Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/challenging-behavior/5017426/
It seems as if everyone in early childhood education is talking about children with challenging or difficult behaviors. The widely-publicized study of preschool expulsions by Walter Gilliam at the Yale Child Study Center, documenting the high rate of three- and four-year-old children expelled from various categories of preschool settings because of disruptive or aggressive behaviors, brought a lot of these concerns and issues to a head. What can we do to help children and their families, and the teachers and providers who care for them, before children’s behavior escalates so far that staff gives up on teaching and supporting them?One of the findings of the Gilliam study was that programs with access to some kind of mental health consultation have lower rates of expulsions. At Associated Early Care and Education we have been providing mental health and social service support to our child care and early education programs for over 20 years, and we do not expel children from our programs.
Associated provides programming from birth to school in centers and family child care homes for a multilingual, multiracial, and multicultural population of families who are eligible for publicly supported early education and care. About one in ten of the ...