 Could something as simple as a hoodie be a helpful intervention or reasonable adjustment for a child who is struggling? That's the topic of today's episode of Pukipondas, so let's dive straight in. Okay, so first of all, I just want to give credit to Paul Cabb, who I saw speak recently, who was the first person I've heard frame the hoodie as a potential reasonable adjustment. I've spoken about hoodies a lot and for a long time, but I've never thought just to say why not see them as an adjustment we could make? So thank you to Paul for triggering that thinking and for the great work you're doing around autism in girls in particular. So we're thinking today about the hoodie. So why might we see this as a positive thing? Who's using them? How are they using them? How do we make it work? Right, first of all, so thinking about who might we see wearing a hoodie if left to their own devices and not told they've got a West school uniform, yadda yadda yadda, who's going to be wearing a hoodie with the hood up. So the groups I'm really interested in, and I see this in a lot, our children with sensory differences who might find the environment overwhelming, will often find that they will be wearing hoodie, hood up, and that seems to be comfortable for them. And the other group where we'll often see hoods on, hoods up are our children who are struggling with anxiety. And of course, there is actually quite a lot of overlap between those two groups. So you might have some kids who are both overwhelmed by the sensory environment and who are experiencing anxiety. So first of all, I'm just going to help you understand why these kids might have their hood up and how that is actually helping them, and why we should have a bit of respect for the fact that they found a thing, an adjustment that works for them. And maybe then we can think a little bit about how it might feel for them when we tell them, got to take your hoodie off, got to take your hood down. Okay, so step into their shoes a little bit. So first of all, for our children who have sensory differences and for whom the physical world, the environment in which they're in might feel quite overwhelming in terms of the auditory input and the visual input and so on. When we put our hood up in that circumstance, actually it's a little bit like blinkers on a horse. It kind of cuts out a lot of that visual input. It'll make the world a little bit darker, a little bit grayer because we kind of pulled that hood around. And it will dampen quite a lot of the auditory input as well. We've got the hood up over our ears. So right away that simple, simple step, that hood's gone up. We've actually blocked out quite a lot of that sensory overwhelm. In addition to that, we'll often find that many of these kids will have a favorite hoodie that they've worn a thousand times. It's been washed a million times and it's really, really soft. It probably smells familiar, smells like home, it can kind of help them to anchor and to reduce some of the anxiety of the different input around them because they can smell and feel something that's familiar so that can help to kind of negate the challenges of this new or different environment that they are in. Often as well, it'll be quite tactile. I'm feeling this one. This is a hoodie I inherited from one of my daughters and she'd already worn it a million times. So if you're listening, I'm currently kind of hugging my hoodie. She'd worn it a million times. I've gone on to wear it a million more. It's super, super comfortable. And actually when I'm going out paragliding, I often wear this because I love to paraglide. It's really, really good fun. But when you're just thinking about doing new things, well, it can provoke a little bit of healthy anxiety. Good to be a little bit anxious about dangling in the air from a piece of fabric essentially, but having kind of familiar, comfortable clothing just feels good. It's a nice little anchor, little transitional object really. So for our children and adults who experience kind of sensory overwhelm, those are the reasons, some of the reasons why the hoodie might feel good, might feel familiar, might help to cut out some of that environmental challenge essentially. And then for children who are experiencing anxiety, the hoodie can offer what we refer to as containment. So actually this is about when the world feels kind of scary and big and you've got lots of anxieties about all the other things that are happening and that might be literal anxieties of the environment around you or it might be sort of metaphorical that your thoughts feel big and there's lots and lots going on. Then what we will often try to do is to make our world feel smaller. And we see this in a really physical sense with people sometimes where their world does get smaller and smaller and perhaps they get to the point where they don't feel comfortable leaving their home or don't get comfortable leaving their room as the world sort of shrinks. And what the hoodie does is it offers that same sort of sense of containment, makes the world smaller. So rather than having to manage all of this great big wide world around me with all the scariness and anxiety provoking triggers in it, I'm just managing this little world inside my hood and that makes it feel just a little bit more manageable. I can't manage the whole world but I can manage this little world that I have created inside my hood. So our anxious kids, our children with sensory differences including those who are autistic or ADHD may find the hood to be a really helpful intervention. And many of them will naturally have kind of developed this as a coping strategy that they might use in their day to day life. And we see this around us all the time and it's in popular media as well. So in the Netflix series atypical, for example, the lead character will put his hood up and use his hood and when he's feeling particularly challenged he will kind of draw the strings in and you see that this is his favorite thing and it makes everything feel a little bit more manageable for him. And that's a really kind of real representation of something that we see all the time. So this kind of adaptation making the world feel a little bit better for us. It's one of the things that our children may have come to for themselves without anyone ever suggesting it. Although now that you understand how a hood might be helpful you might actually proactively suggest this to some children too, but actually it's an adaptation they may have made themselves. And just as a little aside here, lots of kids make loads of amazing little adaptations all the time and sometimes