I have spent a lot of time thinking about what happens before a restraint. What happened in the minutes leading up to it? What did the student signal? What changed in the environment? What demands were placed on them? What did the adults do? What warning signs did we miss? But the more I think about restraint and seclusion, the more I realize that we have another enormous gap in the conversation: what happens after? We spend so much time documenting the incident itself that we can forget that the student’s experience does not end when the adult releases them.
As an autistic person and an educator, this is something I think about very differently than I might have before I understood my own nervous system. When I hear someone say that a student “calmed down” after a restraint, I immediately want to know what they mean by calm. Did the student’s nervous system actually return to a regulated state? Did they feel safe? Were they able to communicate? Could they process language? Were they ready to learn? Or did they simply stop displaying the behavior that adults found concerning? Those are not the same thing, and I think education has sometimes been far too comfortable treating them as though they are.
The human nervous system does not operate on a classroom bell schedule. A crisis does not necessarily end because the clock says it is time to move on. During intense stress, the body shifts resources toward immediate survival and away from many of the cognitive processes we rely on for learning, flexible thinking, language processing, planning, and problem-solving. After a highly stressful event, a student may be exhausted, withdrawn, tearful, hypervigilant, irritable, quiet, confused, or unusually compliant. They may look completely fine from across the room while still not being anywhere close to their typical baseline. We have to be careful about assuming that the absence of outward behavior means the absence of distress.
This is one of the reasons I get uncomfortable when I hear restraint described as though it simply “worked” because the student stopped moving or became quiet. Of course, there are situations where adults genuinely need to intervene to prevent imminent serious harm. Safety matters. I will never argue otherwise. But stopping an observable behavior is not the same thing as resolving whatever caused the crisis. If a student stops because they are exhausted, frightened, overwhelmed, or anticipating what will happen if they continue, then we need to be honest about what exactly we accomplished. We changed the behavior we could see. That does not automatically mean we changed the student’s internal state.
And the research gives us reason to take that question seriously. Research on physical restraint involving children and adolescents has identified both physical and psychological risks, while also highlighting a major limitation in the evidence: we still know far too little about children’s own experiences of restraint and its longer-term effects. One systematic review found that first-hand accounts from children and adolescents were particularly underrepresented in the literature. That alone should make us pause. We have extensive conversations about what adults observed, what adults did, and whether adults believed the intervention was necessary, but we have comparatively less information about what the child experienced.
That gap matters to me personally because I know what it feels like to have adults make decisions about you based on what they can observe from the outside. Disability can make that especially complicated. A child may not have the language, communication access, or emotional capacity to explain what happened in the moment. That does not mean they did not experience it. It means we may have to work harder to understand their experience afterward.
I think about the student who gets released from a restraint and then is expected to return to their worksheet. The student who is told to “calm down” and then immediately transition to the next class. The student who is expected to sit quietly while adults finish documenting what happened. The student who is asked whether they are ready to go back to work when their body may still be processing what just happened. We would never expect an adult to experience an intensely stressful and potentially traumatic event and then immediately return to normal productivity without considering what their body and mind might need. Yet children are often expected to do exactly that.
And then there is trust.
This is the part I think we underestimate tremendously.
If the adult who physically restrained a child is also the adult who is supposed to teach them, comfort them, help them, and keep them safe, what happens to that relationship afterward? Again, I am not saying that every student will lose trust after a restraint. We cannot make that universal claim. But we absolutely have to recognize that physical intervention can affect how a child experiences the adults and environment involved. For some students, particularly those with previous experiences of trauma or coercion, being physically controlled may carry an emotional meaning that extends far beyond the few minutes of the intervention.
The next morning matters.
The next transition matters.
The next time that adult walks into the room matters.
The next time the student hears the same direction matters.
The next time they are asked to enter the environment where the incident occurred matters.
We cannot say the event is over simply because the restraint is over.
This is why I believe the post-restraint conversation needs to be much bigger than, “Did staff follow the procedure?” That question has a place. We need accountability, safety procedures, and clear standards. But procedural compliance cannot be the end of the conversation. We also need to ask what the student experienced, what the adults learned, and what needs to change.
I want to know what the student remembers. I want to know what they believe happened. I want to know whether they were afraid. I want to know whether they understood what adults were saying to them. I want to know whether they were trying to communicate something that nobody recognized. I want to know what they would want adults to do differently next time. And I want to ask those questions in a way that respects the student’s communication style and developmental level rather than expecting every child to sit down and provide a perfectly articulated verbal explanation.
For some students, that conversation may happen through speech. For others, it may happen through AAC, writing, drawing, visual choices, play, observation, or a trusted adult who knows how to help them communicate. The method matters because if we only listen to children who can explain their experience in the way adults expect, we will systematically miss the voices of some of the students most affected by these interventions.
