Really difficult kid

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Home : 2002 : October : 14

Really difficult kid
By Same boat, bailing water as fa

I have a child who is similar in some ways to yours, Connie. Mine, who I'll call Jorge, has some behaviors that range from very annoying to seriously dangerous. Mine also stabs with pencils, wrestles, and is deliberately
rough with other children.
My Jorge is repeating 1st grade. His mom abandoned him & his dad when he was a toddler. When Jorge was in kinder, his father went to jail, and since then Jorge is with his father's girlfriend and his half-siblings. He's the family punching bag, unwanted and unloved. No one helps him study for spelling tests, but they sure love to beat him when he fails them.

This kid breaks my heart even when he infuriates me.

Even though our school is really underresourced, I've managed to get him resource room 5x/wk, therapy 2x/wk, and speech therapy 3x/wk. (You know a kid is in trouble when a poor urban school devotes that many resources to one kid!) Not only is this good for Jorge (not least of all because it gives him a range of adults who he can see are invested in his well-being), but also it's good for the other students in my classroom to have 90 minutes a day when Jorge is out of the room.

I've instituted a behavior system in my room that rewards individuals for a certain number of days of good individual behavior, and the whole class for days of good class behavior. Jorge is lagging behind the others, but he's really excited about getting enough stickers to take a dip in the treasure chest, and he tries so hard. One of the ways I try to avert bad behavior is to praise him when he is doing something good, and especially when I see him make a choice to stop doing something bad and do the right thing, even if it's stopping his hopping down the stairs and instead walking one step at a time: "Jorge, I admire the way you made the right decision. I could see you trying and I'm glad you did the right thing. Nice work." I know that Jorge WANTS to be good, so I give him lots of attention when he is, and very little attention when he isn't. If he is harming another student, my focus is on the other student's well-being rather than on punishing or even yelling at Jorge. In fact, I've even started to ask him what kind of attention he wants. When he starts acting out by making noises or doing something disruptive, I tell him that the class can give him our attention so he can get it out of his system, and I direct the class's attention to him. He usually shrinks from this, so I tell him that he can choose WHAT KIND of attention he wants to receive. I make it clearly his choice, and I remind him of this by saying, "Jorge, what kind of attention would you rather have?" when I see him going down the wrong road.

These are just a few of the strategies I'm trying. One more that I am going to implement is an individual behavior mod. plan for him, like the one you mention. I agree with another writer here that you may have to make the increments smaller at first -- 10 minutes on task, one sticker; morning message copied down, one sticker; and so on, so that he can reasonably expect to accumulate the 5 or 10 stickers it will take to get a reward. Start small, let him taste success, increase the challenge by baby steps -- on the next round he has to be on task for 20 minutes; has to participate in a group activity for 5 minutes without hitting anyone; etc.

Good luck.