Badly Behaved Children

                                                 Behaviour

The Incorrigible, John Burr (1831-1893)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

The next time you find your patience tested by a badly-behaved child, consider this: they may not be entirely to blame for their behaviour.

New research shows that children with a condition called conduct disorder, characterised by severe anti-social behaviour, have differences in the wiring connecting the brains’ emotional centres. Scientists from the University of Birmingham said that the findings could open the door to better diagnosis or new treatments because the hallmarks of the condition, such as aggression, vandalism or harming others, are often put down to a lack of discipline at home.

…Researchers scanned the brains of 124 nine to 18-year olds with conduct disorder and 174 without. The scans revealed differences in the white matter pathways of the brain among young people with the condition.

(The Times, 2019) 

                 

Bad behaviour is dead. Long live challenging behaviour. Challenging behaviour is dead. Long live conduct disorder.  

Meanwhile…

*One in four teachers in the UK say they experience physical violence from pupils at least once a week, and many say poor behaviour is making them want to leave the profession, according to a survey by a teaching union.

The NASUWT union found that 24% of the nearly 5,000 teachers who sent in feedback said they were on the receiving end of physical attacks each week, with many reporting they had been “shoved or barged” while a significant percentage said they had been hit, punched or kicked.

Nearly nine out of ten of the teachers who responded said they had received some sort of verbal or physical abuse from pupils in the past year, including 86% who said they had been sworn at and 46% who said they had been verbally threatened.

… “Having taught for almost 40 years I have witnessed a demonstrable and seemingly unstoppable deterioration in pupil behaviour,” one said. “Teachers are, it seems, now expected to tolerate verbal abuse and threats as ‘par for the course’ and, quite literally, an occupational hazard.”

(The Guardian, 20.4.2019)

There must be procedures in schools for badly behaved children? Are the parents not involved when a child misbehaves frequently? Are there not progressive guidelines for teachers when bad behaviour occurs? Surely, there are rules in place that state that after persistent, unacceptable behaviour, exclusion should be the norm. If that fails to work then expel them. Where are the headteachers in all this? Are they failing to give their support to classroom teachers?

*Finally, an explanation for the bad behaviour of children. According to scientists at the University of Birmingham, children who are disruptive, antisocial, callous and brattish in their behaviour could be suffering from a condition called “conduct disorder”, which is rooted in the corpos callosum area of the brain (it connects the left and right hemispheres).

Which is curious. Because the few genuinely brattish kids that I can think of (you know, the ones who come over and “act out” and totally wreck the birthday party, and look at you defiantly as if to say, “Yeah, what are you going to do about it? I’m a kid you can’t touch me!”) are somehow united by one specific and scientifically verifiable factor. Their parents are assholes.

(Kevin Maher, The Times, 2019)

Ah so.