There are times when even the most docile children appear to have
the aggressive tendencies of a professional wrestler. While a certain
amount of pushing and shoving is to be expected from all children,
especially when they are very young, there are a few for whom aggression
becomes a way of coping with almost any situation.
These overly aggressive children are not bullies; they often get
into fights with people who are stronger than they are. They face
problems not because they are aggressive, but because they become
aggressive at times that are inappropriate and in ways that are
self-defeating. They routinely argue with teachers and wind up in
far more than their share of schoolyard scraps.
In some cases, this pattern of easily triggered aggression appears
to be rooted in the children's developing nervous systems. They
appear to be physiologically unable to control their impulses as
much as other children their age. For others, it is often a matter
of needing to learn and practice social skills.
Aggression is one of the first responses to frustration that a
baby learns. Grabbing, biting, hitting, and pushing are especially
common before children develop the verbal skills that allow them
to talk in a sophisticated way about what they want and how they
feel.
Children are often rewarded for their aggressive behavior. The
child who acts out in class generally gets the most attention from
the teacher. The child who breaks into the line to go down the slide
at the playground sometimes gets to use the slide the most. One
of the toughest problems parents and teachers face in stopping aggressive
behavior is that in the short term it gets the child exactly what
he wants. It's only after a few years that inappropriately aggressive
children must cope with a lack of friends, bad reputations, and
the other consequences of their behavior.
For some children, this tendency toward physical aggression and
other difficult behaviors appears to be inborn. There's some evidence
that a proportion of these children may be identified as restless
fetuses that kick significantly more than other fetuses. Many very
aggressive children are noted to be restless infants even before
they begin to crawl and walk.
These overly aggressive children appear to have less mature nervous
systems than other children their age. This shows up in a variety
of problems with self-control. They cannot sit still for more than
a few minutes. They are easily distracted. Once they begin to get
excited or angry, they have difficulty stopping themselves. They
are impulsive and have trouble concentrating on a task for more
than a few minutes or even seconds.
Coping With a Very Aggressive Child
It's difficult for adults not to attribute malicious motives to
children who consistently appear to be trying to drive their parents
and teachers to distraction. Often it's equally difficult for parents
not to assume that children are behaving this way because of something
the parents have done wrong or have forgotten to do right. Such
casting of blame, however, is not only inaccurate but usually useless
as well.
The first step in helping an overly aggressive child is to look
for patterns in what triggers the assaults, especially if the child
is a toddler or preschooler. The aggression may happen only at home
or only in public places. It may occur mostly in the afternoon or
when the child is frustrated. Also, most of these children go through
a predictable sequence of behaviors before they lose control. It's
a bit like watching a car going through a normal acceleration and
then suddenly kicking into overdrive.
Once you can determine the most common triggers and can spot the
escalating behavior, the simplest thing is to remove the child from
that environment before he loses control. Take him away from the
sandbox or the playgroup for a minute or two until he regains his
composure. As the child develops, he will become less frustrated
and, therefore, less aggressive because he has a wider variety of
ways to respond to a challenging situation.
It's also very useful to provide these aggressive and distractible
children with a lot of structure and routine in their daily lives
since predictability helps children remain calm and in control.
Tempting as it may be at the time, spanking these children for being
aggressive often does more harm than good. It is simply modeling
the very thing you don't want children to do. It teaches them that
big people hit when they're angry or upset, and that is precisely
the aggressive child's problem.
For older children and adolescents, teaching new and more appropriate
ways of getting what they want can be very helpful. These children
often have not learned the skills that their classmates picked up
years earlier. As with bullies, formal assertiveness training can
be particularly helpful to overly aggressive children since they
have difficulty distinguishing between assertiveness and aggression.
It's also useful to help these children look at life from a slightly
different perspective. Psychologists have found that both aggressive
children and their parents tend to focus on what's wrong with a
situation rather than what's right with it. That makes their respective
problems all the more frustrating for each of them, since neither
pays any attention to the children's improvement when it occurs.
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