7 Reasons for Challenging Behaviors

On her website, consultant Rae Pica lists seven reasons she believes we are seeing more challenging behaviors in children lately. Here’s a synopsis of them:

Children have almost no time to play — something that early childhood researcher and professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige calls ‘nature’s plan’ and ‘a biological drive.’ Experts around the globe agree with this statement. Can you imagine if we insisted that kittens and puppies stay still? If we prevented them from frolicking and playing? The idea is ludicrous – and it should be just as ludicrous when we’re discussing children…

We are demanding that children accomplish things for which they are in no way developmentally equipped…

Children get little to no downtime...

We treat children as though they exist only from the neck up and that only their brains matter, when the research shows and good sense validates the importance of the mind-body connection…

We stifle children’s natural creativity and inherent love of learning through worksheets, standardized tests and curricula, and an insistence on conformity and rote — as opposed to active, authentic — learning…

We pit children against one another with our focus on competition and winning…

Too many children spend hours in front of screens, leading sedentary lives (it’s the sitting thing again) filled with virtual relationships instead of interacting with real people in real life – when the research clearly shows that social-emotional development is critical in early childhood and that in-person interactions are necessary for social-emotional development. Additionally, we have research demonstrating that screen time is creating depression and aggression in children…"

Source: http://www.raepica.com/2019/05/challenging-behavior-in-early-childhood-settings/

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