Children’s challenging behavior represents a missing skill and those skills can’t be taught if the child isn’t at school.
This final brief in our series on policies and practices that can minimize exclusion from early learning environments is a reporting-out of a collaborative workshop for over 100 child care and preschool professionals. This workshop was directed toward providers, teachers, and technical assistance specialists serving at least one child exhibiting dysregulated behaviors.
Participants attended the workshop because they were committed to reducing and minimizing the use of exclusion to manage challenging behaviors. Over 60% of them have been working in early care and learning for 10 or more years, and only 25% have been providing care for five or fewer years. Despite the substantial amount of experience providing care, participants reported many struggles and the need for technical assistance/professional development and direct resources to enable them to meet the needs of children exhibiting challenging behaviors.
Our primary takeaway message for workshop participants was, “Behavior is Communication.” Educators should be aware that the lens through which we perceive young children’s challenging behavior substantially affects how we respond to it. It is important that providers view all behavior through the lens of communication: each child’s acting-out behavior is communicating that something is wrong and that they don’t know what they need or don’t have the words to ask for what they need.
Workshop participants’ responses suggest that the urge to suspend or expel children from care often arises because externalizing behaviors can undermine the quality of the care and learning environment, are emotionally distressing, and are sometimes harmful to providers and other children in care. It is important to note that, unlike in the K-12 context, childcare providers don’t receive additional fees or funding to cover the cost of classroom aides when they care for children with emotional and behavioral challenges. It is important that educators receive the training and resources necessary to provide differentiated and developmentally appropriate support based on the needs of the children in their care.
Good policymaking on this issue will be based on the extent to which decision-makers understand the many connections between broader economic and family support policies and childcare and preschool exclusion. An important issue for policymakers to keep in mind is that early care and learning providers are some of the lowest paid workers in this country, and they are expected to shoulder the burden of managing young children’s externalizing behaviors, which are often the result of adversity and toxic stress. Our state’s leaders can help create a more sustainable childcare system through funding, resources, and education.
Read the full brief here. Download previous policy briefs on the End Early Learning Exclusion webpage.
These policy and practice briefs highlight the need for improvements in early care and learning environments; however, the recommendations have broad applicability across preschool to 12th-grade learning contexts.
Past blogs in this series
- Exclusion from care and learning environments is not the answer
- Offer Supportive Responses for Children’s Challenging Behaviors
- Building Effective Reporting Systems to Prevent and Reduce Early Exclusion
- Understanding Disruptive Behavior Helps Keep Kids in the Classroom
- State Decision Makers are Critical to Reducing Preschool Expulsions
- Beyond Suspensions and Expulsions: Facing the Racial Disparities in Early Learning Head-On
- Moving Upstream to Prevention: The Underlying Role of ACEs and Trauma in Children’s Dysregulated Behaviors
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