Disruptive Behavior Disorder : Aggression

Every child has been yelled at by their parent or their guardian. Frequently, a child is guilty of misbehaving. Often, parents are screaming for no apparent reason. Each child has felt the fear rise from their toes to their brain worrying about what they could’ve done. Once they figured out it’s nothing they have done, children get confused. They

A developmental psychologist videotapes interactions between groups of toddlers and their care givers to determine which intervention methods most effectively manage aggression.

     As immediately as infancy, children express individual characteristics that can be considered aggressive. The child can be aggressive in the way it cries, the way it plays and the way it attains attention. Parents of children that have a hard time sleeping through the night, trouble accepting affection and/or difficulties with hyperactivity are often so stressed and bothered by these behaviors that they resort to negative reinforcement techniques in their parenting. Examples of this can be seen in spanking, harsh reprimanding or even ignoring the child’s behaviors. By using negative reinforcement, the parents are unknowingly strengthening the prevalence of these behaviors, and therefore, the risk of these types

A developmental psychologist videotapes interactions between groups of toddlers and their care givers to determine which intervention methods most effectively manage aggression.

In the afterschool program, there would be recurring instances of disruptive behaviors and we would observe that the behavior had a direct connect to the trauma the child had gone through. A violent child witnesses violence as a norm and may use that to communicate anger or frustration where on the other hand, a child that has not undergone trauma expresses those same feelings in a positive and more productive way. Understanding experiences that the child has, and how this in turn impacts how they responds to different situations creates an awareness of how to best support

The general problem is that because of a decrease in character values taught in the home and in the classroom, an increase in disruptive behavior among young children ages four years old to eleven years old have been dominate in elementary schools (Embry, & Flannery, in press; Topo, 2003;) Manning (2011) notes that proven moral intellect is a crucial factor in aggression and school violence. Also, enough research displays moral reasoning of aggressive and antisocial children tend to be self-oriented, focused on the attainment of peripheral rewards, and the evading of punishment. The specific problem is that there is a need for moral virtues to be taught daily to young children and upper elementary children in the classroom among poverty area elementary schools to help students with the issues of inappropriate behavior (Berkowitz & Bier, 2005; Character Education Partnership, 2003; Davis, 2007).

This can improve their child’s development because physical violence has been correlated to more negative attributes that a child portrays (Kazdin,

There are several in-home treatments for reducing child physical abuse (Barnett Miller-Perrin Perrin 184). With Project SafeCare parents actively acquire needed skills through techniques such as completing homework assignments and demonstrating (modeling) desirable parental behaviors (Barnett, Miller-Perrin, Perrin 185). Behavior - based treatment programs focuses on parent’s behavior, the child’s behavior, parent-child interactive behaviors, or all three (Barnett, Miller-Perrin, Perrin 185). With behavior-based treatments parents are taught the effects of reinforcement and punishment on children’s behavior, appropriate methods of delivering reinforcement and punishment, importance of consistency in discipline and so on. There are other treatments that deals with, children learning how to express their feelings, parents writing letters of apologies for being abusive, and the children writing about the traumatic elements of his/her abuse, and counseling (Barnett,

On a smaller scale though, a number of interventional programs have been developed to address childhood aggression. One in particular called The Second Step Violence Prevention Curriculum, is a school-based program for elementary school aged children intended to teach social skills relating to managing anger, controlling impulses, and promoting prosocial behavior such as empathy. This program was established by the Committee for Children, they are a global nonprofit focused on promoting social and academic success in children based in Seattle, Washington (Committee for Children, 2014). Most intervention programs are addressing aggression as a developmental outcome during adolescence, when recent studies are proving that intervening during adolescence misses the sensitive period. This program has been evaluated by Taub (2001) of its' effectiveness in the United States. Second Step works as a interactive program integrated into the elementary school curriculum. The lessons incorporate modeling prosocial behavior, role-play, and feedback. Role-playing is actually the biggest component of the program. During this portion the teacher models good behavior, the children practice it, feedback is given, and positive reinforcement is encouraged. These lessons are conducted two days per week for 30 minutes at a time. School counselors had extensive training in workshops hosted by the creators in Seattle, and then they would come to the school to train the entire staff. Taub (2011) evaluated 790 2nd and 3rd grade students. There was a control school that did not practice Second Step and an intervention school that incorporated the curriculum for a whole year. After a two-week follow up, results illustrated a significant difference between the behaviors in both groups in the playground and cafeteria

