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Nurturing relationships with safe and dependable adults, like early childhood educators, can make a profound difference for kids who’ve experienced early adversity. Early childhood expert Kai-leé Berke knows this firsthand and she’s spent her career working to improve resources for early childhood educators. Through training and awareness, these educators can help prevent the damaging impacts of trauma, and instill skills like how to love, how to trust, and how to learn.

This episode is made possible with support from Lillio, whose mission is to elevate early childhood programs with innovative design, quality content, and professional growth opportunities, delivering joyful learning experiences for all children. To learn more, visit lillio.com.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Gloria Riviera, Kai-leé Berke

Gloria Riviera  01:13

Hello and welcome to Good Things. I’m your host, Gloria Riviera when it comes to the earliest years of a child’s life, safe and nurturing relationships with adults are crucial for healthy development for children who have experienced trauma, it can act as a buffer from the negative impacts of that trauma. Children need and deserve to have those relationships in their lives, but not enough. Child Care educators are trained or have the resources to support kids with trauma. Kai-leé Berke wants to change that. Kai-leé is an early childhood expert, author and CEO of the child care management company lilio. She also has her own story of experiencing trauma as a young girl, and says the nurturing relationships she had with adults saved her life. Throughout her career, Kai-leé has worked tirelessly to improve resources for early childhood educators, because they have the power to truly change lives. Kai-leé, welcome to Good Things.

 

Kai-leé Berke  02:22

Thank you for having me.

 

Gloria Riviera  02:23

Thank you again for taking the time to speak to us. And we’re going to talk about a lot. We’re going to talk about your career. We’re going to talk about the importance of relationships, that bond between a child and a reliable adult in the early years of that child’s life, and why educators really need to be supported, which is the work that you do. But before we get to that, I would love to start at the beginning. You’ve spoken about this publicly. Tell me about your early childhood, the trauma you experienced, and what the world around you looked like.

 

Kai-leé Berke  03:00

Yeah, that’s such a lovely way to frame it. Thank you for inviting me to share. As a child, I always dreamed about being a teacher, and I saved my money I was I was about six years old, wanted to buy a chalkboard at the local toy store that I had my eye on, and this was back in the day when if you got $5 and a birthday card from your grandma, you felt like a lottery winner, so I saved, I saved my birthday money, and I bought that chalkboard and spent many hours standing in front of it, pretending to be a teacher and and so unpacking that dream of being a teacher is pretty easy. My brother, who was three years older than me. We began our lives in a home with an abusive, alcoholic father. My mother left him right around my first birthday, but by my sixth birthday, she was in the hospital beginning cancer treatment, and she died when I was nine. So for me, my early childhood teachers were my only constant. I had this really long hair, longer even than it is. Now our family is actually part Hawaiian, and my daughter calls it my Moana hair, period. But it was so long that my little arms couldn’t quite brush the middle. I could do the top and the bottom, and so I get these really gnarly knots right in the middle. My teachers would brush my hair for me, and we’d sit together before the school day started and after the day ended, and I’d go and sit with one of these teachers, and she’d work on the latest knot, and while she brushed, we talked. These women made me feel loved and nurtured and supported. So to me, it’s no wonder that when I wasn’t with one of those women, I was standing in front of my little chalkboard pretending to be those women. It made me feel really safe. My brother didn’t have that. He didn’t have that support, right? He was a little older, so relationships with teachers were a little bit different, and he went through. Those years without that warm, nurturing embrace of the consistent support of adult relationships that I was getting from my teachers, we came out on the other side of my mother’s death, completely different people when we were little. Of course, we were always different, but we were more alike than not, and after her death, we would go on to take completely opposite paths in life. I did really well in school. I liked it. I worked my way through college and graduate school. I became a teacher and a counselor and a school administrator and a college instructor and an author, and eventually a CEO, and he did poorly through school, you know, many hours in the guidance counselor’s office for what they called at the time, like dramatic behaviors. Right back then, no one was talking about mental health that just wasn’t part of our vernacular. After graduating from high school, he struggled to keep a job. He battled with his health. He became a drug addict. He was a father who took his children in and out of homelessness and neglected and hurt them in ways that is still heartbreaking to think about. Even though they’re they’re safe and happy. Now, a few years ago, my brother died of a drug overdose. So you know, as I grew up and I could reflect on our childhood with some adult perspective. And certainly, you know, as I studied human development and learned about the impact of early adversity. And did you know work with trauma, impacted children and families and supported their teachers. The key differentiator in our experiences was that I had these amazing women, these incredible early education teachers who, by my estimation, I believe, quite literally saved me.

