Aggressive Behaviours in Early Years
Aggressive behaviours, such as hitting, biting pushing, pulling and scratching, are not uncommon amongst young children. In fact, in many ways it is part of their development as they use behaviour to understanding themselves, others, and the world. When it comes to brain development, children do not develop the ability to understand others’ feelings until around the age of 4. Children are primarily egocentric until the age of 7, meaning all of the child’s thinking is self-centred. This is because children run off primal instinct, which is to survive and ensure their needs are met! However, children do not have the ability to differentiate between their wants and needs. For example, they will view wanting a toy the same way as they will view needing food to eat. In addition to this, young children have not yet developed the ability to understand their own feelings, never mind be able to manage them. When children experience intense emotions, such as frustration, anger, insult, upset, or even excitement, they only way they know how to deal with it is through behaviour. Children also communicate through behaviour. For example, babies cry to communicate their needs to you, otherwise you wouldn’t have a clue if something was up. Children will throw toys at others or lash out to express their frustrations as they do not have the ability to verbalise it.
Food for thought: Imagine if you completely lost your voice, and someone did something that REALLY irritated you and you could feel your blood boiling. How would you feel? How much self control would you need to be able to keep yourself calm and refrain from using behaviour to express your anger? We’ve all experienced that blood boiling feeling where it’s like our entire body feels electric and there’s an intense need to let it all out. Then imagine someone shouting at you for expressing your emotions the only way you can in that moment. Imagine how difficult that would be for us as adults… this is probably how children feel most of the time when they get frustrated.
As adults, we have a fully developed brain and are able to rationalise and manage ourselves appropriately (most of the time!). How can we expect children to do this when they don’t even know what feeling they are experiencing? As adults, we know aggressive behaviour is “wrong” and what behaviours are socially acceptable, but young children have not developed that understanding yet. To them, they haven’t got a clue why they can’t hit or scratch someone when they feel a certain way.
Aggressive behaviour in children can bring out the frustration and anger within ourselves. It’s completely normal to feel angry yourself. However, it is vital that we remind ourselves of all of the above, remain calm, and support children with their emotional development and self-awareness.
Here are some contributing factors of aggressive behaviour which are important to consider:
- Temperament — natural characteristics and personality traits can have a huge impact. Some children are just naturally more laid back, whereas others may be less adaptable. However, this does not mean that the child cannot be coached to manage themselves and their emotions more appropriately.
- Environment — this is a big one. Children learn via observation, experience and repetition. If their environment has links to aggression via TV content (e.g. superhero cartoons), older siblings, aggressive peers, physical discipline, parents who fight, etc., they will copy what they see.
- Triggers — we all develop associations to certain things, smells, sounds, people and places. If your child feels frustration by the same things on a regular basis, they may develop a triggered response. In these instances, you may notice habitual behaviours set in, so interventions are needed to break the cycle.
Here are some tips for how we can support children with their behaviour as part of their development:
- Identify any triggers. This will help to detect any patterns which you can then prevent or manage. Every day, babies, toddlers, children, teens and adults encounter numerous triggers ranging from; hunger, tiredness, frustration, pain, desire, sadness, excitement. The younger a child is, the more they will react to the trigger via impulse (their behaviour). What then happens following the behaviour will either encourage or discourage the behaviour. This can be a long process as we have to figure out whether it reinforces or discourages, and to do this we have to explore what patterns are occurring. For example, for a child, any attention is good attention, so if the aggression is met with lot of attention, the child will then associate the aggressive behaviour with having their needs met. This will then lead to a viscous cycle. Once you know the triggers, you can put things in place to help prevent the aggressive behaviour, or break the cycle.
- Model appropriate behaviour — if we are responding to the child’s anger with our own anger, what are we teaching them? How can we tell a child off for being aggressive if we are shouting at them aggressively? If children observe certain behaviours around them or towards them, they will view them as appropriate ways to behave. If we’re going to talk the talk, we need to walk the walk.
- Keep it simple! — In the heat of the moment, limit debates and lots of talking. Just pinpoint the feeling and the boundary. For example, “You hit Jack, hitting hurts”. No questions or debates. If we shout “no!”, this can further trigger the child and lead to an escalation of behaviour.
