Addressing Challenging Behaviors and Mental Health Issues in Early Childhood

Mojdeh Bayat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429513909
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Now in a fully updated second edition, this essential volume provides research-based strategies to help educators address challenging behaviors in early childhood and elementary years.

Drawing on research and approaches from the fields of neuroscience, child development, child psychiatry, counseling, and applied behavior analysis, this text offers teachers simple strategies to manage behaviors and promote mental health and resilience in young children. Thoroughly updated to reflect new developments in neuroscience, trauma, and physical and mental health, this second edition also features an entirely new chapter on classroom approaches in child mental health, including the interaction of technology with challenging behaviors and mental health issues.

Comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and culturally responsive, this critical resource provides new and experienced educators and coaches with educational and intervention approaches that are appropriate for all children, with and without disabilities.

1

YOUNG CHILDREN WITH CHALLENGING BEHAVIORS AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES

Early childhood educators have a lot of responsibilities on a daily basis. They have to first and foremost ensure the safety and security of a group of young, active children, carry out the teaching agenda for the day – design and implement small and large group lessons, meet the developmental needs of every child, assess group and individual learning outcomes – and plan and determine a course of communication with family members about their children on a daily basis. In addition, they are responsible for making sure all program policies and curricular mandates are observed closely. These responsibilities could be and are easily challenged when there are one or more children with challenging behaviors in the classroom.

Teachers often discuss how tired and defeated they feel when they are not able to successfully address a child’s challenging behaviors. Children with challenging behaviors literally consume all the energy of teachers on a daily basis. Early childhood professionals who face working with children with challenging behaviors are usually stressed and continuously seek solutions for working successfully with them. To find solutions, many teachers participate in trainings that are focused on working with children’s behaviors, and seek advice of experts on an ongoing basis. In reality, finding a solution requires gaining an in-depth knowledge not only of the factors contributing to challenging behaviors, but also understanding how these contributing factors may be addressed directly and most effectively. In this introductory chapter, I will describe what challenging behaviors are and how they have been classified. Additionally, I will discuss issues that are relevant to the early education of children with challenging behaviors.

We Have Come a Long Way

In the past decade, particularly in the last five years since the first edition of this book, there have been an increasing number of studies in the areas of neuroscience, in particular genetics and epigenetics, which have demonstrated the deleterious effects of early adversities on the brain and on the behavioral adaptation and mental health of young children. There are many buzz words and terminologies in the literature, such as childhood adverse experiences, complex trauma, PTSD, toxic stress, trauma-informed early care and education, child mental health, behavioral health, and child social-emotional learning, all of which convey the importance of prevention and intervention for challenging behaviors and mental health issues in children during the early childhood period. These terms imply certain approaches to child mental and behavioral health that go above and beyond simple behavioral strategies. This was not always the case previously.

In fact, young children with challenging behaviors were not of much scholarly attention or interest. Instead, it was adolescents with challenging behaviors who typically captured the interest of researchers. For example, John Bowlby, whose groundbreaking work on attachment (1969, 1973, 1980) changed our understanding of children’s emotional development, attributed the reason for his choice of career and research in child psychiatry to his after-college volunteer work with youth enrolled in a school for children who were described as maladjusted (Bretherton, 1992). Bowlby and other scholars of his time, such as Eric Erikson (1968), focused on maladjustment in youth, and believed that the challenging behaviors of adolescents had roots in early caregiver–child attachment. However, despite attachment studies, research studies and finding intervention for social-emotional learning in early childhood was not the norm previously. Up until the 1990s, parents who approached professionals with their concerns about their young children’s behaviors were often told that it was natural for young children to have challenging behaviors and that their child would outgrow those issues in time.

Young children in preschool and kindergarten are just at the beginning period for learning social and emotional cognitive skills, such as how to get along, share, cooperate, and regulate their emotions; so, we expect them to have some challenging behaviors that are developmentally appropriate. However, there are limits and boundaries as to what is the extent and types of behaviors that are appropriate, or alternatively may signal future problems (Bayat & Jamnia, 2019).