 

Gloria Riviera  06:59

I’m listening to all of this. And first of all, thank you for sharing that in the detail that you just did, I’m thinking about you know that we have many parallels. I also have an older brother. We also had very different experiences as young children. He also died. He was an alcoholic and abused drugs as well. And I could sort of sense that, listen, I don’t want to make this about us, but I think it’s valuable for the listener to ascertain what we’re talking about here, what you were provided with, which he was not, which can be extrapolated and applied to my own situation. The phrase a sense of self is coming to me that with those reliable teachers, day in and day out, spending time with you, is it fair to say that you emerged with a stronger sense of self than your older brother did?

 

Kai-leé Berke  07:58

Absolutely, that’s so spot on. And I think through that sense of self, had a level of safety in that. And he was always searching, right? He was always searching to find himself, to find a place where he could feel safe inside of himself. You know, this isn’t just we talk about safety a lot, and I think people think about physical safety, but really what we’re talking about and that sense of self is emotional safety.

 

Gloria Riviera  08:29

Yeah, that sense that I’m okay here and I’m supported, I mean, it’s very basic, and it breaks my heart that both of our older brothers did not have that and turned to alcohol and drugs to escape the lack in their life. It’s, it’s something that you’ve devoted your life to helping early educators, to help them, help the kids, right? Yes, so I want to get under the hood a bit more into the idea of sense of self and feeling safe. What kind of tools do you believe those reliable relationships with early educators gave you?

 

Kai-leé Berke  09:11

Yes. I mean, I think first and foremost, the ability to regulate right when we think about young children, a very key part of early development, a crucial part, is the ability to regulate our emotions and behaviors. And I know a lot of adults that are still working on self regulation, but a big piece of that is being able to regulate our stress response, right? So children who are exposed to early adversity and trauma, you end up with a dysregulated stress response, and so when that happens, right? We’ve got all these processes happening in our bodies. When we’re under stress, our heart beats faster, our adrenaline rises, cortisol rises, right? All this stuff is happening. In us, our body is activating and shutting down certain parts of the brain, right because your prefrontal cortex shuts down when you’re under stress, and so for young children, that means that some of our brain pathways are being strengthened and some are being weakened. So if we think about the tremendous impact that has on young children, whose brains are still developing when the architecture of their brains is being built. The neural pathways telling children to be on high alert, to be hyper vigilant, to be ready to fight or ready to run or ready to shut down and retreat and protect themselves, those neural pathways are being strengthened, and the ones related to problem solving and emotional regulation and impulse control, those are being weakened. And what a warm, nurturing, trusting relationship with an adult does is it helps to buffer against that impact. It allows children to be able to go back into self regulation, to get back into their prefrontal cortex faster when a child knows they are safe with an adult. And I, you know, looking back at those relationships with a very clinical lens, right? That’s, that’s what I would say is really what impacted my actual brain and body development that shape the trajectory. Now I also have lots of warm, nurturing, wonderful memories, and that helps me to seek out relationships like that in my life, right? There are all these trickle down impacts that a teacher’s relationship with a child, just like a parent, child relationship, has the power to dramatically influence all of the things, how to love, how to trust, how to enjoy a book, right? Like everything that a parent child relationship has the power to impact a relationship with a teacher can also provide that same nurturing, buffering impact.

 

Gloria Riviera  12:00

We’re going to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more on Good Things.

 

12:15

To hear you speak about this in a clinical sense, neural pathways. That’s a really okay. I’m gonna really nerd out here. That’s a very exciting word to hear, because we are teaching, well we, the teachers that we entrust with our children, are teaching them how to become good humans, and healthy neural pathways are critical to that. So let’s get into that, because I want to hear about your work with noni for teachers. Am I right to describe it as a game changer?

