Difficult Behavior in Early Childhood

Positive Discipline for PreK-3 Classrooms and Beyond

Ronald Mah

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781452236636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per la prima infanzia

Increase your understanding of children to guide and shape behavior in positive ways! The author assists teachers in observing and understanding children so that they can respond appropriately to difficult behaviors, and enable children to make good behavioral choices for themselves. In an engaging, conversational tone, the book covers:

• Reconciling the different behavioral expectations of families and schools
• Applying timeout effectively
• Motivating children immediately and powerfully
• Establishing and following through with boundaries
• Developing behavior incentive plans that work
• Identifying early signs of depression, anxiety, grief, and special needs

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PART I

The Role of Discipline

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1

Discipline in Classrooms, Families, and Society

It's Monday morning, and Mrs. Jones, the kindergarten teacher, is taking roll. She begins to go down her list by calling out the children's names, one by one:

“Dominic?” [He's there, in the back of the room]

“Susie?” [There she is…. little wallflower]

“Glenn?” [Present, and cute as usual]

“Renee?” [She's there…. for now!]

“Mark? Where's Mark? Is he in the back? No, that's Brian. Is Mark here today? Well, he's not over there…. Has anyone seen Mark today? Hmm. I guess… I guess he's not here today. He is not present. Mark's not here! Mark is not here! MARK IS NOT HERE! YES! No Mark tantrums! No Mark fights! No Mark arguments! IT'S TIME FOR A CELEBRATION! IT'S GOING TO BE A GREAT DAY TODAY! No Mark interruptions to distract the other kids. No Mark whining to take me away from the others. I'm going be able to get work done today. It's going to be a GREAT day! MARK IS NOT HERE TODAY!”

Which child is it in your classroom whose absence causes you to celebrate inside? It's not likely to be the invisible child who never causes any trouble. That child is virtually unknown to you and the other children because she's so quiet. It might be the fidgety one. Or the “Yes, but…” kid, as in “Yes, he's bright, but he's so active!” Or “Yes, Carmel is very sweet, but she can't keep her hands or feet still.” How do the darlings of mommies and daddies become the good, great, and… well, other children of preschool, kindergarten, and elementary, middle, and high school? How do they become the academic and social successes or failures of schools and their future communities?

Think for a moment about the opening vignette. Did you laugh? Did you, by any chance, relate? If so, then you've probably wondered how that child became the child who gives you a feeling of elation every time he or she is absent. Is it due to the dynamics of the classroom, the playground, the home, the family, and the neighborhood or the media? The answer is the classic therapist answer: It depends!

Communities That Affect Children's Development

The home, the family, the neighborhood, the class, the playground, and even the media are the communities every child grows up and develops in. Each and every one of these communities influences the child's development and predicts future success or failure in other communities. A young child's future communities include middle and high school, college, various formal and informal teams, performing groups, clubs, partnerships (platonic and romantic, unofficial and legally sanctioned), the workplace, places of spiritual fellowship, family configurations of many kinds, and more. The success or failure of a child cannot be measured in academic or financial success, nor can it be measured by the amount of trophies or other material things accumulated.

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Success or failure is truly measured by a person's ability to function well in his or her community.

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Home and School: The First and Second Communities

The home is the first community for children. From the behaviors, habits, discipline, and values of the home, they move to the next communities: preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school classrooms and playgrounds. Teachers then face the challenge of integrating the diverse backgrounds and discipline of anywhere from four to thirty or more children in their classrooms, all the while attempting to accomplish the agenda of teaching various academics. Teachers are usually amazingly effective in accomplishing this task—that is, if they can only get the children to sit still, or pay attention, or keep their hands off each other (or out of the fish tank), or whatever incredibly creative, new aggravations children come up with!

Family Expectations and Classroom Expectations

Discipline serves to direct a child toward appropriate behavior. However, the appropriate behavior that is taught in a child's home may or may not match what is considered appropriate behavior in future and other communities, including your classroom. This is often quickly discovered during visits to Grandma's and Grandpa's, where expectations may differ significantly. Or at the grocery store versus at home. Or by many children at the same time on the first day of school. Sometimes the expectations in one's home change with additions or subtractions to the family community. When guests are present, suddenly the dress code changes. Running around in just a diaper or underwear, acceptable and normal at all other times, becomes unacceptable. Or when dad's gone, the food menu changes drastically! The first training ground of socialization—that is, for the child to behave appropriately in society at large—is in the miniature society of the family.

When the socialization expectations of the family are a relative match for the expectations of the later and larger societies, then the child may be prepared for (or at least not surprised by) them. Teachers who encounter families that send successive children into their classrooms find they can predict the fit or misfit between their expectations and the successive siblings’ behavior just by reading the class list before school starts. In addition, certain societies or communities (including families) are more or less functional and more or less healthy.

Different Children Come to the Classroom Differently

A child raised in a functional, healthy family may be surprised by a dysfunctional or unhealthy society or community (new family, classroom, workplace, or even larger institution). However, such a child will still be more readily able to survive and maintain functionality and health in the new community. In other words, a relatively healthy, socially and emotionally adept child will tend to do relatively well even in a relatively chaotic classroom with a less-than-organized or experienced teacher.