it can be really helpful just to step back and watch and observe what are they doing that helps them, what are the coping strategies that they have developed through sort of problem solving, trial and error, managing over time, trying really, really hard to cope and which of those might work within our environment. So if you're listening to this as someone who works in a school, we're going to be looking them for adaptations that can be used in a classroom with 30 other kids without causing disruption or difficulty for the rest of the class. I'd argue that hood fits in there. I don't think it's going to cause any disruption to anyone else. And then if you are a parent or carer listening at home then just be thinking about you know these adaptations that you've noticed in your child and can you encourage them to use those things more. Sometimes they won't realize that they're doing it and that it helps them and at times of calm you might talk to them about the fact that I noticed when you felt very anxious when we went out to the library the other day that you put your hood up. Does that make you feel a bit safer? Is that something maybe I should prompt you to do in the future? And then thinking next so we've noticed about the hood we understand a little bit about why it might actually feel really, really helpful and calming and containing for some of our children. Then thinking about well can we be as outrageously daring as to consider the hood as a potential reasonable adjustment. Now why I loved Paul Cabb's talk and him thinking about the hood and the hoodie and being allowed to wear it as a reasonable adjustment was because suddenly this gave us something that we can kind of write into our plans and we can share with other people and say this is an adaptation we are making for this child to enable them to manage day to day with their condition within our environment which is not perfectly tailored to them. So let's do it in the same way that we might allow a child to use coloured overlays or a fidget toy perhaps we're going to allow the hood as well. Some of you will find this idea outrageous because we do not allow hoodies in our school so what might this look like? Okay there are different ways it might be that a child has a particular favourite hoodie and we might think about how we can adapt our uniform to fit around that for example could this child be allowed to wear the hoodie underneath an oversized blazer for example could it be that they are encouraged to get a very similar hoodie to a favourite one ask a parent or carer or themselves at home to wash it plenty of time so it gets more comfortable but that this hoodie is perhaps one that fits in with the school uniform maybe it's the right colour maybe we're going to put the school logo on it so it kind of blends more with the uniform if this really matters to us or we could take the absolutely outrageous step and just allow this child to wear an item of clothing from home that doesn't match our uniform but enables them to engage with and enjoy the learning. Now I know this feels like a massive and radical step but imagine if that child in your class who is so anxious that they can't interact or maybe they're not even making it into your class was actually able to feel comfortable enough to actually engage with things or that child who may be engaged as well at the beginning of the lesson but becomes more and more overwhelmed throughout was able to continue to focus and enjoy and thrive in your lesson it could be something as simple as a hood that might be making that difference and so perhaps just perhaps it's worth a try take it away is an idea and have a little think about it and whether there are some children for whom this might make a difference we might also think particularly about allowing our children to wear their hoodies at times when they might find things more challenging when the environment changes so break times lunch times perhaps during bigger loud and noisier lessons like things like music a hoodie could make a particular difference then drama perhaps and things like pe and sport as well so just thinking about when that hood might make the most difference and when it might be okay for us to begin to introduce it if we can't allow it all of the time now I think if we're going to do it we need to talk to the student about why we're doing it why we're allowing it and understanding with them what the hoodie brings and also just helping them to understand that in terms of societal norms and expectations that whilst we're making the adjustment of the hood other people other places when they're outside of our safe environment might not be quite so forgiving and the hoodie for some reason has got a really bad reputation and so we just want to help them to explore that and get curious about that and explore when it might be time for them to take the hood down and that some people might think they're not paying attention and so on and so forth the other thing about wearing a hood in this way is it can be a really simple visual communication between you and the child about how they're actually doing right now so this is something that we practice at home so my children are now home educated and one of my daughters in particular spent the first few weeks of home education in an hoodie so those big kind of hoodies they have a hood and they're kind of all over kind of massive piece of clothing she felt very comfortable and safe in it when the whole world felt really rather challenging we were at the not able to leave the house anymore kind of stage so the hood was up all the time we didn't get a lot of talking and it was pretty tricky time for her but gradually as things began to settle and her confidence began to build and things began to feel safer for her then that hood would start to come down not all the time so there'll be times still now when that hood is up and sometimes she'll quite extended periods but I quickly know whether you know what kind of day we're on and how much I can push and challenge in terms of our learning both in the kind of very sort of academical sense of her sort of curriculum that's more like the classroom learning but also her learning about the wider world and exploring how we interact with that and so on and so forth I get a good idea how much we can push with that and how much we can challenge ourselves today by the situation with regards to her hood if it's a hood up kind of day or a hood up kind of moment we're going to go more gently more carefully we're going to do more familiar and safer activities if the hood's down or occasionally off and we might