 

Kai-leé Berke  14:35

Yes, so after leaving the classroom and school administrator work. I went to a company called Teaching Strategies, which works with early education programs, providing curriculum and assessment materials. And I’d spent many years there, a decade and a half there, working on resources for teachers. And when I left the CEO seat to teaching strategies, a. A colleague of mine came with me, and we had been in that last year there really looking at all of the research that was coming out about adverse childhood experiences and the impact of trauma, and we were doing a deep dive into that right as the pandemic started, and so we had just started talking to and partnering with an organization called the Laurie Center, which is the leading research organization in how to work with trauma impacted children and families. It’s an amazing group of of educators and psychiatrists and psychologists and doctors who do intensive work and also have a preschool program to work with children whose trauma has essentially excluded them from a public preschool program or a head start.

 

Gloria Riviera  15:54

So let me just stop you right there. So what are those kinds of traumas that they’re excluded from our public school system. What takes a child out of that pool for for admission?

 

Kai-leé Berke  16:08

Yeah, so it’s what we were just talking about. So their experiences in their life, right, have been so impactful on how their brains have developed, that they are living in a hyper vigilant stress response state. And so we see that in preschool programs, in children who are disruptive, children who seemingly, and I’m going to put air quotes around this, provoke chaos, the children who are flipping over tables and fighting teachers, or they’re just shut down in the corner of a room, completely dorsal, right? They’re frozen in a corner, not taking care of their biological needs. So these are four year olds who need to be changed a lot because they’re not using the bathroom and not taking care of themselves. So it’s when their behaviors overwhelm the classroom.

 

Gloria Riviera  17:06

It’s so helpful to hear you really explain it. And one of my questions was, you know, not every teacher will know the specific trauma. What are the signs they can recognize?

 

Kai-leé Berke  17:17

Yes, there are over 30 different categories of what I refer to as behaviors that challenge teachers, as opposed to saying challenging behaviors, they’re just behaviors that challenge us, that they’re different for each person. But when you look at those behaviors, how can you look at it through the lens of, oh, this is just a child who’s dysregulated. This is a child who’s fearful. How can I help this child feel safe? And that’s going to be different for every child, which is what makes it challenging. So what noni does is it helps to coach teachers through the process of identifying that and then immediately serves up guidance about what to do. So you know, if you have a child who understanding their desire for proximity or distance, right? There are some children who when they’re dysregulated, you wrap your arms around them and you can feel their body relax, and you can do that physical co regulation with them. And there are other children who need space, and any kind of closeness is a threat, because in their life, closeness from a grown up is scary, and they need to protect themselves from that. So as soon as teachers get this insight, you see the behavior in this totally different light.

 

Gloria Riviera  18:31

Yeah, as CEO of Lilio, what is lilio doing specifically to support teachers?

 

Kai-leé Berke  18:40

One of the beautiful things about lilio, which you know now I’ve done everything from being an infant, toddler caregiver with three babies to being the CEO now of a few different businesses serving the industry and our core focus at Lilia. Like what we believe in in our hearts is that early childhood educators have the power to change children’s lives and ultimately, the world. And the focus for us is really on private child care. And private child care is everything from, you know, family child care or a friend, an auntie, a grandma taking care of your child all the way up to the kindercares, you know, very large Child Care chains, and at Lilia, we’re focused on serving that child care market, which, out of the entirety of the Early Childhood space, is the most fragmented and needs the most funding. It’s where most of the children are being cared for. That’s where most of our children are. We have a lot of focus and energy and attention on public pre K, and I think that that’s wonderful, and I think that that’s great. And I love Head Start and Early Head Start. And I spent many years in military childcare programs, but most of our children are in childcare, and so being able to create. Create resources specifically for those educators and caregivers. I like being able to focus on their needs.

 

Gloria Riviera  20:10

Here we are with these resources available to teachers. How do you deliver it? How do you put it in front of the teachers and say, this will help you, help them.

 

Kai-leé Berke  20:22

Yeah, and I do believe that’s the responsibility of companies and organizations serving this field. I’ve been in the position of being alone in a classroom with a group of children, and the time and energy you have to seek out those resources is very limited. And so to me, I think it is the moral and ethical obligation of any business serving this industry to be addressing the actual problems that classroom teachers and caregivers are facing provide resources to those folks so that they can better serve the children and families they work with and make their lives easier.