It is common for parents and their children to have disagreements and to have arguments but sometimes these disagreements can turn into abuse. Children usually use violence to try to “control or bully them” (Parenting and Child Health, n.d.) This violence usually occurs when the child “frightens, threatens or physically hurts them. It can involve using abusive language, pushing, shoving, kicking, throwing things, or threatening with knives or other weapons” ((Parenting and Child Heathen’s.) Children may abuse their parents due to the normalization of that parent getting abused by the other parent within their household. The child may use the parent that abusing the other parent as a model for the way they should act towards their parent as well and justify their actions simply as something that they observed in their household. The violence that children commit against their parents affects that subsystem because it leaves it broken. There is a strain within the parent and child relationship that forms a direct result of constant conflict and abuse between the child and parent. Sometimes, in child-child relationships, an older sibling may become “more aggressive” with their younger sibling because of the abuse that they have witnessed and been exposed to. (Fantuzzo, Mohr, 1999) The children can become socialized by the parents to believe that

In this study, the researchers were looking for a variable that may have been previously overlooked in determining early signs of violent behavior in infants. The idea of the experiment was to monitor pairs of infants and their vocabulary development, as well as the number of violent behaviors. 562 infants were chosen for the study. When the children are at 19 months of age, their parents were instructed to record the number of words that they had heard their children say. They were also asked to record the number of violent behaviors that they observed such as kicking, biting, stealing and bullying when interacting with others. The final results showed a “modest

S. Lee, J. Manganello, J. Rice, C. Taylor (2010) preformed a study to understand childhood aggression. The journal article of Mothers’ Spanking of 3-Year-Old Children and Subsequent Risk of Children’s Aggressive Behavior starts by saying that they are not the first to perform this research and many of studies have displayed connection between corporal punishment with children and child aggression. They are testing their research with new controlling factors, which have not been controlled together before. (Lee et al., 2010) The main goal of the article is to determine the association between the use of corporal punishment against 3-year-old children and recognize later aggressive behavior among those children.

Although research that investigate aggressive behaviour or antisocial behaviour in early childhood increased, studies that concentrate on young children’s antisocial behaviour are still limited, especially for children before two years of age (Lorber, Del Vecchio, & Slep, 2018). Research of infants’ physical aggression has not developed significantly as researchers may consider their limbs as ‘weakness’ and they do not have ‘intention’ in their physical aggression (Tremblay, 2000). However, some authors argued that infants had learned that the use of force could be a useful method in retaking for possession of toys they had put down or stored in the mother’s lap (Hay, Hurst, Waters, & Chadwick, 2011). The result of their study suggested that whether infants’ motives go beyond the eagerness to retake their items was not quite clear (Hay et al., 2011). It is believed that infants age between one and two are intentionally forceful, whereas necessarily hostile, in their conflicts with other children (Hay et al.,

In a study conducted by Mark Cummings and his colleagues, he proved that despite their age, infants are still well aware of their surroundings. In the same study Cummings proved “20- month-old toddlers showed increased amounts of aggression with their playmates after they had been exposed to anger or loud arguing between adults.” (Groves 187). This study relates back to the idea that exposure to domestic violence at a young age can greatly impact a child's way of interacting with others (187).

Disruptive behaviors are conditions that can have a great influence in the teaching environment. Disruptive behaviors unswervingly hinder the ability of the teacher or the capability of a learner to benefit from their classroom experiences. Students attend schools with hopes of being productive citizens of society. I like to think of students as future leaders of tomorrow! For the most part, students attend school because it is the law. A learning environment should have actively engaged students, who are eager to participate and show knowledge is being acquired on a daily basis. However, some students are bored and disengaged with academic struggles, due to non-active lessons. Certain life factors such as family problems, financial difficulties are all factors that distract and contribute to students disruptive behaviors. One of the most detrimental settings for a teacher in a class is classroom management. Classroom management is defined as being "the methods and strategies an educator uses to maintain a classroom environment that is conducive to student success and learning" (McCreary, 2011). Disorderly student conduct is unfavorable to the entire academic process because they impede with the learning process of other classmates and cause teachers not to be able to instruct teachers most effectively.