Analysis of Difficult Behavior in Children in Works Ronald Mah, Sami Timimi, Maria Tatar - Article Example

Summary Task Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Name Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Course Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Lecture Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Date Summary task 1: Ronald Mah; difficult behavior in early childhood. The diverse behaviors present among the children in a classroom are hard to go unnoticed by the class teacher. As such teachers are more comfortable working with some children as compared with others. It is therefore no surprise when a teacher’s mood lightens up because the child who always causes trouble fails to attend class for a day. After all, teachers are human and just like everyone else want to enjoy their work. Questions have been asked about how these diverse children grow to have successful or failed lives, socially and academically as they progress through the various communities that life has set before them. The diverse behaviors present in a class are just a representation of the particular influences that the home, school, neighborhood, or media have on them. The various communities that a child goes through as they grow old include the home, pre-school, middle school, high school, college, membership in teams, performing groups, various partnerships and the workplace. Parameters for measurement of success should be based away from material possession such as trophies, money or academic accolades. The home sets the base on which a child develops various behaviors and values as well as discipline. Teachers face the task of dealing with the various diverse mindsets present in a class as well as impact knowledge on these children. This would be an easy task were it for not for the lack of concentration and inattentiveness of these children. Families may fall short impacting the expected levels of discipline that the community expects them to impact onto their children or they may do a more than descent job at it. Children from families who have done a decent job have it easy when adapting to newer communities as they grow old. Teachers enjoy having children from such families in their class. Children from effectively functional and healthy families are surprised by communities that lack functionality but they are still able hold themselves together. Children from families that lack functionality will still be successful though there is a continued psychological and emotional deformation impacted o them by their dysfunctional families. Families that force themselves to respect the individuality and personality of their child so much so that they adapt to conform to the child’s needs end up doing much more harm than good as such a child is unable to conform to other communities outside of the family. Teachers are almost certainly not able to help such children who expect other children to accommodate their personality and such children respond through anger and withdrawal. It is such children who the teachers dread to have in their class. A fine line must be drawn between respecting a child’s individuality and letting such individualities interfere with how such other children express their own. Too much respect for a child’s individuality will be at the detriment of their own social life, as they will face rejection from their future communities. Families offer way too much supervision to the children more than a teacher with 30 children in his class can afford to them. As the word would suggest discipline is acquired through learning from those who are well behaved. Parents fail to recognize this and often try to force their children to make decisions that they approve of, often with disastrous results of rebellion. Supervision should be done with the aim of teaching the children how to make the right decisions and develop self-discipline. Learning is a process that comprises of study and practice; both have to occur for learning to have taken place (Mah, 2006). Through practice, children make mistakes and from them they build up experience. Teachers need to understand and help children deal with the stresses and disappointments in life as he will not be there when such shows up in life, all they will have is experience garnered when dealing with such situations before. Traits such as classroom management, ability to impact knowledge and positive attitudes towards student success are desirable in a teacher in order to help mould a child. A teacher’s attitude towards a child with a challenge will affect the other children’s perception of such a child. Teachers must not ridicule children with challenges in front of their classmates. Instead they should help these children develop social competence though cooperation, experiences with other children and development of a sense of social cues. Children may be unable to fit in among other children as they do not understand how to behave in certain situations. The ability to conform to the arbitrary rules that are set by culture is important in helping children to socially fit among others. Payne (1996) as cited by Mah (2006) attributes generational poverty to the inability by some children to identify these hidden and arbitrary cues. School culture has different cues from those impacted by families. Disciplined children should therefore have no problem adapting in the various diverse communities and being successful in them. Teachers should consider whether there is a conflict between the family and the classroom communities in terms of the expectations. Parents should avoid from adapting and conforming to the child’s personalities as this hampers the child’s ability to be social. There is need for children to learn the various social norms to associate with the different communities so as to be successful irrespective of the community they are in. Summary task 2: Sami Timimi: Naughty boys and Anti-social Behavior, ADHD and the role of culture. Current