 

Gloria Riviera  21:07

Right? And I just want to extrapolate from that, because it makes me think of from here, good things will follow, literacy, better high school graduation rates, staying out of you know, incarceration, everything, there’s a long list. But if we fix it early, and we fix it by providing young children who have had adverse childhood experiences, if we can get in there like you experienced, you know, I still, I think of you for whatever reason, sitting in a chair looking outside with your hair being brushed. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but that’s the image. Totally Accurate. It is. Wow, wow. But I think about providing that you know from there, good things will follow. So yes, you know, we know that the conversation around early childhood education is often about availability and spaces and are there enough programs? Is it affordable? All important things. But from reading about you and your work, I take that we also need to be focused on the kind of care that’s being offered and those quality interactions that can change the trajectory of a young child who’s been exposed to trauma, it can change their life. Can you talk about that connection in your work and how you see those relationships affecting outcomes for students?

 

Kai-leé Berke  22:37

Yes, absolutely. There’s a wide body of research that shows that if you take a child from what we would consider to be a challenging home environment. So let’s look at very low socioeconomic levels, you know, low availability of adult support. If you go into that home and you remove that child from their mama, it’s usually the moms. You remove the child from that home, and you put them in low quality childcare. Their outcomes are even worse than if you just left them at home. But the point is, is that if you want to be the buffer. The buffer only happens if it’s a warm, nurturing, supportive, trusting relationship, and that is all quality. The center of quality is the relationship between the child and the adult.

 

Gloria Riviera  23:39

Okay, sit tight, everyone. We’re going to take one more quick break, and we’ll be right back with more Good Things.

 

Gloria Riviera  25:34

Because you’ve had so many years inside the classroom. Is there a child that you’ve seen go from, you know, age three, four to much older that’s thrived, and that, you know, it was because of this warm relationship that they had.

 

Kai-leé Berke  25:52

Yes, absolutely, I can think of so many children, but my, my near and dear to my heart. Story is about a little boy named Casey. So Casey came into my pre K classroom with what my colleagues at the preschool called was a rap sheet, right? He’d been in another military child program was transitioning into my classroom, and so you get a file on children. It talked about aggressive behaviors and hitting the teachers and screaming swear words and turning over furniture, like all of these things.

 

Gloria Riviera  26:31

And this is pre K. Let’s just remind everybody pre k4, years four years old.

 

Kai-leé Berke  26:36

Four years old, and the teacher had actually written a note that said she struggled to find something that she liked about Casey. And so.

 

Gloria Riviera  26:46

That breaks my heart.

 

Kai-leé Berke  26:47

I know four years old, and so just hearing that, you can see the trajectory of Casey’s life like you can see it clear as day. So when Casey came into my classroom, he exhibited all of those behaviors, I really tried to hone in on my observations of him, to find something I liked, to find a connection point with him. Like, what was this child good at? What did he like? You know? What was he naturally interested in? And so there were a few glimmers that I saw in the first couple of weeks. One was he had been systematically asked to leave the areas of the classroom because he’d knocked over the refrigerator and dramatic play and throwing blocks in the black area. And so I took him to come sit with me at the art table, and I pulled this model airplane over, and I said, Casey, let’s draw this together. And he sat there for a good 15 minutes, which, you know, for a four year old is like, you have to look at time, like dog years. Like, that’s a really long, long time. And so I was like, Oh, here’s something that we can really tune into. So when I had my first conference with Casey’s mom, I was able to talk to her about some of those glimmers, some of those, those sweet things that I had seen happen. And started the conversation that way, rather than with a litany of, here’s all the bad things that your son has done. And she she cried, Oh my gosh. And I don’t think anybody had ever talked to her this way about her child. And so then that allowed her to open up to me, and she shared that dad had left. It had been a really contentious divorce. She admitted to lots of screaming in the house, and Casey was a super sweet, lovely, wonderful little two year old. And when all that happened, he became a different person, right? So I now I had all this background information on Casey, and so it was just slowly over time, building that trusting relationship, paying attention to the things that he liked and that he was good at. You know, he found his place in our classroom as the child who was an excellent observational draw, he found pride in that he found a place in our classroom community. Now, I remember one time that he was having a particularly challenging day, and he would get very physically out of control, like I think about all of that adrenaline pumping through his tiny little body, and I would hold him and actually physically restraining Casey is what would help him to calm and he had been screaming, I hate you. Miss Kai-lee. I hate you. I hate you. And finally, when he calmed down and he snuggled into me, he said, I really love you.

