what is challenging behaviour

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What is Challenging Behaviour? Challenging behaviour is any form of behaviour that interferes with children's learning or normal development; is harmful to the child, other children or adults; or puts a child in a high risk category for later social problems or school failure. In a school setting, challenging behaviour is acknowledged to be any form of behaviour that causes concern to teachers. It can range from talking in class and not settling to work, to verbal and physical abuse, destruction of property and bullying. (1989 Elton report). However, the most commonly cited forms of misbehaviour are: Arriving late for lessons Not listening to the teacher Excessive talking Being noisy - verbally and non-verbally Not getting on with work Being out of seats without reason Preventing others from being able to

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Page 1: What is Challenging Behaviour

What is Challenging Behaviour? 

Challenging behaviour is any form of behaviour that interferes with children's learning or normal development; is harmful to the child, other children or adults; or puts a child in a high risk category for later social problems or school failure.

In a school setting, challenging behaviour is acknowledged to be any form of behaviour that causes concern to teachers. It can range from talking in class and not settling to work, to verbal and physical abuse, destruction of property and bullying. (1989 Elton report).  However, the most commonly cited forms of misbehaviour are:

 

Arriving late for lessons

Not listening to the teacher Excessive talking

Being noisy - verbally and non-verbally

       

 

Not getting on with work

Being out of seats without reason

Preventing others from being able to work.  

Managing challenging behaviour in a classroom setting is a problem faced by all teachers.

One of the key factors in behaviour management is understanding why challenging behaviour occurs.

Page 2: What is Challenging Behaviour

Biological Risk Factors for Challenging Behavior

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Environmental Risk Factors   

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The Role of Gender in Challenging Behavior   

Page 3: What is Challenging Behaviour

Related Topics Behavior Issues in Children and Adolescents    Behavior Problems   

Gender Differences   

Temperament and Personality   

Discipline and Challenging Child Behavior   

By B. Kaiser|J.S. Rasminsky 

Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

Genes

Scientists are leaning more and more toward the view that a gene specifically "for" a disorder or condition such as antisocial behavior is very unlikely (Rutter, Moffitt, and Caspi, 2006). Dean Hamer, director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute, writes, "Human behaviors, and the brain circuits that produce them, are undoubtedly the product of intricate networks involving hundreds to thousands of genes working in concert with multiple developmental and environmental events" (2002, p. 72).

Because there are so many elements involved and they interact with one another in such complex ways, it is extremely difficult to disentangle the influence of genes from the influence of the environment. To tease out these different strands and estimate their relative power, behavioral geneticists use twin studies, comparing identical twins (who share all their genes) and fraternal twins (who share about half their genes). The genetic influence on a characteristic such as intelligence, temperament, personality, cognitive style, or psychophysiology is greater when the trait is more similar in identical twins than in fraternal twins. Researchers also study adopted children to see if they are more like their biological parents (with whom they share genes) or their adoptive parents (with whom they share the environment). These studies, which are becoming increasingly analytical and sophisticated, show that antisocial behavior is moderately heritable (Moffitt, 2005), especially antisocial behavior that begins early in life (Arseneault et al., 2003; Rhee and Waldman, 2002).

In addition, scientists have discovered that some genes interact with a particular environment to actually produce a disorder (Rutter et al., 2006); some genes are expressed or turned on (or not) because of physical, social, and cultural factors in the environment; and some genes—for example, those that influence difficult temperament, impulsivity, novelty seeking, and lack of empathy—predispose people to be exposed to environmental risks. Genes even help shape the environment. Genes influence how parents bring up their children; genes affect the responses that children evoke from their families and the others around them; and, as children grow older, genes sway their choice of companions and surroundings (Caspi and Silva, 1995; Plomin, Owen, and McGuffin, 1994).

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It's important to remember that heredity is not destiny. With the right environmental interventions at the right time, even a trait with a strong genetic foundation (such as antisocial behavior) can be altered.