- When behaviour differs at home and nursery – If your child is hurting other children at nursery but does not display this behaviour at home, this can be because nursery is a highly stimulating environment and frustrations/triggers are a lot more likely to occur. You cannot offer discipline at home for something that happened earlier in a different place, as the child will not be able to make the connection. Instead, have discussions about feelings and use scripts such as “I don’t like that”, and try not to jump to their every command at home. If they get their needs met instantly at home, this will lead to being highly triggered in nursery (e.g. they will not understand why they can’t instantly have a toy that another child has got).
- Help them identify their emotions by labelling them at various times, E.g. “I can see you are sad”, “you seem very happy!”, “I can see you are angry”, “oh dear, you are very sad” etc. Doing this at different times throughout the day is important as you don’t just want to label emotions only at the times when they are being aggressive. As children develop further understanding (once they are reaching close to age of 3), you can communicate the issue with them more thoroughly. For example, “It is okay you are upset that Alice took the train away from you, but hitting hurts. It is not nice to hit”. It’s important you use sentences that your child can understand.
- Focus on their positive behaviour! — children can be very kind and loving for 99% of the day, yet if they bite or scratch just once, there will be SO much attention focused on that behaviour. It can be difficult at times, but it’s vital to also pay a lot of attention to the child’s kind behaviour and give them specific praise for it. For example, “oh wow, Molly, you are being so kind! Well done!”. Children LOVE praise, and this will make him feel good about themselves. This will also aid them in understanding difference between how being kind makes them feel vs now being unkind makes them feel. Doing this will also prevent a self fulfilling prophecy, as if you are only focusing on the child’s “bad” behaviour, they will begin to view themselves as “bad” therefore will engage in further similar behaviours as they are forming their sense of self and identity.
- Listen, Validate and Distract method – If your child is hitting you at home when you say no to something, you can use the Listen, Validate and Distract method — “I can see that you are upset, we can _______ after we _________. Can you help me with _______?”
- Calm, consistent and logical responses will see this behaviour decrease over time. It’s vital to understand little ones have zero impulse control, so aggressive behaviour can become a reflex.
- All emotions are valid! – We want to refrain from making children feel that they are not allowed to feel frustration, anger, upset, etc. This can lead to emotional difficulties and mental health issues later in life. Instead, our role is to coach children to acknowledge and validate their emotions, and learn appropriate ways of managing them.
- Offer them alternative ways of managing emotions — the key to this is finding out what works for your child. E.g. you may suggest taking quiet time to calm down and self sooth in a quiet environment with very little stimulation, you may get them to move their body to shake out all the anger (and make it fun!), distraction may help them shift their focus on something else they enjoy, etc. Find what works for your child and stick with it so the child learns to use these coping strategies instead of impulsively lashing out.
- For babies and toddlers, use scripts such as “kind hands”, “kind teeth”, “kind feet”, etc to remind your child of appropriate behaviour. It can be useful to make it into an enthusiastic/positive learning opportunity, for example “our feet are for jumping and dancing, not for kicking! Would you like to do a dance to show what your feet can do?”. Providing the distraction will also help them to move on from the trigger.
Overall, it is vital to support and coach children in understanding their emotions and appropriate ways of managing them. They need to understand why certain behaviours are not okay, so they are able to make the decision themselves to refrain from engaging in such behaviours due to emotional awareness, rather than avoid them just to avoid “punishment”. Providing children with more appropriate ways of managing their intense emotions will benefit them as they navigate the world and will protect them from struggling with mental health as they grow older.
It is not easy raising little humans! Remember that there is no such thing as perfect and doing your best is all you can do! Having patience and tolerance whilst supporting your child with their behaviours is very demanding and challenging, so remember to give yourself some credit, too.
It is not easy raising little humans! Remember that there is no such thing as perfect and doing your best is all you can do! Having patience and tolerance whilst supporting your child with their behaviours is very demanding and challenging, so remember to give yourself some credit, too.
@BananaMoon - 1 year ago
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