Using Psychology With Children

Small children can be baffling. They dig in their heels, refuse to budge, and leave the adults around them grasping for a way to respond. The usual reflex is to reach for anger or some form of punishment. That reflex rarely helps. Force tends to push a child further into frustration, and the standoff only gets worse. So the better question is where to look for an answer, and the answer usually starts with the child's own psychology. Figure out why the child is behaving the way they are, and you have something to work with. This is as true for a teacher in a classroom as it is for a parent at home.

Teachers carry the same load that parents do, just across a room full of kids instead of one or two. Tantrums happen. So does the child who simply will not pay attention to the lesson. The quick judgment is to file that student under troublesome or slow, and move on. Before settling on that label, it helps to spend the time working out what is actually going on. Often the label turns out to be badly wrong. Maybe something at home is sitting heavy on the child and leaving no room to concentrate at school. Maybe the child just takes a little longer than classmates to absorb new material. Neither case calls for punishment. Both call for patience and some real warmth.

Once you start reading a child's behavior this way, helping them becomes a lot less of a fight. A method a lot of teachers lean on is simple record-keeping: one running file per student, tracking how each one is doing academically. When a child's work slips, it shows up on the page right away. That gives the teacher a fast read on where the trouble might be and what pulled the grades down. The quicker a teacher reads the child, the quicker a workable response appears.

Children's behavior is not fixed. It shifts, and that shifting is normal. Treat it as something to build on rather than something to stamp out, and you are already pointed in a more useful direction.