AboutLeslie Truex Expertise I am a parent of two, but also I'm a social worker with over 15 year experience working with children and families. I can provide many tips and techniques to help with child behavior, interventions for specific behavioral issues, ideas to help children through difficult times such as divorce or grief, hints on keeping the family running smoothly, and tips for developing confident, happy children.
Experience I have a master's in social work and over 15 years experience working with children and families. I have worked in schools, public health, mental health and adoption agencies providing parent education courses and children's groups.
Question My 5 year-old is having behavior problems in Kindergarten. The teacher is having a great deal of trouble getting him to concentrate on his work. He is also having trouble realizing when it's okay to be silly and when it's not okay.
She has put the children in a new seating arrangement, with his seat at the front next to her desk. This seems to have made the problem worse. He has come home with the color of red on his behavior chart for 2 of the last 6 days, yellow for 3 of the last 6 days, leaving only 1 day of green.
We have encourage him to work hard to get green. We have offered rewards. We have explained that if he is not listening to his teacher's instructions that he is not learning everything he needs to learn. We have also tried taking away privileges. Nothing seems to work. Any ideas?
Answer Hi Jannean,
I'm not sure I have enough information to help you. My first thoughts are:
1) Is he ready for kindergarten? Many families, myself included, have waited until their sons were 6 to send them to school. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Instead its more a social maturity. Did he go to preschool or other structured group settings and how did he do there?
2) Does he have a learning disability or attention difficulty. Please note, I'm not big on labels or medication. However, there are several different learning styles and there is such a thing as attention deficit. If he suffers from any of these, it will be to his advantage to get tested so that the teacher can be given instruction on how to best teach him.
Some other ideas: Does he respond to discipline when he misbehaves at home (not punished for a school event?). If so, then maybe he needs a different intervention. Who cares about a red card? He clearly doesn't. When I was a guidance counselor, I had some students on a behavior plan in which they received a check mark in a booklet for doing good. If they received a certain number of checks during the day, they were allowed to come to my office at the end of the day to get a treat such as a sticker or piece of candy.
At this point, you may want to ask the guidance person or psychologist to observe him and give an impression to what they think is going on. The only way to know how to intervene is to understand where the behavior is coming from. If it is something like a learning disability or ADD, a red card is only going to make it worse because he can't fix something out of his control. He'll need skills to compensate for the difficulties and probably specific teaching interventions.