 

Gloria Riviera  29:49

Oh my god.

 

Kai-leé Berke  29:51

And it just.

 

Gloria Riviera  29:52

I know.

 

Kai-leé Berke  29:53

It took months. This was not just not like him. Two and a half weeks, Casey was. The, you know, the angel child, but by goodness, by the end of the year, he was just a member of the classroom community, and he had friends, and he had pro social behaviors, and it even impacted his relationship with his mom and brother at home, because he was able to be more regulated there, because he was learning how to regulate. And just it really is the power of that relationship, and that’s all. That’s all it is.

 

Gloria Riviera  30:28

I mean, just the idea that all that adrenaline through a four year old’s body, mean, what are they going to do with it? It has to come out somewhere. So to teach that child how to allow it its own breathing room. That’s a really beautiful thing. What do you want people to take away from this conversation? I’m taking away this, this new perspective on the work that we need to do to support our teachers. You know, someone needs a lot of support and resources, from self care to all the work that it takes to help these kids.

 

Kai-leé Berke  31:05

Yeah, we do ask a lot of these educators, and it is a mighty task they have that particularly in those first five years, the impact that they have to shape a child’s future is extraordinary. It is a gift. It is wonderful, amazing work, and it is incredibly hard. I love that that you just mentioned, self care, so being in support of teachers so that they can show up for these children. Yes, you know, 100% to that, yeah.

 

Gloria Riviera  31:41

And so, what does self care look like? What are your suggestions for teachers? How do teachers take care of themselves?

 

Kai-leé Berke  31:47

Yeah, there’s a lot there that you have the the ongoing self care practice, whatever that is that you do your morning routine, whatever that you have a practice to start your day in a more level state. It can be very easy to start our days a little frenetic, and if frenetic comes into the classroom, oh boy, do the children feel that. So having a practice to try to start your day on a scale of one to 10, instead of starting the day at a seven, maybe you’re starting at a two. So whether that’s through breathing or movement somatic exercises, we have lots of those kinds of practices. And then we also have practices that help teachers to identify when they are getting dysregulated in the moment of teaching, and to come back into what you know, we’d say is our thinking brains. Oh my gosh. That sounds so hard.

 

Gloria Riviera  32:45

That sounds so hard to me to be able to self diagnose in the moment. I mean, I’ve been working on that for more than 20 years in therapy. Like, how do you do that? How does a teacher do that?

 

Kai-leé Berke  32:57

Yeah, we practice cueing into our body signals. So you can actually activate your stress response. If you think about something that’s really stressing you out and dwell on it, you can feel the tightness in your chest. You can feel your temperature start to rise. So by practicing outside of the moment, you learn how to have self awareness in the moment. You’re like, oh, wait, I’m feeling that tightness in my chest. And you have to believe that when that happens, that means you can’t think clearly. So it means you have to do something to be able to come back into, what I say is come back into our bodies, right? Yeah. So we do things like feel the ground. So you just feel the ground beneath your feet, and it just, it takes five seconds, and you can come back into your brain.

 

Gloria Riviera  33:47

Yeah, I sometimes with my kids, I say, Okay, I’m just gonna go in the kitchen and take a few deep breaths. I’ll be right back with you, because I can feel that I’m about to be like, you know I just need to.

 

Kai-leé Berke  34:00

It’s an awesome mom move that is so great.

 

Gloria Riviera  34:03

My kids and I practice breathing. And you know, I’m like, take a breath, but I just, you’ve given me a new appreciation for the teachers that are with my kids every day, and I just want to thank you for the work that you have done to to to change what is available to teachers so that they can positively effect change in our youngest learners. So thank you, Kai-leé.

 

Kai-leé Berke  34:30

thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciate it.

 

Gloria Riviera  34:42

Thank you for listening to Good Things. I’m your host, Gloria Riviera, this episode is made possible with support from Lilio, whose mission is to elevate early childhood programs with innovative design, quality content and professional growth opportunities, delivering joyful learning experiences for all children.

 

CREDITS  35:03

This episode is produced by Lisa Phu. Our supervising producer is Muna Danish, mixing and Sound Design by Noah Smith. Steve Nelson is our SVP of weekly content. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks so much for listening.  Follow Good Things wherever you get your podcasts and listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.