In the 1990s, several studies (Campbell, 1990; Cicchetti & Richters, 1993) showed a correlation between early social-emotional and behavioral difficulties of children, and later cognitive and social issues. These researchers established that if initial challenging behaviors were not corrected at an early age, the developmental trajectory and outcome for those children would be negative. This wave of research inspired an interest in studying young children’s mental health, finding ways to address challenging behaviors, and possibly preventing further diminished developmental issues. Children’s mental health problems were studied further in the 1990s, and established that early childhood challenging behaviors predicted negative consequences in multiple areas in adolescence and adulthood (Fergusson, Lynskey, & Horwood, 1996; Moffitt, Caspi, Dickson, Silva, & Stanton, 1996). Attention has now shifted to the primacy of the role of social-emotional development, not only on children’s later academic success, but on their overall health and wellbeing (Hemmeter & Conroy, 2018). As a result, it is now solidly established that if not addressed early, young children’s specific challenging behaviors, such as inconsolable tantrums, excessive crying, screaming, uncontrollable anger bouts, physical or verbal aggression, self-injury, non-compliance, disruptive behaviors, and withdrawal or social isolation, are likely to cause a downhill path for the child which could result in conduct problems, school failure, and more serious mental and physical health issues later in life (Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015; Perry, Dollar, Calkins, Kean, & Shanahan, 2018; Powell et al., 2007; Woodward, Lu, Morris, & Healey, 2017).

Children’s Behavior in Context

Understanding children’s behaviors in their context, such as in their families’ homes, in daycares, or in early childhood classrooms, depends on a well-informed and comprehensive knowledge about four factors which influence a child’s behavior:

1. Age and developmental functioning of the child;
2. Identifiable neurobiological characteristics underlying the child’s development and behaviors, for example any physical, bio-developmental, or genetic disorder;
3. Early childhood adversities, which directly influence the architecture of the child’s brain and, therefore, their behaviors; and
4. Cultural environments, such as family, community, schools, and society, which dictate the parameters of what society may deem to be typical vs. atypical behaviors within that particular context.

It is only with a good understanding of all of these factors that we can appreciate the complexity of a child’s behaviors.

In reality, however, it is very seldom that teachers or parents of young children have an in-depth understanding of all factors influencing a child’s behavior. As a result, adults in charge usually have expectations for how children must act without considering that those expectations may not be feasible for all children and uniformly. For example, adults’ expectations of young children to “Sit still,” “Keep your hands to yourself,” “Be quiet,” or “Don’t fidget,” are not necessarily informed by the neurological, genetic, and environmental underpinnings for these specific skills. The child’s ability to self-regulate not only depends on an underlying set of executive functioning capabilities that are dependent on a healthy neuro-development of the child, but also on the quality of early attachment and the adult–child relationship. Not all children equally meet the biobehavioral conditions necessary, or have the strong positive relationships to give them foundations for successful self-regulation.

On the other hand, cultural expectations play a role in self-regulation. Standards for behaviors – for example, what many early childhood professionals consider as “developmentally appropriate” in this country – may not be in fact considered developmentally necessary according to another culture and its expectations. In the United States and most economically developed countries, we expect preschool children to develop a specific set of academic readiness skills, such as being able to sit for long periods and do seat work, and follow two-step instructions; and have a certain minimum-language skills, literacy skills, and numeracy skills, etc. In many Western countries, such skills are necessary for children to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. In US kindergartens, for example, it is norm for play and creative activities to give way to organized and well-structured lessons. These lessons include not only language, literacy, and social sciences, but would gradually integrate foundational knowledge for math, biology, physical science, engineering, and technology – commonly referred to as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).

This would mean that for a young child to come to kindergarten, they must be not only cognitively prepared to successfully perform such required academic tasks, but also be prepared to do so emotionally. However, for a child to be cognitively and emotionally ready for academic tasks, they should have both the motivation and interests, as well as have the self-regulatory capacity, to do so. Simply put, kindergartners are expected to be able plan on work based on a goal, execute the plan using the materials available, and focus their attention on that work for a necessary period of time, until their goal is reached.

From a modern educational perspective, classroom behavioral adaptation for a young child therefore includes a particular set of skills that includes working and playing independently, being seated while focusing on task, and regularly using the materials available – such as the modern technology to reach a goal.

