than passive recipients of advice.

Parents attend alongside their children and learn strategies through coaching, modeling, observation, and guided practice.

Twice a week, children participate in developmentally appropriate, play-based learning experiences while caregivers receive live coaching, immediate feedback from trained staff, and modeling from families further along in the program.

During a typical session, a child might be learning to wait for a turn during a game while a parent is coached on how to provide prompts, reinforce success, and respond to frustration. Another family may be practicing communication strategies during play or learning how to support smoother transitions between activities. Staff model strategies in real time, provide immediate feedback, and help families troubleshoot challenges as they occur.

Parents learn how to:

The intervention does not end when the session ends. Families leave with practical tools they can use during meals, bedtime routines, grocery store trips, community outings, and other everyday experiences. Because meaningful change does not happen during a 30-minute social emotional lesson. It happens during the thousands of interactions that shape a child’s development.

Building a bridge between home and school One of the most important lessons we learned early on was that supporting families alone was not enough. If parents were learning evidence-based strategies in PEP while school staff were using entirely different approaches, children were receiving mixed messages across environments.

Recognizing this gap, LMSVSD developed the Early Childhood Empowerment Team (ECET), extending the PEP model beyond families and into classrooms. Through ECET, teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators, and support staff receive training, coaching, modeling, and implementation support focused on emotional regulation, communication, positive behavior supports, and developmentally appropriate practices.

The model was intentionally designed to be scalable, allowing districts to implement parent coaching, staff coaching, or a fully integrated home-school model depending on local needs and resources. The goal is simple: When adults use common language, common expectations, and common strategies across home and school, children experience consistency. Families feel empowered. Teachers feel supported. Students learn faster because the adults in their lives are working from the same playbook.

Rather than asking educators to manage increasingly complex behavior challenges alone, the model focuses on building capacity across the entire system.

Results that matter The impact has been significant. During the past school year, LMSVSD reduced special education assessment referrals by more than 100 students across the district. For students enrolled in the PEP program, there has been a decrease in requests for intensive one-to-one services and reduced changes of placement. There has also been increased confidence and capacity in the adults supporting early education, which has helped more students remain successful in their least restrictive environments.

These outcomes suggest that when districts invest in prevention, family capacity, and home-school alignment, fewer students require increasingly intensive interventions later.

Beyond the numbers, families report feeling more confident and empowered. Teachers report feeling better equipped to support students with challenging behaviors. Most importantly, children gain the social-emotional, communication, and self-regulation skills needed to access learning and build positive relationships.

Programs such as PEP are also an important equity strategy. Children do not arrive at school with equal access to experiences that build communication, self-regulation, problem-solving, and social skills. By partnering with families early and providing coaching in natural environments, districts can increase access to support while reducing the likelihood that children enter school already behind their peers socially and emotionally.

Four lessons for educational leaders As districts continue expanding early learning opportunities, four lessons have emerged from our work:

Invest in parent coaching, not just parent communication. Information alone rarely changes behavior. Families need opportunities to observe, practice, receive feedback, and build confidence.

Invest in staff coaching, not just staff training. Professional learning must move beyond one-time workshops. Teachers need ongoing modeling, coaching, and implementation support.

Build home-school alignment. Children make the greatest gains when caregivers and educators use consistent strategies across environments.

Invest upstream. The earlier we support children and families, the greater our opportunity to change developmental trajectories and reduce the need for more intensive interventions later.

At LMSVSD, we have learned that improving outcomes for young children requires more than supporting students. It requires supporting the adults who care for them at home and at school.

Through PEP and ECET, we are building a shared system of support that empowers families, strengthens educators, and improves school readiness for our youngest learners.

As we begin partnering with other districts interested in implementing similar family-centered early intervention models, one lesson continues to stand out: When schools invest in families as partners — not observers — in early intervention, we do more than improve behavior. We strengthen school readiness, expand opportunity, and change trajectories for children long before they reach crisis.

Chelsea Matz (Gould), MA, Ed.S., LEP, is coordinator of the Parent Empowerment Program in La Mesa-Spring Valley School District.