Gender

Almost all experts agree that boys are at greater risk for physical aggression than girls (Underwood, 2003), and several large longitudinal studies bear this out (Broidy et al., 2003). Boys seem more susceptible to many of the risk factors for aggressive behavior—difficult temperament, ADHD, learning disabilities, and nervous system dysfunction, for example (Moffitt and Caspi, 2001; Rutter, Giller, and Hagell, 1998) —and the prevalence rate for aggression in boys is three to four times as high as the rate for girls (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The social context has a strong influence on how and whether aggressive behavior appears (Maccoby, 2004). Parents treat anger and aggression differently in their sons and daughters and use more physical punishment and power-assertive discipline with their boys (Zahn-Waxler and Polanichka, 2004). Boys hit, push, kick, tease, and insult each other more; spend more time in rough-and-tumble play; and accept aggressive behavior more readily than girls. Physical aggression starts to taper off as boys get older and develop more impulse control (Maccoby, 2004).

Like boys who don't renounce physical aggression before they enter school, girls who continue to act aggressively face the prospect of school failure and rejection by their peers and are also more likely to be depressed (Underwood, 2003). They often join groups of boys, fight with boys, and eventually date—and marry—boys who act aggressively. Without the social and problem-solving skills they need to sustain an intimate relationship, they may find themselves in increasing danger as the boys grow bigger and stronger (Pepler and Craig, 1999). They are also more likely to become teenage mothers (Pepler and Craig, 1999). Although arrest statistics indicate that the rate of physical violence among girls is rising, other studies show that this is a myth: It is not the level of violence that has changed but the labeling of offenses (Chesney-Lind and Belknap, 2004).

As researchers turn their attention to aggressive behavior in girls, they are looking hard at indirect and relational aggression, where the goal is to damage another's self-esteem, social status, or both (Underwood, 2003). Covert tactics—exclusion, back-stabbing, gossiping, belittling, and the like—become more sophisticated and prevalent in middle childhood and are fairly widespread among girls during adolescence. Relational aggression provides a way for them to act on their angry feelings, seek revenge, and assure themselves that they're accepted by the group (Underwood, 2003).

Temperament

In 1956, New York University psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess and their colleagues (Thomas, Chess, and Birch, 1968) began a pioneering longitudinal study of temperament. By collecting data on a sample of 133 children from infancy through young adulthood, they discovered that each child is born with a distinct temperament—an observable,

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constitutionally based pattern of behavior and emotions, a characteristic way of experiencing and interacting with the world.

Thomas and Chess identified nine traits that appear in different people in different combinations and quantities. These traits emerge early, often become stable by 4 months of age (Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000), and remain into adulthood, although by that time they may look entirely different from the outside (Caspi and Silva, 1995). This explains why a self-assured young woman who talks easily to strangers at a party may still regard herself as a shy person.

Thomas and Chess (Thomas et al., 1968) made another interesting observation: They found three distinct types of children, whom they classified as easy, slow to warm up, and difficult. The children in the easy group had a sunny outlook on life and adapted easily to change. Over the years, a mere 7.5 percent of them developed behavior problems (Chess and Thomas, 1984). The children who were slow to warm up took a long time to get used to new things, but with patient care they became interested and involved. About half of them had some problems with behavior (Chess and Thomas, 1984). The difficult group of children cried loudly and often, had tantrums, resisted new things and changes in routine, and always seemed to be in a bad mood. Although they made up just 10 percent of the study sample, about 70 percent of them developed problem behaviors (Chess and Thomas, 1984).

In trying to figure out why 30 percent of the children with difficult temperaments managed not to develop problems, Thomas and Chess (Thomas et al., 1968) evolved the concept of goodness of fit. Serious disturbances are more likely to arise, they found, when the temperament of the child and the expectations of the family or teacher are out of sync. Traits of temperament are neither good nor bad in themselves; what matters is how the environment responds to them.

