Four-year-old Elijah’s task was to draw a penguin, his favorite animal, and then rip up the paper so the scraps could be used for another project. The adults leading the project hoped that making Elijah uncomfortable would help the preschooler navigate similar tricky situations in his daily life.
“He was not having it,” recalls Elijah’s mother, Janet Walton. “He freaked out.”
For most toddlers, ripping up a beloved drawing would be a challenging ask. But Elijah’s struggles went beyond the norm. After a particularly bad tantrum at public preschool last year, a mental health expert with the La Mesa–Spring Valley School District in San Diego referred Walton to the