Ever feel like your classroom tips into chaos the moment the room gets loud, and you’re not sure whether it started with the children or with you?

Prerna Richards has spent more than 40 years in early childhood education. She is the CEO and Founder of Together We Grow, a keynote speaker, and a behaviour coach whose work is grounded in brain science and decades of hands-on experience in real classrooms. We sat down with her to talk about challenging behaviour, burnout, and the simple shifts that help educators and children regulate together.

Let’s start with the question everyone tiptoes around. Is it dysregulated staff who trigger children, or dysregulated children who trigger staff?

Honestly, it can go either way. It’s a chicken and egg story, and that’s the truth. Burnout is real. Stress is real. There’s science behind this. We know cortisol levels rise, and when they do, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a child or a grown up. If you have a brain, that cortisol release is going to dysregulate you.

So you get a classroom full of children whose needs aren’t met, who flip their lids and act out, and a grown up who already has her own stress in her brain. It’s like a match meeting a firecracker. They explode together. I don’t think it’s fair to say which is impacting which. The reality is it’s human brains impacting other human brains.

The only way to change that is for somebody to reset the room. Children haven’t learned that skill yet. And let’s be honest, many grown ups haven’t learned it either.

You mentioned burnout. You’ve said there are four different types. Can you walk us through them?

Yes, and it really matters to identify which one is showing up for you, because burnout doesn’t just go away unless you change something.

The first is physical burnout. It’s exhaustion, headaches, trouble sleeping, feeling drained before the day even begins. You wake up already looking at a long to do list with no idea where to start.

The second is emotional burnout. You get irritable, you go numb. The opposite of empathy is apathy. A teacher hears a child crying and just tunes out. Compassion fatigue is huge in education. There’s actually research on this. It’s a form of secondary trauma, and it leaves you saying, I just can’t give any more from an empty cup.

The third is cognitive burnout. You can’t prioritise anymore because you’re jumping from frying pan to fire. You spend five hours on something and realise it was never the priority. That’s fatigue talking.

And the fourth is purpose burnout. You start asking, why am I even in this field? I’m not making a difference. It shows up as no longer finding joy in your work.

That’s a sobering picture. How would you describe the state of the sector right now?

I feel like early childhood is in the emergency room. As a behaviour coach, I get called in to diagnose the problem. Is it the teacher? The system? The classroom? The parents? And meanwhile everyone is doing triage in the hallway, checking vitals, slapping on a bandage.

The trouble is we’re doing patch up work, but we’re not getting down to the issue underneath the issue. Symptoms don’t just show up. They’re telling us something.

Let’s make this concrete. You once walked into a classroom with a little boy the team had nearly given up on. Tell us about him.

This was a three year old classroom in a program that had brought me in because their behaviours were extreme. There were three teachers in the room, and one little boy, I’ll call him Josiah, who was running up and down, climbing the bookshelf, throwing things, screaming and kicking. He’d already been expelled from two other schools. He had a lot of change going on at home too.

Here’s what stopped me. I sat in that room for an hour, and not one teacher, not one other child, acknowledged him. The only reason I even learned his name was because another child mentioned it. They told me they’d tried everything, that he hit and bit and spat, so now they just gave him space because engaging with him felt unsafe.

So I asked them to pause and picture school from Josiah’s perspective. He’s coming in every single day, doing everything in his power to get your attention, and his experience is that he’s invisible. Can you imagine being an invisible human being?

What did you tell them to do?

I asked them if they’d heard the phrase, attention seeking behaviour is a relationship seeking need. It’s a need. We are wired to connect. It’s a biological need, not a reward we get when we behave.

The teachers got emotional. They actually started crying, which was exactly the right response, because now we could do something with it. So I asked, without any judgment, whether one of them felt even a small bond with him. One teacher raised her hand. I said, then you’re the person.

The framework I use for all of this is connect before you correct. I told her, for just one week, find time to play with him. Don’t take over the play, don’t redirect, don’t look for compliance. Just join him. Pour love into him. Little five minute connects during circle, transition, centre time, lunch, nap.

And did it work?

A week later the director sent me a photo of that teacher and Josiah sitting on the floor together, both of them smiling. I cried when I saw it.

It was so basic and so human. It wasn’t another checklist. It wasn’t another to do list. It was one human connecting with another human. That child’s relationship is now going to start, because the teacher found something that works, and she’ll lean into it.

A lot of educators tell us the hardest part of the day is the transition after lunch. Why does it fall apart?

The wait period. That’s what gets the kids restless. I watched a classroom recently with three teachers, fully staffed, and after lunch it was complete chaos. Thirty five minutes where the kids were running the show and they were the sheriffs in town.