The theorists who've followed Thomas and Chess—Jerome Kagan, Mary Rothbart, John Bates, and others—have started to pinpoint more precisely the temperamental dimensions associated with problem behavior. Perhaps the most important traits they've identified have to do with the way children experience and regulate their emotions (Frick, 2004).

Some children are easily unsettled and feel their negative emotions, such as anger and frustration, intensely and frequently (Lahey and Waldman, 2003). Untamed, this negative emotional reactivity can put them at risk of defiance, tantrums, and other problem behaviors; lead to peer rejection; and impair the development of cognitive skills such as social information processing. However, when negative emotional reactivity is balanced by a good dose of another temperamental quality, effortful control, or the ability to inhibit feelings and behavior and focus attention, the risk is attenuated (Rothbart and Jones, 1998).

At the opposite pole of this prickly emotional reactivity is a temperamental trait that also carries a high risk for behavior problems (Frick and Morris, 2004). When their reactions are low key and difficult to arouse, children seem to feel no fear and may actively seek out excitement, novelty, and danger. Those with an extreme version of this trait—variously called uninhibited (Kagan, 1998), daring (Lahey and Waldman, 2003), callous-unemotional (Frick and Morris, 2004), or low in harm avoidance (Tremblay, Pihl, Vitaro, and Dobkin, 1994)—aren't deterred by the threat of punishment or moved by others' distress; and they have trouble developing empathy, guilt,

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and moral reasoning (Frick and Morris, 2004). Their aggressive behavior is likely to be covert and instrumental.

However, like Thomas and Chess before them, the new temperament researchers do not believe that temperament is destiny. Families and teachers who understand and accommodate temperamental traits can gradually extend a child's capacity to cope—to learn to regulate her emotions, maintain relationships, develop empathy and guilt, and follow societal norms (Frick and Morris, 2004). Jerome Kagan (1998), a developmental psychologist who's studied inhibited and uninhibited temperamental traits in hundreds of babies, has found that only about one-quarter of them still show the same behavioral and biological profile at the age of 11 years (Kagan and Snidman, 2004). Daily experience helped the inhibited children learn to control their fear and irritability and the uninhibited to manage their disobedience, aggressive behavior, and impermeability to adult criticism—or not. Children with more extreme temperamental traits find such learning more difficult, which makes it harder to teach and care for them.

Although the environment can influence temperament, it is important to remember that biology comes first. On average, traits of temperament are about 50 percent heritable (Plomin et al., 1994). Kagan (1994; Kagan and Snidman, 2004) suspects that differences in neurochemical inheritance provide the basis for temperament traits, and he has found several physiological differences between inhibited and uninhibited children. For example, when uninhibited children are stressed, their heart rate is less likely to accelerate—a characteristic that has also been seen in older children with aggressive conduct disorders (Reiss and Roth, 1993).

Influenced by both biology and child-rearing, temperament varies with culture and geography (Kagan and Snidman, 2004). In 1974, medical student Marten deVries (1989) went to Kenya and Tanzania to collect information about the temperament of the children of the Masai, a semi-nomadic tribe on the Serengeti Plain. Using temperament scales based on Thomas and Chess's criteria, he identified 10 infants with easy temperaments and 10 with difficult temperaments. The area was in the midst of a severe drought, and when deVries returned five months later, most of the Masai's cattle and many of their people had died. Although deVries couldn't locate all of the babies, he found seven with easy temperaments and six with difficult temperaments. Of the seven with easy temperaments, five had died; all but one of those with difficult temperaments had survived.

What accounted for the unexpected survival of the children with difficult temperaments? DeVries credited several factors. First, the Masai admire their warriors and encourage aggressiveness and assertiveness in their children. Second, shared caregiving in the Masai's large extended families makes it easier to deal with children who are difficult. Third, Masai mothers breast-feed on demand, and children who are fussy ask for—and receive—more nourishment. The qualities that European American middle-class families regard as difficult—loud and frequent crying, for instance—are an advantage in an environment of scarcity (Chess and Thomas, 1989; DeVries, 1989).