An increase in the academic content in early childhood has become prevalent in early childhood policy and practice in other developed countries, as well as the US. For example, up to now, the Nordic model of early childhood education, which has been considered as the model for emulation in early-learning programs around the world, was focused on social-emotional skills and play. This model consists of a universal and heavily subsidized early education for all children from birth to school age in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The curricula, up to recently, was exclusively based on child-directed outdoor and indoor imaginative play, with a focus on socialization, peer relationships, creativity, and with almost no academic content (Karila, 2012). Although not widespread yet, in the last decade, the Nordic countries have begun to gradually include academic content into many of their preschool programs (Broström, 2017).

Behavioral adaptation means that a person is able to perform particular tasks that are expected of them successfully and in a given culture or environment. Therefore, it seems that adaptive behaviors in early care and education environments for children in the US and most economically developed countries are increasingly including requirements for behaviors that include self-regulation both physically and emotionally. In the US, one side effect of having emphasized academic and cognitive learning over social-emotional and mind-body health, has been a decrease in overall physical activities of children, particularly outdoors, in favor of seated indoor tasks, and a reduction of learning skills to socialize and play together in favor of learning literacy and numeracy. From a brain research perspective, this could and does have deleterious effects on not only the social-emotional and behavioral health of a child, but on their overall wellbeing (discussed in Chapter 5). Regardless, let us look at what exactly constitutes challenging or maladaptive behaviors in children.

Definition of Challenging or Maladaptive Behavior

In the field, terms like children with behavioral problems, emotional and behavioral problems, or behavioral difficulties were previously used to refer to children whose behaviors deviated from those specified as the norm for the same-age-peers. In the technical literature, two other terms with opposite meanings have also been used. These are adaptive vs. maladaptive behaviors.

In this book, I interchangeably use the terms challenging behaviors and maladaptive behaviors (vs. adaptive behaviors) as preferred terms, because unlike the other terms, they not only describe the behaviors instead of describing the child themselves, but also consider the child’s culture and environmental demands, which influence not only the child’s behavior, but the adults’ expectations (Bayat & Jamnia, 2019; Lyons & O’Connor, 2006).

To understand maladaptive behaviors, it is important to first understand what adaptive behaviors are. Adaptive behaviors are defined as performing daily activities that are necessary for social and personal functioning (Sparrow, Cicchetti, & Balla, 2008). There are four principles involved in adaptive behaviors and functioning:

1. Adaptive behaviors are age-related;
2. Adaptive behaviors are defined by standards and expectations of other people;
3. Adaptive behaviors are changeable; and
4. Adaptive behaviors are based on performance, and not by ability (Sparrow et al., 2008).

By default, behaviors that are against expectations of others in a particular culture or environment, and are not considered to be age-appropriate, are typically seen as challenging or maladaptive behaviors.

As mentioned, standards for what constitute maladaptive are based on expectations expressed by the culture and others in the environment of that child. Therefore, definition of challenging behavior is fluid and subjective. In presenting a definition for challenging or maladaptive behaviors, I adopt a definition that brings into account descriptions presented by several other scholars (e.g., Gebbie, Ceglowski, Taylor, & Miels, 2012; Kaiser & Rasminsky, 2012; Powell et al., 2007; Williams, Perrigo, Banda, Matic, & Goldfarb, 2013).

Accordingly, a challenging/maladaptive behavior meets one or more of the following conditions:

1. It interferes with the development, learning, and prosocial engagement and interactions of a child with their peers and adults. Examples include disruptive behaviors, like hyperactivity, impulsivity, defiance, opposition, or prolonged tantrums.
2. It may put a child at risk for developmental or learning issues. Examples include behaviors like isolation, anxiety, depressive moods, excessive crying, or inattention.
3. It may harm the child, or harm others around. Examples include verbal and physical aggression toward others, and/or toward the self, such as in self-injury.

Challenging behaviors that could present harm to the self and others warrant immediate intervention, since they put the safety of the child and others at risk. In general, however, before any plan of intervention is considered, all maladaptive behaviors must be intense enough and severe enough to warrant intervention. This is particularly important, because typically developing children display certain degrees and types of challenging behaviors during their development. F...