When I asked who was responsible for what, they looked at each other blankly. One teacher was stuck at the bathroom because every child wanted to play with her. Another sat down with one child in the block corner and basically became a submarine, only dealing with that one. A third just wiped tables and tuned everyone out. Nobody became the leader.

You don’t need a submarine. You need a periscope. You need to scan the room. And you need a plan, because if you don’t have a plan, the children will come up with one, and you’re not going to like their plan.

How do you help a team untangle that?

I get them to name the task. What actually needs to happen after lunch? Brushing teeth, nappies, wiping tables, setting out cots, turning off the lights. Whose job is each one? When nobody is assigned, it becomes everybody’s job, which means it’s nobody’s job.

Then I ask them to diagnose what’s really going on. Is it skill, will, awareness, or responsibility? Do you not know how to do it? Do you not want to? Are you not even aware you’re doing it? Or is it simply that no one’s clear whose task it is? In that classroom, it was responsibility. They just needed clarity, and once they had it, they could tag team and knock it out.

This connects to safety too, doesn’t it?

Without a doubt. The highest time for incidents, if I had to guess, is that in between transition time. The brain isn’t engaged, the sensory overload hits, and that’s when things go wrong. When children are engaged, they’re not getting into mischief. It’s the wait period that gets you into trouble.

You also talk about doing an audit of the environment. What does that involve?

So much challenging behaviour comes from overstimulation. I coach teams to do a sensory audit. Get down to the child’s knee level and look at what they’re seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. A room that’s chock a block with stuff on every wall is overstimulating to a little human.

We have a lot of children with nervous systems that are simply overwhelmed, and the world isn’t slowing down on its own. So I encourage teachers to soften the space. Swap the harsh ceiling tube lights for lamps or fairy lights. Those overhead lights drain the energy out of you. Small changes make a real difference.

Coaching others starts with coaching yourself. Tell us about a moment that tested you.

I was running a three hour session in California for a group of regional directors, and one woman kept interrupting me. Every few minutes it was, but what do I do with the child who won’t sit down? We hadn’t even finished talking about the brain yet. I was on a tight schedule, racing to the airport afterwards, and I could feel myself getting frustrated.

So I used a technique I teach, called SBA. Stop, breathe, and anchor yourself. As she talked, I put my hand on my belly and started breathing. I wiggled my toes. I kept telling myself, you’ve got this. I had to manage my own face before I could manage the moment.

And when I calmed down, I saw it clearly. She wasn’t trying to give me a hard time. She was having a hard time. She was reliving every difficult moment from her year. She finally said it out loud. The summer was coming, the same children were coming back, and she was terrified.

How did you turn it around for her?

I met her where she was. I said, this feels really hard for you, and I can tell last year was hard. She softened immediately, because she felt seen and heard. She wasn’t the crazy lady interrupting. She wasn’t getting the evil eye from the room.

Then I asked her to forget the brain science for a second and tell me her single biggest trigger. I expected something huge. She said, the whining. The staff whine, the children whine, and she just couldn’t take it anymore.

So I gave her one thing. The next time someone whines at you, stay calm and say, can you match my voice? I don’t understand whining. That’s it. She said, that’s too simple. I told her it could change her program and her life. And I watched the weight come off her. My stress left too, because that was exactly what she needed.

You’ve said the resistant teacher is one of the biggest challenges leaders bring you. What shifted your thinking on that?

The teacher who won’t follow through, who’s been given every idea and still doesn’t implement, that came up over and over. And it triggered me, if I’m honest. I’d think, I’ve given you so much and you’re still not doing it.

So I had to coach myself first, because you can’t coach anyone else until you can coach yourself. And I had to change my mindset. Resistance is not shutdown. Resistance is information. Once I saw it that way, I could ask what was really underneath it. Usually it was time, consistency, and the feeling that nothing was landing.

That’s where micro coaching came from. Not twenty strategies. One reflective question, or one tiny change. Greet every child by name this week. That’s all. I can’t wait to see what shifts just from using their name. It’s small enough that an overwhelmed brain can actually do it.

If there’s one idea you’d want every leader to take away, what is it?

We’ve forgotten how to be. We’re called human beings, but we’ve become human doings. Nobody’s coming to save us, and that’s actually the point, because we can choose how we show up.

Connect before you correct isn’t just for the children. It’s how we slow down and be, instead of endlessly do. And we don’t do it alone. The one thread that ran through every coaching session was the relief of seeing others struggle with the same things and realising you’re not the only one. We really are better together.

Prerna Richards is the CEO and Founder of Together We Grow, a keynote speaker, and a behaviour coach passionate about early childhood education. You can learn more about her work, free resources, and coaching at togetherwegrow.online.