A Cry For Help - Looking Beyond Bad Behaviour

That screaming child may not be able to articulate the root cause of his emotional outburst, so you need to be the one who gets to the heart of the matter, says Nancy Gedge...

Poor Sam. There were days, I reckon, when he was glad to go to school to escape me, Cross Mummy. Back when he was about seven or eight years old, we went through what we teachers somewhat euphemistically term a ‘challenging time’. It was a time where Sam displayed quite a bit of ‘interesting’ behaviour. Anything I asked of him that he didn’t want to do was a trigger for shenanigans. At the time this consisted of getting dressed, getting undressed, putting on his shoes, walking up the road to school, coming to the table for tea, cleaning his teeth, going to bed, staying in bed…everything, basically.

People used to say to me, when I eventually arrived in the school playground with three children in tow, how calm I looked, and I used to think, ‘if only they knew’. If only they knew how I was perspiring beneath my clothes, heart still hammering, tears of frustration still clinging. If only they knew about the tussle Sam and I just had over teeth, shoes, coats, bags, pushchairs – again, pretty much everything. No wonder I never had those problems other mummies had, when their children cried and clung to them and made leaving them heartbreaking.

The thing is, looking back, I can kind of see his point; in the heat of the moment, when we were going through it together, I couldn’t. But a bit of time and space, not unlike the professional moments at the end of the day when you can reflect or talk something through with a colleague while you’re searching high and low for the protractors, works wonders. And I feel bad about that.

I’m sad that it took so long before I was able to figure out even a tiny part of what was really going on. Poor little Sam. He was unhappy and he didn’t have the words to tell me. He was having a tough time at school, and I was giving him a tough time at home. I’m so glad that I, as his mother, get the chance to say sorry and make amends.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, because understanding behaviour is a difficult thing to do, especially if you are on the receiving end. I might not teach children with the same manner of communication difficulties as my son, but I have yet to find the child who can easily articulate how they feel, who can tell you which emotions are running high. I haven’t discovered the child who can tell me what is really going on, who can see to the heart of the matter, beyond the moment, and into an often-complex web of adult agendas, some of which we know do not have their best interests at the heart. I think about some of the children I have taught over the years, and I think about how they were never away, always in class despite the coughs and snot, large proportions of them in some kind of bother or another, kicking off.

Thankfully, today, I know about how to systematically observe a child and her challenging behaviour. I know that looking for patterns, for when and where and who and what, is important. I know that keeping records of incidents, as well as professional discussion, helps me to understand what is going on, to see where the barriers to acceptable behaviour lie.

I think about some of the children I have handed on to secondary school and I wonder how they got on – the mouthy ones who were full of attitude, the silly ones, the nervous ones, the quiet ones, the ones who waited til the end of the lesson so that they could speak to you privately. Did they find a teacher who ‘got’ them, was kind to them, who understood what kind of vulnerabilities were resident inside that small person? Did they have someone who saw beyond the behaviour, to the need that was driving it?

How easy it is to misunderstand. What were, or what are they trying to tell me? What was getting in the way?

About the author

Nancy Gedge