Children who come with dysfunctional behavioral expectations may be “successful” in a larger matching community but with a continuation of the psychological and emotional destruction they have suffered in their families. Or in a differing yet still dysfunctional and unhealthy community, they may lack a healthy psychological emotional foundation or model to deal with new challenges. Sometimes family members adapt their expectations to accommodate their challenging child, but that child may be able to function only in the family and be left unprepared for the greater community. A family may make accommodations that allow for the child's challenging behavior that few, if any, others in any other community (neighborhood, playground, school, etc.) would be willing to make. This can be a huge challenge for the teacher. Such children enter into the classroom with implicit expectations that the teacher and the other children will accommodate their entitlement, personality, lack of personal space boundaries, fussiness, tantrums, and so forth. Stunned that they are not accommodated, they may respond with withdrawal and/or anger that will compromise the educational mission of the classroom.

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A family may make accommodations that allow for a child's challenging behavior that few, if any, others in any other community would be willing to make.

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We now return to Mark, the absent child in the opening vignette. This window on his background helps us understand his teacher's reaction.

Mark: Failing in Communities

Mark was a very challenging child at 3 years old. He was very active, very loud, and very impulsive. He was a sweetheart, but (another “Yes, but…” kid) his energy and lack of social awareness caused him to antagonize just about everyone outside of his parents. His parents loved him and his 4-year-old brother dearly, of course. They understood his energy and largely accepted it. They made accommodations to help Mark: He was allowed to have more time than his brother to get his clothes on; plenty of warning when there was going to be a transition; few, if any, trips shopping with only one parent; curtailed social activities that would be too difficult for him to handle, and so forth. Their major accommodation was to change their lives and the home community to fit his abilities.

Missing the Point

For the most part, individuals function in communities of one kind or another. In fact, in modern society, most people need to function in several successive if not simultaneous communities in their lifetimes. Mark's family did a “reverse socialization”: rather than socializing Mark to their community (the family), they socialized (adapted and changed themselves) to his personality, despite the fact that his personality caused him to be ostracized or punished by others outside the family. Respecting individuality must not mean allowing people to express their individuality in ways that are intrusive or destructive of others’ safety, sanity, security, and serenity. Respecting a child's personality and individuality is a highly honorable principle. However, in the extreme, it misses out on the need for socialization.

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Balancing the individual child's needs and personality with community needs and standards is the key challenge.

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From Home to Preschool

As soon as Mark stepped outside of his family, his behavior started drawing severe consequences. In his neighborhood, as much as they liked his brother, most of the other children hated him. His preschool teachers didn't like him, either. He made their lives miserable! He made the staff and the other children feel frustrated and angry. Although the teachers were professional and refrained from labeling him a “bad boy,” their body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice clearly communicated their dislike. As much as adults try to make a distinction between the behavior and the child, when the behavior is consistently troublesome and the adults’ frustration becomes extreme, then the child becomes the negative behavior and the negative behavior becomes the child.

Of course, Mark's self-esteem plummeted. He had high self-esteem that had developed within his family—his parents loved him! But no one else loved him enough to tolerate his behavior. To them, he was a “bad boy.”

From Preschool to Kindergarten

Life became even more difficult for Mark when he entered kindergarten. He had the misfortune of entering a class with a teacher who was “real tired” of working with challenging children but had not yet retired. In her classroom, Mark's behavior was quickly labeled as outrageous and intolerable. The teacher decided that Mark was a “problem child,” along with another five of the eleven boys in the class. As the manager of the community, her negativity made Mark's daily misery so overwhelming that he became a kindergarten dropout before the winter break. Mark failed to succeed in three communities (neighborhood, preschool, and kindergarten), mainly because his first community—the home—did not prepare him adequately.

Discipline From the Inside Out

Discipline comes from the inside out in many ways. It comes from the inside, the emotional and psychological history of the adults, and moves out into the developmental challenges of the child. As a former preschool, elementary, and secondary school teacher and now family therapist, I have experienced many children who had significant difficulties dealing with mainstream group expectations once they were outside the family. Oftentimes, their difficulties come from the mismatch between family socialization and the larger-group standards.

Functionally, in families with a smaller ratio of adults to children, parents can get away with discipline that involves intensive supervision and little or no self-management on the part of the children. As a result, children may not be taught or may not be expected to internalize behavioral boundaries. Adults stay vigilant (hypervigilant!) and/or restrictive to prevent their children from crossing any boundaries. They will hold the cup of milk for their children, bathe their children past the time they are developmentally ready to bathe themselves, and intervene with other children for their children when there is a conflict. For a teacher with anywhere from several to thirty or more other children to teach, guide, and stimulate, this intensive monitoring and regulating is impossible.

Discipline Comes From Disciple

“Discipline” comes from the word disciple, that is, one who learns and conforms to a healthy and positive way of life taught or promoted by a more experienced and wiser individual. Of course, some parents or teachers may not be all that wise despite experience! Often adults try to force their children to make the “right” choices. However, when this backfires, they find they've created highly defiant and acting-out children, or depressed and anxious children who are unable to make their own choices. Discipline in the form of intensive monitoring and regulation may direct more positive behavior, but it does not teach children self-discipline. We can help children make good behavioral choices by helping them develop the...