Page 7: What is Challenging Behaviour

School as a Risk Factor for Challenging Behavior

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Buy this book »

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By B. Kaiser |J.S. Rasminsky 

Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

In the 1970s, researchers began to notice that schools vary greatly in their rates of academic performance and emotional and behavioral problems (Rutter and Maughan, 2002). The reasons behind these differences, they found, lie not only in the proportion of disadvantaged and difficult pupils in the student body but also in the schools themselves. Since then, research has uncovered a number of complex factors that contribute to a school's character, including structural features such as resources and size; social organization and climate; the quality of teaching and teacher-pupil interactions; and federal, state, and local education policies.

A school's resources, which depend in large part on the community and school district, play an enormous role in a school's effectiveness. The wealthiest public schools spend at least 10 times as much as the poorest (Darling-Hammond, 2004), so it's no surprise that children in poor neighborhoods attend schools with larger class sizes and fewer books, computers, libraries, materials, supplies, extracurricular activities, counselors, and highly qualified teachers (Beam, 2004; Darlingmond, 2004). This shortfall affects students' behavior and their academic performance, which are often related (Gottfredson, n.d.). Sheppard H. Kellam and his colleagues (Kellam et al., 1998) found that boys and girls in poor communities were at greater risk of highly aggressive behavior in middle school, regardless of how they behaved in first grade.

A school's size has a profound influence on social organization and climate—and on behavior as well. In big schools (often defined as more than 400 pupils for elementary schools and more than 800 for middle and secondary schools [Cotton, 1996]), students can more easily become

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disenfranchised and socially isolated. When they feel they don't belong and nobody at school cares about them, they disengage from school life and cease to care about their own aspirations and performance (Gottfredson, n.d.). This disconnectedness, which by high school affects 40 to 60 percent of students (Klem and Connell, 2004), can have a substantial impact, increasing the risk of bullying, fighting, vandalism, and truancy as well as emotional distress, substance use, and early sexual activity (Blum, 2005).

The way a school is organized and run (including having clear behavioral expectations and rules that are consistently and fairly applied) also shapes school climate (Gottfredson et al., 2004). But it is a challenge for a school to be safe and caring at the same time. Columbine, Virginia Tech, and other school shootings create an environment of fear, especially for students who are already at risk. Schools across the country rely on police, metal detectors, and video cameras to protect their premises from antisocial behavior, drugs, and weapons (Public Agenda, 2004; DeVoe, Peter, Noonan, Snyder, and Baum, 2005), but these strategies can frighten students, destroy trust, and turn the school into a military camp. Rigid, formal discipline and harsh punishment policies such as zero tolerance have a similar effect. Automatic suspensions and expulsions discourage communication and alienate students (Fletcher, 2002). In the face of these inflexible rules, students don't feel comfortable reporting bullying, harassment, violence, or threats (Newman, 2004), making it extremely difficult to address such activity.

What happens inside the classroom matters, too. A chaotic, disruptive atmosphere has long-term effects on children's behavior (Kellam et al., 1998), but overcontrol is not the solution either. Corporal punishment is still allowed in 22 states, and in 2002-2003, more than 300,000 children were subjected to it ("Corporal punishment," 2005), damaging their self-image and academic achievement and stirring up disruptive and violent behavior (American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on School Health, 2000). Emotional abuse—controlling students through fear and intimidation, bullying, sarcasm, ridicule, or humiliation—is equally harmful and affects every child in the classroom (Hyman and Snook, 1999).

Teachers' expectations have a strong influence on children's behavior (Berk, 2000). In fact, a conflictual relationship with a teacher sets a child up for learning problems (Ladd and Burgess, 2001), poor academic performance (Hamre and Pianta, 2001), misconduct, suspension, and aggressive behavior with peers (Ladd and Burgess, 1999).

