Adults tend to assume that children who are acting out can control their behavior but are choosing not to. Here's why that assumption is often wrong—not to mention harmful.
. We monitor kids’ development over time. And we have age ranges for typically developing skills— walking, talking, building blocks, social play. We measure these because we can see them. We provide supports and therapies for kids who have delays in these skills, but we don’t assume they can just change their minds to learn how to skip or speak in full sentences at the same time as their peers.
But when children struggle with self-regulation, such as managing big emotions, filtering distractions, or controlling impulses to move or speak—it just looks like “bad behavior.” The developmental challenges are not easy to see outside of behaviors and external emotional expressions. Children who can’t stop moving, or stop calling out so often, or stop drawing on the board and sit down for class aren’t trying to be difficult. They aren’t trying to aggravate us.
Once we got a sense of that, we built a plan that gave her some room to zig and zag. We set a goal with her of not bumping into people and objects, which became part of her game. Parents and school worked as a team, with the therapist and me, to find ways to let Rachel move around when she needed to in and out of the classroom—letting her stand and stretch—with the goal of not interrupting others. She could go sit on the floor on a rug, or she could stand and listen.
This path wasn’t easy—and there were plenty of evolutions of it over time. Some things worked, and some things didn’t. The shift in our assumption was a game-changer for everyone. Meeting any child where they are developmentally—making sure to include self-regulation skills—opens up new worlds. Kids and adults aren’t on opposing sides wherein the adults try to fix the child. Instead, everyone is on the same team, coming together to give the child what they need to thrive.
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