just be wearing a t-shirt then I know this is a day when we're ready to push some boundaries and try some new things and be a bit bold and brave without any of us saying anything to each other at all so the hood can actually be a really really good signal to you as the adult about what's going on for this child right now particularly if at times of calm you've had conversations about the hood and how it feels and what it kind of represents to the child one final thought about hoods and again something that paul did talk about in in his talk is that moment when children arrive at school and I've seen this happen lots of times when I've been sat in reception at the beginning of the day in the school how we will have someone literally stood there on the gate telling off each child who is wearing a hood for having it on making them take it off making sure they're in full school uniform and all ready to go as they come in now this and addressing this is one of these things that's going to completely alienate me from half of the world but I'm pretty sure that none of the people who feel really really strongly about the uniform and they need to like really heavily kind of go with all the school rules all the time are listening into my podcast they'll be listening into someone else's so hopefully kind of preaching to the choir a little bit here but we maybe haven't thought about this moment so loads of the work I do is around emotionally based school avoidance and school anxiety children who are struggling to come to school where the school environment might not feel safe for them for some reason now for these children as they transition from home to school if they're wearing a hoodie and that feels a little bit safer for them just imagine for a moment how it then feels if their first significant interaction of the day is an adult telling them off for wearing that hood they then have to remove the hood and be wearing their less comfortable uniform both less comfortable in terms of the fabrics and things and for those of us who are autistic or have other sensory differences that's not a small deal suddenly being wearing scrunchy scratchy starchy horrible clothes makes it really really hard to focus and engage and thrive but also the safety net of that hoodie for all the reason we talked about in this podcast episode is gone that's gone so I no longer have that to help me so I'm kind of doubly impeded and I've had a difficult interaction I've been told off it's the first thing that's happened is I'm wrong I'm doing the wrong thing and again lots of kids will bounce back from that kind of interaction but some of us really don't and we can find that really hard and just the thought of that interaction and how we're going to transition from home to school can be enough for some of our children to mean that they can't make that first step into school so we might think not for every child but for some of our children about seeing that hoodie is a reasonable adjustment they are allowed to wear in for some of them they might only need to wear it up until say the end of form time have a think about it with the child think about what's reasonable think about what's going to really really help them and think about which boundaries we can begin to push in terms of those school rules about uniform and so on one final little thought on this as you take it away and think how to write it into your action plans for some of your children I hope is just to remember if you have got this in a plan as a reasonable adjustment or intervention for a particular child please please make sure that this like all other reasonable adjustments are communicated universally so every member of staff knows that this child is allowed to do this thing it's been agreed that they're allowed to do this in order to support them to manage and cope and thrive every day this is particularly important when it comes to something as visually obvious as wearing a hoodie because if we're wearing a hoodie and particularly if the hood is up then there will be many adults in your school who will in line with I'm sure all your school rules tell that child to remove the hood take the hoodie off and that interaction that social interaction could be the thing that trips big anxiety and big panic for child who is already otherwise struggling somewhat with being at school so just make sure that the communication happens we make the decision we work out why we think about the boundaries and how we're going to make it work and then we think about how and with whom we're going to communicate it you might also as a backup to allow that child to feel safe wearing the hoodie do something like allowed them to carry a letter or laminated card if they can keep track of such a thing that you have signed that shows that they have permission to be wearing this sometimes that little safety blanket can be helpful for a child not ideal for some kids who will lose that piece of paper or that card but for some it can work really really well so hopefully that gives you a little bit of food for thought just as it did when Paul Cabb said in his presentation that I was watching hoodies as a reasonable adjustment I had a bit of an aha moment hopefully you can take that aha moment and think about how to make it work and do come back to me share on the socials are you already doing this could you do this how will you make it work hugely importantly how will you overcome the obstacle of other members of the team who might not be totally on board with this idea how are you going to tackle that I really look forward to engaging with you on this one I hope it's a helpful idea and that's really all I have to say about that so thank you ever so much for listening in as ever if you have found what I've said today helpful please share this please also subscribe and like and all those things that give me little boosts of dopamine as I check in on my socials and please do share all of my work as widely as you can if you think it's helpful sharing is caring if you'd like to support what I'm doing you can head over to Patreon where for a pound a month or 10 pounds a year you can join my little community of people who are so lovely over there you get resources early and get to kind of influence what I'm going to develop next or you can also invite me to come and speak at your next event or to deliver a webinar for you all things I absolutely love to do with that though I shall leave you today thank you ever so much for everything you are doing every day it really really matters make sure you look after yourselves as well you matter too and with that over and out