The practice of ability tracking, widespread in poor school districts, reinforces feelings of anger, rejection, and disaffection among students (Dahlberg, 1998) and widens both the academic and the behavior gap (Kellam et al., 1998). Because students rarely jump from one track to another, they are stigmatized; and each passing year compounds the problem, creating many classrooms with a persistently aggressive, disruptive atmosphere.

State and local policies and laws such as the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 also have a powerful effect on schools. When the results of a test determine whether a child will move from one grade to the next or whether a school will be taken over by the state, the stakes are very high indeed. To raise their scores on these "high-stakes tests," schools change their priorities and their programs. In the poorest schools in particular (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2004), teachers are spending more time on reading, writing, math, and science (the

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subjects tested under No Child Left Behind) and cutting back on subjects not tested—arts, gym, social studies, creative writing, computers, foreign languages, recess, and conflict resolution programs (Mathews, 2005; Perkins-Gough, 2004; Tracey, 2005; Wallis, 2003; Wood, 2004). Test preparation is replacing projects, themes, field trips, and hands-on, experiential learning—the ways that children learn best (Ganesh and Surbeck, 2005; Wood, 2004). One consequence of this narrow focus is enormous stress on everyone from the principal on down; another is an increase in behavior problems (Wallis, 2003).

Challenging Behavior and Social ContextPrint  Email 

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Behavior in School    Kindergarten Readiness   

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College Information   

Education Issues Today   

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Immigration and International Students   

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Page 11: What is Challenging Behaviour

Buy this book »

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By B. Kaiser|J.S. Rasminsky 

Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

Not surprisingly, the social context influences the appearance of aggressive behavior. In an experimental study, 7- and 9-year-old boys playing basketball and other games behaved more aggressively when their group had higher levels of aversive behavior, negative affect, competition, and physical activity (DeRosier, Cillessen, Coie, and Dodge, 1994). When a group was cohesive and friendly—that is, it had a positive social context—its members were less likely to act aggressively.

Researchers have spent a great deal of time looking at the question of social context in schools, particularly a phenomenon they variously call "social bonding" (Hawkins and Weis, 1985), "connectedness" (Resnick et al., 1997), "social climate" (Comer and Haynes, 1999) and "a caring

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community of learners" (Schaps, Battistich, and Solomon, 2004). They have found that students who feel connected to their school benefit in numerous ways. In the academic realm, they like learning and school more and have better attendance, graduation rates, grades, and standardized test scores (Wilson, Gottfredson, and Najaka, 2001). At the same time, their social and emotional skills, relationships with teachers and peers, and prosocial behavior all improve, and their behavior problems diminish (Schaps et al., 2004; Wilson et al., 2001).

What characterizes a caring community? To begin with, it meets children's basic psychological needs, which psychologist Edward L. Deci postulates as belonging, autonomy, and competence (Deci and Ryan, 1985). A caring community provides these essentials:

Students feel physically and emotionally safe (Blum, 2005). Relationships are caring, respectful, and supportive—children, teachers, and parents work at 

getting along together (Blum, 2005; Schaps et al., 2004).

Children have many opportunities to participate, help, and collaborate with others (Schaps et al., 2004).

Students have many chances to make choices and decisions—for example, they have a say in class norms and their own study topics (Schaps et al., 2004).

Teachers practice proactive classroom management (Hawkins, Guo, Hill, Battin-Pearson, and Abbott, 2001).

Teachers promote cooperation and cooperative learning Johnson,Johnson, and Maruyama, 1983; Solomon, Watson, Delucci, Schaps, and Battistich, 1988).

Teachers actively teach social and emotional skills (Zins, Weissberg, Wang, and Walberg, 2004).

Teachers set high academic standards and provide the support necessary for students to meet them (Blum, 2005).

