LITTLE ROCK — Q: Our son started full-day kindergarten in September. For the first three months he had no problem with his behavior at school, but for the past few weeks he has gotten in trouble for talking, not listening, and he spit at a child at school today. Taking away privileges hasn’t made a difference in his behavior. He was always such a well behaved child so we are at our wits’ end as far as what to do. Any suggestions for punishment would be greatly appreciated.
A: Sometimes punishment is the answer for a classroom behavior problem; sometimes it isn’t. In this case, I am reluctant to recommend punishment (but I’ll go ahead and describe an approach that may work) because your son’s problems began rather suddenly after three initial months of good behavior. That’s certainly puzzling. It suggests that something happened - and is still happening - at school to cause this change in your son’s attitude.That intuition is strengthened by the fact that he has never been a discipline problem.
Is the teacher young or inexperienced? Did some incident occur - an embarrassing one, perhaps - in class or on the playground that might have caused the other children to change their attitude toward your son? Is he being teased by his classmates? Did his best classroom friend suddenly decide to abandon him in favor of some other child? You first need to do a certain amount of detective work in order to determine if such an incident did occur. The fact that taking privileges away hasn’t worked to set your son back on the right path leadsme to think there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
Sometimes a seemingly small event can rapidly cascade into a major problem. If so, then it may be that things have gone downhill to the point where a change of teacher, even a change of school, is called for - a fresh start, in other words.
When it can be determined that a classroom behavior problem is nothing more and nothing less than a classroom behavior problem, I generally recommend a consequence based approach involving loss of privileges on “bad” school days. This requires that the teacher provide daily feedback concerning the child’s behavior. She can, for example, e-mail a brief daily report to the parents at the end of every school day.
At-home privileges depend on a good report. The best results are obtained when the daily report involves no shades of gray. In other words, the child was either incident-free or not - and exactly what constitutes an incident must be defined clearly in advance. One such event results in the child losing all privileges - including television, all other electronic entertainment, and afterschool activities. In addition, his bedtime is moved earlier at least one hour. Two baddays through the school week result in loss of privileges on the weekend.
The combination of daily and weekend consequences usually proves to be enough of a “persuader.” Sometimes, improvement is seen almost immediately; sometimes, it takes a few weeks. The secret, as always when the issue is discipline, is consistency on the part of parent and teacher.
John Rosemond is a family psychologist and the author of several books on rearing children. Write to him at The Leadership Parenting Institute, 1391-A E. Garrison Blvd., Gastonia, N.C. 28054; or see his website at rosemond.com
Family, Pages 25 on 12/26/2012