There's No Such Thing As A Naughty Child

I have been thinking a lot about behaviour recently - hardly surprising given the environment I have chosen to work in. In my new post in January I will be working with young people who have been excluded from school or who are in danger of exclusion.

I have thought for a long time that it is really unhelpful when teachers talk about children being "naughty" or "badly behaved". We are describing unwanted behaviours and habits and then, usually, agreeing with each other that the child is disrupting lessons or affecting the learning of others. We commiserate with each other and reinforce the idea that there are just some children who we would be glad to see the back of.

It feels helpful to have these conversations in - at least you know that it's not "just me" and that others have the same problem. Slapping the "naughty" label on the child means it is not your fault - your behaviour management is not in question. They are a naughty child and you can't change that any more than you can change the colour of their eyes. Have you noticed how annoyed we get with the one person who bursts our bubble and says that the monster-child works well for them? My personal reactions have in the past definitely focused on denial and anger, then bargaining (please can I just have 1 good lesson...) and occasionally depression.

It has taken 21 years and a stint in alternative education for me to finally reach acceptance: there is no such thing as a naughty child, only unhelpful and unwanted behaviours. The trouble with acceptance is that it throws the responsibility on to us - the professionals - when a child is not doing well and it is not good enough to thrown our hands in the air or pass the problem on to someone else to solve. We have to do better than that.

Our Victorian ancestors thought that children had to have the bad beaten out of them - we know better. With all our knowledge of psychology we know that behaviour comes from some where. If a child is "attention seeking" then the question is why? What is lacking in the child's life that means that they need my negative attention so badly? If they are exhibiting work avoidance behaviours, why?

We need to start with questions:

• What does the child do exactly?
• When did the behaviour start?
• What are the triggers for the behaviour?
• Are the behaviours the same in all lessons?
• How does the composition of the class affect the behaviours?
• How does the child behave in unstructured times?
• To what extent is the child choosing to behave in the way they are?
• Where and when are the behaviours most extreme?
• What do parents say about the child at home?
• Who does the child work well with?
• Where is the child able to behave well?

Asking these questions is about trying to find the cause of the behaviours. The child is responding to something - finding out what can be hard, but it is not impossible. It's hard because the cause is invisible - and sometimes historical. It's not like a missing arm which everyone can see. You don't expect the child with an absent limb to grow it back on demand; you work around their disability. So why do we expect children with behavioural problems to be able to change because we want them to? 

At the heart of it all is the necessity to separate the child from the behaviours in our minds as we do for children with other, more visible, barriers to learning. Only when we think of them as a person can we begin to address their needs.