People in the community share common purposes and ideals (Schaps et al., 2004). "When a school community deliberately emphasizes the importance of learning and the importance of behaving humanely and responsibly, students have standards of competence and character to live and learn by," write Eric Schaps, Victor Battistich, and Daniel Solomon of the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, California (2004, p. 191).

Because children in a caring community feel respected, valued, and cared about, and because they believe that they make a meaningful contribution to the group's activities and plans, they are likely to feel committed to the community's goals and values (Schaps et al., 2004).

What If Positive Reinforcement Provokes Challenging Behavior?

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By B. Kaiser|J.S. Rasminsky 

Page 14: What is Challenging Behaviour

Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

With some children, positive reinforcement seems to have exactly the opposite effect from what you expect. At the first kind word, they throw games on the floor or kick the nearest person. Why do children react this way? One reason is that your style or choice of reinforcement may not suit that particular child. Perhaps your positive attention is too intense and the child’s neurological or sensory system can’t handle it. In that case, you need to tone it down. If the child is old enough, you could ask him what kind of feedback he’d prefer (Andersen, 2000). If another teacher has more success with this child, watch her, talk to her about what she does, and try it. Ask yourself, “What would Louise do in this situation?”

But the most likely explanation is that the child rarely receives positive attention, and it scares and worries him. When he punches the child beside him, he knows exactly what to expect from the people around him and he’s far more comfortable. Children like this eventually become used to criticism from adults and rejection from their peers, and they begin to believe that they deserve this treatment. Convinced that they’re bad, they dedicate themselves to proving it. Their motto seems to be, “If you think that I’m bad, why should I be good?” If their negative self-image is too strong, they will try to get you to treat them the way everyone else does—negatively—because in their own eyes they couldn’t possibly be worthy of your positive attention (Giuliani, 1997; Milne-Smith, 1995). This state of affairs severely damages their self-esteem and makes it difficult for them to succeed in the future.

When a child has so much trouble with positive reinforcement, it is tempting to conclude that it is the last thing he needs. But such children need more encouragement, not less. So what can you do? Combating the child’s negative view of himself takes commitment, patience, and perseverance. It requires you to trust, respect, and care for the child so that he can learn to trust, respect, and care for himself. It’s important to believe in the child’s ability to succeed, to look for what he can do instead of what he can’t do. If you expect him to hurt others, that’s what he will do. But if you believe that he can learn to make friends, enjoy circle time, finish the assignment, wait his turn, his potential for success will increase. Your confidence in him can’t guarantee it, but it will help.

Give the child lots of nonverbal positive reinforcement, showing your affection and your belief in him in your body language, tone of voice, and behavior. Watch carefully to see what he likes, what he’s good at, what works as a reinforcer for him. Each day find opportunities to offer him activities you know he enjoys, books he can read successfully, games that entice him to cooperate. Notice and create positive moments with him, playing at something he chooses himself, letting him direct the play, and telling him that you like talking and playing with him. Include other children when you can. Gradually you will increase his comfort zone and accustom him to feeling better about himself and less anxious when he is behaving appropriately.

Behavior Disorders

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photo by: ellievanhoutte Children with behavior disorders are those who are aggressive, social withdrawal, and have temper tantrums. They also like to lie, steal, hit and fight. These children have much anxiety and some degree of depression.

Behavior Issues in Children and Adolescents

As a parent, it can be hard to know how your child behaves at school. If you hear that your child is acting out, whether it's a comment on a report card or something mentioned in a parent-teacher conference, how do you know if it is a one-time problem or a serious behavioral issue? Read on for helpful tips and information on some of the most common behavior disorders.

Behavior Problems

photo by: Jennifer R Children have many behavior problems including hitting, fighting, stealing, bullying, etc. It's important for parents and educators to understand that children do not misbehave to get attention and behavioral problems in children can be due to a combination of factors. Parents and school professionals should seek out what these factors are.