diagnosis levels of ADHD are high enough to suggest that it is somewhat of a viral or bacterial disease. There are enough cases of children who are on the common drug prescription for the diagnosis of ADHD. Diagnosis is passed by psychiatrist and pediatricians after having observed such symptoms as over-activity, poor concentration levels and almost always acting on impulse. The stimulant prescribed as treatment for ADHD is Ritalin, a drug that can be compared to cocaine. Prevalence is high in almost all western cultures. With the use of this drug almost similar to substance abuse, concerned stake holders would raise their concerns, sooner or later. Indeed the unmasking of this high level of ADHD diagnosis is just a tip of the iceberg. Unacceptable malpractices are being perpetrated by the major stake holders in the pharmaceutical industry to further increase sales of stimulants. Common malpractices include paying off industry experts so as to attend advisory boards, using them to pass on misleading information to unsuspecting parents and teachers. Other malpractices include paying of people so that they can answer questionnaires. Evidence based practice research released to the public is only that which shows successful trials with their drugs. Symptoms that practitioners attribute to ADHD are quite general archetypical behaviors of human beings; low concentration time-spans, substance abuse, delinquency, depression, learning difficulties, bullying, poor grades and poor social ties. The majority of stake holders are for this practice and only a few concerned parties raise concerns about the validity of ADHD diagnosis, often to no effect. Parents and teachers are crumbling under the pressures of child bearing so much so that whatever high expectations they have of their children are beyond the realms of reality. Practitioners can then easily propose that the reason why children cannot meet these expectations is because they have ADHD. Children who have been taken off from Ritalin by concerned parents have reported positive effects such as rejuvenation of normal eating habits, rekindled ability to express themselves as well as regaining of normal weight. Such effects have often gone unreported. The network that seeks to establish ADHD as a diagnostic has an intricate process that takes advantage of the inability of the understaffed teachers to handle the diverse inherent behaviors that are present in a class. Hence whenever a student exhibits disturbing behavior that a teacher cannot quite tame the solution seems to be blaming such traits on ADHD and prescribing a dosage of Ritalin. On realizing that the students’ inherent behaviors are still persistent, they look for scapegoats as to why the behavior is so persistent. Often scapegoats include divorce or a change in the teacher in charge, but they often agree to increase the dosage of Ritalin. Doctors seem to have lost the ability to correctly diagnose. Either that or all that they care about is making money. The majority of practitioners believe in ADHD as a diagnosis with only a few believing otherwise. A case study of a practitioner who did not agree with the ADHD diagnosis highlights how perfect understanding of a particular situation and the psychosocial causes of behavioral problems will work better than ADHD diagnosis. The practitioner recorded a swift and successful transition away from Ritalin for most of the cases that he was monitoring. Ritalin has often been compared to cocaine and it is well known to produce some level of highness. Persons on Ritalin are more likely to use cocaine and tobacco as compared to their peers who are not under prescription. However, such information is concealed whenever parents are weighing options on whether to prescribe Ritalin for their children. Increase in the diagnosis of ADHD is attributed to either an increased skepticism on how child behaviors are viewed in relation to ADHD or an increase in child behaviors related to ADHD. There is need to analyze the environment that shapes the behaviors of children. Our conception of children impulses has shifted from letting them run wild and free to wanting to control them. Reasons attributed to this shift include an ever increasing child right’s culture and tougher times for the average family. Families now contend with poverty, family break-ups, drug and substance abuse and violence, as well as decreased social welfare services. Research hypothesizes that ADHD symptoms are similar to traumatic patients. Trauma during infancy forces these children to create a habitual response to an external threat which causes them to be over-active whenever they detect a threat. Ford et al (2000) as cited by Timimi (2005) indicates that research onto environmental causes of ADHD proposes that trauma and abuse are probable causes. Modern stressful living means that the parents may be unable to provide attention and a healthy relationship to their children. Mothers unable to bring up their children will happily lay the blame on ADHD; child rearing is hard because the child has an inability and not because I am an incompetent mother. Therapeutic solutions do exist that can solve the problems that ADHD stimulants propose to solve though it is necessary to precisely identify those in need of it. ADHD diagnosis is a cheap and less intensive way of helping children in the short term. However, since this therapy continues for quite a few years, if the society chose to empower children, collaborate between parents and children so as to find a solution and finish this off with therapy, the labor required would be far less and the results far more desirable. Behavior therapy is the century’s old habit of punishment to bad and reward for good behaviors. This and drug therapy is a solution that would work. Summary task 3: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! Maria Tatar. Underlying impact of tales told to children on their behavior is not to be overlooked. Earlier generations knew of this and hence their