DIGNITY OF CHILDREN · DR. TOLEDO

The Weekly Practice

Issue No. 11 Week of September 1st, 2026 Focus: Belief

A Message to the Program Director

You are holding a program together with attention that never fully divides and never fully rests. The coverage gaps, the compliance deadlines, the family conversations at the door, the staff member who is still becoming who they are while holding space for someone else’s child: all of it sits with you, and you keep choosing the children at the center of it. None of that weight is a judgment on how well you are doing this. It is simply what the work weighs.

The culture in your program will not come from a new curriculum or a tighter discipline policy. It will come from what you and your staff believe is actually happening when a child acts out, because that belief decides the response, and the response decides the room. When a staff member reads a child’s behavior as defiance, they reach for a correction. When they read it as a request to learn, they reach for a relationship. That shift in what you believe is your most dependable influence, and it is the one you can act on today. This is also why your own emotional intelligence is program infrastructure, not a personal wellness matter. A director who can see their own first reaction clearly makes better decisions under pressure, holds staff accountable without escalating them, and gives an entire room a nervous system to borrow.

Your emotional intelligence focus this week: self-awareness. Before you respond to the next behavior that catches you, notice the story your mind has already written in the first three seconds. You do not need to change it yet. You are simply naming what you assumed about the child and the moment, because the belief you hold in the gap between seeing and responding decides what you build next.

THIS WEEK'S FOCUS:

NERVOUS SYSTEM

What do I do in those three seconds, in my own body first, before I address anyone else’s?

Before your body has settled from the last disruption, your nervous system has already read the next one as a threat. That is where the Nervous System link begins, one layer below the belief you examined last week: your autonomic nervous system responds before your conscious mind can intervene, and the child in front of you reads your physiology before they hear a word you say. This is not a failure of composure. It is your nervous system doing what it evolved to do, which is to protect you. The problem is not that it happens. The problem is that the child’s nervous system aligns with yours in real time, whether yours is regulated or not.

Eva Oberle and Kimberly Schonert-Reichl demonstrated this directly in 2016. They studied 406 elementary school students and found that students in classrooms with higher teacher burnout had significantly elevated morning cortisol levels, a biological marker of chronic stress (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, 2016). It was the first study to show that a teacher’s occupational stress travels into the bodies of the children in their care. The teacher’s nervous system state was not a private experience. It was a classroom condition, measurable in the children’s saliva.

This is the physiological mechanism behind co-regulation, and it is why self-management is not self-care. When a director regulates their own body before responding to a flashpoint, they are not tending to their own well-being. They are producing the biological condition under which a dysregulated child can come down. A child whose nervous system is in threat mode cannot hear your words, process your correction, or learn the skill you are trying to teach. They can only match your state. If your state is calm, their body has something to move toward. If your state is escalated, you have just confirmed the threat.

The evidence for what happens when adults are trained to regulate is clear. Joana de Carvalho and colleagues conducted a randomized trial in 2021 with 228 elementary school teachers and over 2,400 of their students. Teachers in the intervention group received mindfulness-based training focused on social-emotional competencies, including self-regulation. After the intervention, these teachers showed significant increases in emotional regulation and well-being, and significant decreases in burnout (de Carvalho et al., 2021). But the finding that matters here is what happened to the students. Children in the intervention of teachers’ classrooms reported significant improvements in the quality of their relationship with the teacher, their own effect, and their social competencies. The teachers regulated themselves, and the students in their rooms changed with them.

This is the Nervous System link in the Belief-to-Outcomes framework. The belief you hold about a child tells you what to look for; the state of your nervous system tells the child what to feel. The order is fixed: you regulate your own body first, and you do it because the child’s body is listening to yours before it listens to anything you say.

A REFRAME TOOL FOR THE WEEK

The Sixty-Second Reset: Before the Flashpoint

When you feel your body respond to a situation, before you walk into the room or open your mouth, take sixty seconds:

Plant both feet on the floor. Feel the contact.
Take three breaths, each one slower than the last. Exhale longer than you inhale.
Name what you feel in your body, silently, in plain language: “My jaw is tight. My heart is fast.”
Drop your shoulders away from your ears.
Say to yourself: “This is behavior, not an emergency. My body is reading it as a threat. I am safe enough to respond.”

Then walk in.

Source and reading

Oberle, E., & Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2016). Stress contagion in the classroom? The link between classroom teacher burnout and morning cortisol in elementary school students. Social Science & Medicine, 159, 30-37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.031

de Carvalho, J. S., Oliveira, S., Roberto, M. S., Gonçalves, C., Bárbara, J. M., de Castro, A. F., Pereira, R., Franco, M., Cadima, J., Leal, T., Lemos, M. S., & Marques-Pinto, A. (2021). Effects of a mindfulness-based intervention for teachers: A study on teacher and student outcomes. Mindfulness, 12(7), 1719-1732. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-021-01635-3

One Small Step this Week

Teach the sixty-second reset to your full staff at the next team meeting. Walk them through it once, then ask each person to try it with a real situation from the past week. Ask one staff member to keep the script visible in their room for the next seven days. You are not asking them to be calm; you are giving them a concrete step that makes regulation something they do, not something they are supposed to be.

SECTION 6 · PARTNER HIGHLIGHT

We Cannot Do This Work Alone

None of us builds a strong program in isolation. The leaders who go the furthest are the ones who surround themselves with partners, resources, and people who strengthen the work. Each week I will introduce a resource you can add to your own toolbox, so that over time you build a network you can lean on instead of carrying everything yourself.

This week's partner is MILLU, a company that helps after-school programs turn important life lessons into engaging, hands-on experiences children remember.

Many program leaders know what they want to teach: belonging, emotional resilience, empathy, confidence, and healthy relationships, but finding activities that busy staff can facilitate consistently is another challenge. MILLU was created to bridge that gap.

Instead of asking staff to build social-emotional learning lessons from scratch, MILLU provides immersive, play-based experiences that transform big life concepts into meaningful moments of connection, conversation, creativity, and play.

Designed specifically for after-school and expanded learning programs, MILLU includes:

20-40 minute ready-to-facilitate sessions with everything needed to lead each experience
A complete Facilitator Guide with step-by-step instructions, discussion prompts, and extension activities for your staff to gain confidence
All physical materials included, eliminating hours of preparation
Screen-free, hands-on activities grounded in play therapy, neuroplasticity, and experiential learning
English and Spanish editions to better serve diverse communities
Flexible implementation for after-school programs, summer learning, classrooms, and family engagement nights
Professional development workshops that equip staff to create emotionally safe spaces where children can thrive

MILLU's flagship Uniqueverse Kit helps children discover that their uniqueness is a strength while building self-awareness, confidence, communication skills, and healthy peer relationships. Because every activity is experiential, children do more than learn these concepts—they practice them.

Trusted by organizations including YMCA programs, Boys & Girls Clubs, KIPP SoCal, school districts, and community organizations, MILLU offers a practical way to make social-emotional learning engaging, consistent, and easy for staff to facilitate.

One resource to explore this week: If your team is looking for ready-to-use SEL experiences that require minimal preparation while building belonging, confidence, and trust, explore MILLU at millubox.com.

JOIN ME IN CELEBRATING MY MILESTONE

Beyond Supervision walks through all five links of the From Belief to Outcomes framework: Belief, Nervous System, Executive Function, Systems, and Outcomes. Buy the book here. If it has helped your practice, leave a review here.