 My son has been in burnout since November last year and has not been able to leave his bedroom or the house. We have lowered all demands and expectations for him, but this seems to have made his demand avoidance even worse. Could you please explain the best way to support a child through burnout? This is a very important question and it's multi-layered. Every child is completely individual. So let's address the fact that a child has been in burnout since November last year. That's not a long time for a child in burnout. I don't know the specifics around this is the burnout associated with school. If it's associated with constantly putting ourselves into an environment where we're masking or foaming, burnout can last days, weeks, months or years. If it's with school, it is going to take a while. When we bring our children home from school or when they're burnt out and we withdraw them for rest and recovery, we lower demands. Sometimes we have no demands and no expectations and we encourage rest. We also expect that the burnout might pass quickly, but what's actually happening is that once we've removed somebody from that situation, they're no longer in survival mode. It might be the first time in a long time that their body is no longer flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and stress hormones. And if you think about a child who's going into that environment or anticipating going to school or any other stressful environments every day, whether they go or not doesn't matter. It's the thinking that creates the stress and the distress. So the child or the person is in a stress response. Threat response is activated consistently. That is in itself exhausting. When they're no longer in that state of being, the exhaustion is allowed the space to actually come about and set in. When a person is no longer in survival mode, which means they're no longer tense, they're no longer flooded with the stress hormones, they can actually relax for the first time in a very long time. Then trauma can actually start to set in. So that might mean that sleep is completely disrupted. It might look like a child that is sleeping all day and gaming all night because nighttime might be what is perceived by their brain as the safest part of the day. There are no people. There are no demands. Aside from that, other experiences where trauma might be setting in or deep rest might be happening is the eating patterns may change. They may be eating a lot more or they may be eating a lot less. They may start restricting foods or having just different eating patterns. They may introduce new rituals that will often look like OCD. Anxiety may be heightened. Now, this may be hard to understand because when we say that the person is no longer in survival mode and they can relax for the first time, the threat response never forgets. I talk about the limbic system and memory consolidation and that PDA is this incredibly protective beast that lives within and remembers everything that presents a lack of safety. What this means is even when we're out of that environment and we are able to breathe, the brain holds onto those memories and the limbic system reacts accordingly. So it can be that sudden noises or nightmares or certain smells or certain sensory input or certain memories are just flooding the sensory systems. What happens is the processing of all those really tricky experiences and those memories will start to show up and the child may not be able to communicate this. It would be rare for a 10-year-old to be able to say, hey, I think I'm experiencing the aftermath of trauma. Instead, we need to look at their behaviour and notice subtle or even significant changes. Recovery takes a long time.