insistence on tales that focused on stories that highlighted reward for the obedient and punishment for those who acted on the contrary. Other themes that were often highlighted included stubbornness and curiosity, where heroes and heroines of tales who often were stubborn or curious meeting their ends in sad fashions. One such tale from the Grimms’ Nursery and household Tales highlights the stubbornness and curiosity of a girl who could not listen to her parents’ warnings to not visit a house that was said to have mercurially strange happenings inside. “People say that there are unusual things about her house and there are strange things inside….all that’s made me very curious.” The little girl remarks (Tatar, 1993, p.22). The girls visit is short-lived as she is supernaturally turned to a log of firewood and cast into the fire by the evil Frau Trude, owner of the house. Disobedience is highlighted as punishable by a short life, a theme that is echoed in Proverbs (Prov.30: 17) as well as the Ten Commandments. A shift in the 19th century fairy tales saw them offer a chance of redemption to disobedient children. ‘My Own Self’ highlights the story of a disobedient child who only changed to good behavior after a near death escapade with a fairy, just as his mother had warned. Mary’s child is an example of a story that highlights punishment that is due to curiosity and disobedience much like the story of Adam and Eve from the bible. Such cautionary tales aim to deter children from curiosity and encourage them to be well behaved. It is likely that children have monsters hidden away in their imagination as a reflection of some of the ugly behaviors of their parents. Fairy tales often present moral values as well as the reward for the hero or punishment for the villain, though the punishment/ reward is more of an attraction than the moral teaching. The degree of punishment is often controversial as they seem heavy, though collectors of fairy tales have justified the judgment on grounds of morality or the need to emphasize on the moral teaching rather than the severity of punishment. A closer analysis of some lullabies reveals that they are set on a soothing tone even though their text may contain peculiarly hidden messages of rage at a child’s squealing or of threats, such as being eaten by a monster, if the child does not sleep and quickly for that matter. Luckily, children are too young to take anything from the text as all that matters to them is how soothing the lullaby is. However, there is no telling what damage such lullabies might do to older siblings of young ones, though they are more likely to cause anxiety than satisfaction. It is however quite evident those caregivers lay more emphasis on venting out their anger more than to soothing children to sleep. Cautionary tales also fail to balance between laying more emphasis on passing on morals and offering an avenue for narrators to vent out their anger. These tales seem to pass an unjust punishment to an undeserving offense; little red riding hood meets too harsh a fate for an offense that is petty. Some cautionary tales however seem to encourage sadism with the type of punishment that the villain receives. Often, children will rejoice at some punishments. Folklore are set out to be predictable such that actions are prohibited and consequences set out if the villain chooses to do as prohibited, which he often does, but this is not the case with red riding hood. Perhaps this injustice results from the need to make the tale lively and action packed through the use of tension and suspense as most of them were told to pass time during such activities such as harvests and other household chores. Surveys close to times when these folklore tales were just oral presentations show that they were meant for adult entertainment and as such were majorly comic and lacking in moral teachings that presented in later versions of these folklore tales that were cast into them at the cost of ridding the humor and introducing condescending judgments to traits that might have once been seen as brave, heroic and desirable. Frau Trude’s story was a parade of melodrama and humor before 19th century writers transformed it into a tale of a strong-willed and overly curios girl who deserves to be punished. Exemplary stories also dish out harsh and severe suffering to protagonists; in Star Coin’s, the tale has a lengthy account of the girl’s suffering of hunger and cold before she is finally rewarded with coin to stay reach for the rest of her life, though this account is only short and precise. “Little March” contains a concise description of the girl’s trials and tribulations for her humility and selfness and the harshness of her death before she meets her reward in heaven. The fact that these tales were meant for children is only amusing to us; people in the pre-modern era were predisposed to death as a gateway to a happier life. Tales during this era had no problem with giving grave descriptions of horror in melodramatic and humorous fashion. However, with the age of reason came the need for this tales to become self motivated and thus saw the introduction of moral teachings, before an era that saw them revert back to being entertainment for adult audiences while still being molded into children folklore. This aim of tales to try and please both adult and child audiences fails as they lean more toward adult entertainment than children source of moral teaching, which they terribly fail at impacting. Bibliographies Mah, R 2006, Difficult behavior in early childhood: positive discipline for prek-3 classrooms and beyond. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Corwin Press. Tatar, M 1993, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! Fairy tales and the culture of childhood. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University press. Timimi, S 2005, Naughty boys: Anti-social behavior, ADHD and the role of culture. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Read More