I also think we need to pay attention to what happens in the days afterward. Does the student avoid the classroom? Do they become more fearful around particular adults? Do they begin attempting to escape earlier? Does their communication change? Are they more easily overwhelmed? Are they sleeping differently? Are transitions suddenly harder? Do similar incidents become more frequent? Does the student stop participating in activities they previously enjoyed? None of these observations automatically proves that a restraint caused a particular outcome, and we should be scientifically careful about claiming causation from individual observations. But changes are information, and information deserves investigation.
This is where progress monitoring and incident data can become much more meaningful. Instead of treating each restraint as a standalone event, we can look at what happened before, during, and after it. We can examine patterns over time. We can ask whether the student’s functioning changed after repeated restrictive interventions. We can examine whether certain environments, demands, transitions, or adult responses consistently appear in the sequence. We can look at whether our prevention strategies actually reduce the frequency and intensity of crises.
Because if a student is restrained ten times and the only thing we learn is that they were restrained ten times, then we have documented the problem without actually learning from it.
I think schools sometimes become very focused on whether an intervention was justified in the moment and not focused enough on whether our overall system is becoming safer. Those are different questions. An individual incident may have involved a legitimate safety concern, while the larger pattern may still tell us that something needs to change. We can acknowledge that staff were responding to a dangerous situation while simultaneously asking why the student keeps reaching that point in the first place.
That is not blaming teachers.
In fact, I think it is the opposite.
Teachers deserve systems that help them prevent crises rather than constantly putting them in situations where they are expected to manage them. Staff deserve training that goes beyond what to do when a student is already at the highest level of escalation. They deserve time to understand students, collaborate with families, examine patterns, and build prevention strategies. They deserve administrators who are willing to look at the data honestly rather than simply asking whether everyone followed the rules.
And students deserve the same thing.
They deserve adults who are willing to learn from what happened.
One of the things my own experience as an autistic educator has taught me is that the absence of visible distress does not necessarily mean the absence of distress. I know that someone can look “fine” while internally processing an overwhelming amount of information. I know that sometimes the nervous system needs time before a person can explain what happened. I know that communication can disappear when demands become too high. And I know that being given the space to recover can be very different from being told to stop displaying the behavior that made everyone else uncomfortable.
That is why I think the language we use after restraint matters.
Instead of asking, “Is the student calm now?” perhaps we should ask, “What does this student need to return to their baseline?” Instead of asking, “Are they ready to get back to work?” we might ask, “What would make returning to learning possible?” Instead of asking, “Did the behavior stop?” we should also ask, “What did we learn?”
Those questions do not eliminate expectations. They make our expectations more informed.
A student can still be held accountable for unsafe actions while adults examine the circumstances surrounding those actions. A student can still have boundaries while being treated with dignity. A teacher can maintain authority without treating a child as an adversary. Safety and compassion are not opposing ideas.
And perhaps most importantly, the aftermath should not be used to teach the student that the lesson of the incident is simply, “You need to behave better next time.” The lesson should also be, “We are going to figure out what happened, and we are going to figure out how to make this safer.”
That means the adults have to be willing to change something, too.
Maybe the environment needs to change. Maybe the communication system needs to change. Maybe the student’s accommodations need to be reconsidered. Maybe the demand needs to be presented differently. Maybe staff need additional training. Maybe the student’s crisis plan needs to be rewritten. Maybe there is information from the family that we did not previously have. Maybe the student needs a different way to request help or space. Maybe we need to stop interpreting a particular behavior as defiance and start recognizing it as a possible early signal of distress.
Whatever the answer is, the restraint itself should not be the conclusion.
It should be a point of investigation.
The scientific literature is clear enough for us to take restrictive interventions seriously, but it is also clear that there are significant gaps in what we know, particularly regarding children’s own experiences and long-term outcomes. That means we have a responsibility not to fill those gaps with assumptions. We should avoid assumptions about any student’s experiences or needs, while creating learning environments that recognize adversity can affect students in different ways. We should collect better information. We should listen to students. We should examine patterns. We should monitor outcomes. We should be honest about what we know and what we don’t.
For me, that is what responsible restraint reduction looks like. It is not pretending that dangerous situations never happen. It is not shaming educators who have found themselves in impossible moments. It is not pretending that safety does not matter. It is building systems that become more intelligent after every crisis instead of simply becoming more experienced at managing the next one.
The restraint may last minutes.
The aftermath can last much longer.
And if we are serious about protecting students, improving safety, and reducing the use of restrictive interventions, we cannot stop collecting information when the restraint ends. We need to know what happened to the student afterward, what happened to the relationship afterward, what happened to learning afterward, and what happened the next time the student encountered the same situation.
Because the real measure of a crisis response isn’t simply whether the crisis stopped.
It is whether we learned enough from it to make the next one less likely.
