Working With a Challenging Child
By Michelle Graves, Educational Director, Allen Creek Preschool, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and High/Scope Trainer
he High/Scope Curriculum recommends a pre ventive approach to child behavior problems in which team members work to avert difficul -
ties and conflicts by creating a supportive classroom environment and an orderly daily routine. When prevention fails, we advise adults to help children resolve their own conflicts and frustrations through problem solving rather than through adult-imposed control or punishment. The goal of this approach is to help children become aware of how their own actions affect others and of how the choices they make can help them overcome difficulties and conflicts.
While this approach enables most children to function fairly smoothly in most early child hood settings, sometimes staff find themselves spending a disproportionate amount of time deal ing with the problems created by one or two challenging children. When faced with one child’s severe behavior problems, they often ask themselves whether they, as program staff, are the “real problem.” They may first try to lessen the child’s troublesome behavior by altering the envi ronment, but when such efforts fail repeatedly, they may wonder whether the child needs an en tirely different approach.
Each challenging child is a different individ ual, and we don’t claim to have answers for every child; however, we have dealt successfully with such problems in the High/Scope Demonstration Preschool. Following is a description of one such difficult situation we experienced and the process the staff went through in coping with it.
Jeremy (the name is fictitious) was 3ฝ years old when he entered our program. We soon no ticed that when Jeremy could not have exactly what he wanted, he would react violently: biting, kicking, screaming curses, throwing things, and occasionally making a “mad dash” out of our classroom space. These outbursts, which occurred once or twice each morning, were so severe and disruptive that it often took 10–45 minutes of a staff member’s time to calm Jeremy down.
During the next few months of school, much of our time together as a team was spent in discussions about Jeremy. Here are some of the strategies we developed for working with him.
We took turns being the adult who stopped the behaviors when they occurred—spreading this difficult task around helped us be more patient with Jeremy. Even though we wanted Jeremy to develop inner controls, it was usually necessary at first to physically supply the control that Jeremy lacked. For example, we would separate Jeremy from the person being bitten or the object being thrown, and we would hold him inside the classroom when he tried to run out. As we held Jeremy, we would calmly and patiently explain why we could not let him do what he was doing, labeling the feelings that we thought were caus ing the behavior. In restraining Jeremy, we tried to avoid sending mixed mes sages. For example, if the adult spoke in a calm voice but her body was tense as she held him, Jeremy might not feel that we were confident that he would learn to control his own behavior.
We made an effort to spend time with Jeremy during his calmer moments, playing next to him or de scribing his behavior and the positive re actions he was getting from other children: “When you built together with Sally today, the house you made was big enough to fit three people inside.”
We recorded our observations of Jeremy. We kept track of the fre quency of his outbursts and looked for patterns: Did the problems tend to occur at certain times of the day? Were they related to changes in the classroom rou tine? Much later in the year, with the help of his family, we kept track of how much he was sleeping and what kinds of foods he was eating.
We used the daily routine as a vehicle for helping Jeremy control his behavior. If Jeremy refused to do something that the group was doing (such as clean up after work time) we could remind him of the many choices that would be possible at other parts of the routine. “It’s time to for you to clean up and get your jacket on, but when we get outside, you can decide what you want to play with there.” When Jeremy under stood the schedule better, he was some times able to cope more appropriately with frustration.
We tried to help the other chil dren understand their own feelings about Jeremy in the classroom and the ways they could deal with his unpre dictable behaviors: “I know it scares you when Jeremy comes close to you. Tell him: ‘It hurts me when you try to bite. Stop it.”’
We looked for ways for Jeremy to take responsibility for his behavior. For example, when he pulled the arms out of a doll, we helped him find a way to repair it before he chose another ac tivity.
We involved Jeremy’s parents in the process of finding ways to deal with him. This was perhaps the most dif ficult part of dealing with this situation. We tried to balance our reports on Jeremy’s challenging behavior with some positive comments. It took several meet ings and phone calls before the parents realized that we were not passing judgement on them. Once they trusted us, they were able to provide us with a great deal of support, both by continuing our classroom behavior strategies with Jeremy at home and by telling us about outside stresses that might be affecting Jeremy’s behavior in preschool.
As a team, we talked about and set time limits (for example, “We’ll try this for three weeks. If we don’t see any improvement, we will... ). Knowing that we wouldn’t have to endure the situ ation indefinitely helped us over the rough spots with Jeremy. We anticipated that we might have to repeat our behav ior strategies many more times with Jeremy than we have to with most chil dren before we would see results. How ever, we didn’t want to spend so much time and effort on Jeremy that the rest of the class suffered or that staff members got burned out.
When we felt stretched (by about week three) we looked to com munity resources for support. We con tacted a local Foster Grandparent Program and accepted volunteer workers in our classroom. They helped with the other children so staff members could spend more time working directly with Jeremy. We also asked a social worker from the local social services department to observe in the classroom. She gave us some much-needed encouragement by confirming that we were on the right track with Jeremy.
As it turned out, our patience and persistence with Jeremy were eventually rewarded. Slowly, Jeremy’s development progressed; as he grew older, the tech niques we were modeling gradually be came a part of him instead of something that came from us. He hit others less of ten, used language more often to de scribe his anger, and he stopped running out of the classroom.
Reflecting on this experience, we realize that we used the same basic strat egies with Jeremy that we use with most children, but we used them with more intensity, frequency, and patience. We’re glad that we did not “throw in the towel” too early and we believe that the pa tience we displayed helped Jeremy find control within himself. We realize, how ever, that such efforts are not always suc cessful. If we had felt that all involved were losing too much by continuing in the situation, our next step would have been to help Jeremy’s parents find a more appropriate placement for him.