Page 16: What is Challenging Behaviour

 

What Is Challenging Behavior?Print  Email 

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Search Topic

Behavior Problems Help    Behavior Problems   

Behavior Disorders   

Behavior Disorders Recent Research   

Buy this book »

Related Articles What Causes Challenging Behavior?    Eight Practical Tips for Parents of Young Children with Challenging Behavior   

Biological Risk Factors for Challenging Behavior   

School as a Risk Factor for Challenging Behavior   

Challenging Behavior and Social Context   

What If Positive Reinforcement Provokes Challenging Behavior?    

Page 17: What is Challenging Behaviour

Related Topics Behavior Issues in Children and Adolescents    Behavior Problems   

Behavior Disorders   

Behavior Problems Help   

By B. Kaiser|J.S. Rasminsky 

Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

Challenging behavior is any behavior that

interferes with children’s learning, development, and success at play is harmful to the child, other children, or adults

puts a child at high risk for later social problems or school failure (Klass, Guskin, and Thomas, 1995; Ritchie and Pohl, 1995).

We do not call this behavior challenging because it summons you to a duel or battle but because it is threatening, provocative, and stimulating, all at the same time.

First of all, this behavior is challenging for the child. It puts him in danger by preventing him from learning what he needs to know to succeed in school and get along well with his peers. It is also challenging for him because he probably doesn’t have much control over it. Even if he knows what to do instead—and chances are he doesn’t—his ability to regulate his feelings and actions just isn’t up to the job yet. Improving matters will be an enormous challenge for him.

Perhaps more to the point, challenging behavior is challenging for us, the people around him, his family and teachers. In the face of this behavior, we often find ourselves at a loss. We don’t know how to turn things around, how to make the situation tenable, how to help the child get back on track, behaving appropriately and feeling good about himself.

Yet it is essential for us to rise to this challenge. The child’s future can depend on it—to say nothing of our own sanity and the well-being of the other children in the classroom. By its very nature, a challenge is difficult, but once conquered it brings incredible rewards. This is a challenge that is worthy of your very best efforts.

Any child can exhibit challenging behavior. To begin with, it is developmentally appropriate early in life, and all children continue to use it as they grow—once in a while, when they’re angry or having a bad day. Some even use it for an extended period when parents separate or divorce, a new baby arrives, a parent loses a job or falls ill, or the family moves to a different place. Children find such events confusing and difficult, and they often react with challenging behavior. Although most children eventually manage to cope with these experiences, they

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usually need extra support and understanding from their families and teachers for quite some time.

Then there are the children whose problems are more difficult, the children who have come to rely on challenging behavior as the best way to respond to a situation. Their behavior is challenging in all three aspects of the definition and demands very special care and handling. With the appropriate information and strategies, the adults in their lives can play a pivotal role, helping these children avoid serious risk and blossom into the fully functioning people all children deserve to become.

This book focuses on aggressive, antisocial, and disruptive behaviors because their impact is so dramatic and so vast. But many of the ideas here will work equally well with children who display timid and withdrawn behaviors, which certainly also qualify as challenging.

Isn’t challenging behavior sometimes appropriate for very young children?

Many children discover the use of physical aggression before their first birthday, as they become interested in controlling their own possessions and activities (Coie and Dodge, 1998). In one study, most mothers reported that their children grabbed, pushed, bit, hit, attacked, bullied, or were “cruel” by the time they turned 2 years old. Children with siblings exhibit more aggressive behavior than only children, and when there’s a brother or sister in the family, boys and girls behave equally aggressively (Pepler and Craig, 1999; Tremblay et al., 1999).

In the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, a random sample of more than 20,000 children living in Canada, researchers found that the use of physical aggression peaks between the ages of 27 and 29 months, when 53.3 percent of boys and 41.1 percent of girls are trying it out (Tremblay et al., 1996b). As Richard E. Tremblay of the University of Montreal points out, “The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] this is the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress” (Holden, 2000).