02/26/2008

Why Children Act Out

In the Exchange Beginnings Workshop Book, Behavior, Karen Miller describes why it is often difficult to deal with children in early childhood programs who engage in challenging behavior.  One of the difficulties she presents is that children are "anchored in the here and now":

"The child considers a situation only from what she can perceive at the moment.  She has difficulty thinking about events that led up to something, or what might happen in the future because of an action.  The sequence of cause and effect events is too difficult to project -- it requires abstract thinking and the child is still in a very concrete mode.  The child has to be able to perceive something with his senses to understand it.  Therefore, responses to behavior situations should be immediate.  Waiting until the end of the day to discuss a problem with a child works less well.

"The child is not skilled at hypothetical thinking.  For instance, the common adult response to a child's aggression -- 'How would you like it if someone did that to you?' -- is usually completely ineffective.  The child doesn't 'get it.'  In fact, it is usually taken as a threat.  When a child throws sand and hurts another child and the teacher says, 'How would you like it if someone threw sand in your face?' the child hears it as an offer ('Would you like me to throw sand in your face?').  That typically causes fear and alienation rather than empathy."

Exchange has a number of extremely helpful resources for supporting teachers in dealing with children with challenging behaviors.

• The book, Behavior, cited above, has 24 articles written by experts in the field on how to deal with challenging behavior.
• Ten Out of the Box Training Kits on "Positive Discipline" provide directors with all the resources you need to conduct in-house training sessions. 
• An Exchange CEU course on Managing Challenging Behavior provides credit for reading 10 Exchange articles on the subject.
• Exchange's newest resource, the DVD Facing the Challenge, is an expertly crafted video training tool.

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  GOOGLE HIRING EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS: Google has expanded its employee child development program by opening a world-class children's center in Mountain View, California and is now hiring teachers.
  

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