05/15/2026
When we talk about getting curious about “what’s underneath behavior”, we’re rarely talking about one tidy bucket of “unmet needs.” Often, it’s a stack of systems that are all running at once, all the time, and all feeding into the same nervous system. And it’s often “invisible” to the child, in the sense that they aren’t able to accurately conceptualize and verbalize the experience.
If you think about this using the analogy of a volcano, what we can see is the “eruption”, that eruption is the end of or result of something, but what we don’t see is everything going on inside the magma chamber (inside of the child). An eruption is loud, visible, and it’s the thing adults react to. But by the time that eruption happens, pressure has been building inside that magma chamber for a long time.
Closest to the surface is the nervous system itself. Nervous systems are constantly scanning for safety. This is called neuroception, and it happens below conscious awareness. The body decides if a situation is safe, dangerous, or life-threatening before the thinking part of the brain ever weighs in. So by the time a kid is in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, their body has already made that call without them.
Below the nervous system is the sensory layer. Every kid is running their own uniquely coded sensory system that's processing input constantly: lights, sound, temperature, textures, smells, movement, and where their body is in space. Sensory needs are individual, dynamic, and shift with fatigue, stress, illness, and hormones.
The next layer is unmet needs, which includes physiological needs (sleep, hydration, hunger, blood sugar, movement, needing to use the washroom), relational needs (connection, comfort, social belonging, co-regulation, repair after rupture), and developmental needs (autonomy, predictability, competence, agency, downtime).
Children often cannot identify and name these needs in the moment, which means they rely on us to do the tracking and troubleshooting.
Below that layer is communication frustration. Every child communicates. Speech is one channel of communication among many, often not the most important one, and for a significant number of children, not their channel at all. Even for speaking children, expressive language becomes harder to access under stress, and the words for complex inner experiences may not be developed yet.
Many kids communicate clearly through behavior, movement, gesture, stimming, AAC, etc long before an "eruption" happens.
Communication frustration is what builds when a child's communication, whatever shape it takes, isn't being received and understood by the adults around them.
And stacked across all of these layers is accumulated load. Stress doesn't reset between events, it accumulates. This is easy to underestimate and easy to overlook, especially when adults are looking at the eruption and trying to figure out "what set them off." The answer to that questions is often "everything before this moment, plus this moment. "
And at the foundation, the bedrock of the whole mountain that everything else sits on: these are kids who are still developing.
The skills required to navigate daily life are vast, and they develop unevenly, on no fixed timeline. There is no synchronized clock between children, or even within the same child. Capacity to access skills also fluctuates day to day, hour to hour, based on sleep, stress, illness, and accumulated demand. And yesterday's success doesn't prove the skill is locked in. It only shows that yesterday's conditions allowed access to it.
And the deepest WHY:
Children develop self-regulation through co-regulation with safe adults. They do not learn to regulate by being left alone in their dysregulation, and they do not learn it by being punished for it.
They learn it by borrowing our regulated state, over and over and over and over (and over and over and over) until their own system builds the wiring to do it.
Every “eruption” met with calm presence is a deposit in that wiring. Every eruption met with punishment or withdrawal teaches the body that dysregulation equals disconnection, which makes the next eruption bigger because now the child is dysregulated AND scared of being alone in it.
So when we say "underneath the eruption is where the child needs us most," we mean it literally. The child's nervous system is asking for a co-regulator. That's the developmental task. That's how the wiring gets built. That's the WHY.
As the adults, we HAVE TO put this work in for the kids in our lives.
The “behavior” we see is the smallest yet loudest, most misleading part of the whole story. The real child, the real need, the real opportunity, all of it is underneath, inside the magma chamber.
And the adults who learn to look there are the ones who truly help kids grow the capacity they're being asked to demonstrate.
