Positive behaviour support in the Early Years

It can feel shocking to be faced by a child who is physically aggressive, who has an extreme reaction in your setting, or who hurts staff or other children. We come into education to do our best for our children, and it is hard not to take it personally when you experience extreme behaviours from a child.

First and foremost, remember that the behaviour is not personal. It might be to do with the child’s current home situation or adverse early childhood experiences. Maybe it is about a specific trigger that is setting off a reaction, perhaps linked to a special educational need.

It could also be a temporary situation, due to the child’s development. For instance, a number of young children go through a period of biting, often connected to teething, which they usually grow out quite rapidly.

How do I keep everyone safe?

You should always keep the safety of both children and staff at the forefront of your mind.

If appropriate, put one-to-one adult supervision in place for the child for a period of time. Have a clear plan in place for your staff team about how to react if the child is struggling. Work out who will do what, with the child’s key person taking the lead role. If the child is likely to lash out physically, have a plan about how you will move other children away from the situation to keep them safe.

How can I support parents, carers, and families?

Talk to the child’s parents or carers about whether they experience this behaviour at home, and what might seem to be the cause. This can be a tricky conversation to have, because the parents might not want to admit to there being a problem.

To avoid this, be clear that you are not apportioning blame, but that you need to work together as a team to get the best outcomes for their child.

Can identifying triggers help prevent extreme behaviour in the Early Years?

Try to spot a pattern using the ABC Chart, and identify the triggers for the extreme behaviour, so that you can try to stop it happening in the first place. For instance, if you notice that the behaviours occur on a day when the cleaners have been, or when a member of staff is present who wears a strong perfume, it might be that the child has sensory processing issues and is reacting to scents in your setting.

Another trigger might be to do with particular peer group relationships. Is the child playing with a specific child each time the behaviour occurs? It could be that the behaviour always happens on a Monday, and that the trigger is what has happened over the weekend. For instance, where a child whose parents are separated spends weekends in a different place.

If you are able to identify a specific trigger, consider what steps you can take to stop this happening in the first place. For instance, for a child who is triggered by scent, ask staff not to wear perfume and change to hypoallergenic cleaning products.

Avoiding overstimulation and promoting engagement

Poor behaviour in the early years is also often a result of overstimulation – an exciting game gets the children overwrought, and before you know it there are tears.

Children need to be exposed to situations where they learn to cope with challenges – but approach this carefully. When you set up continuous provision, consider the likely reaction of the children. Is there space for them to take time out, as well as to let off steam? Think about how the quiet children will feel, as well as the livelier ones.

If we feel bored, or disaffected, we look for other ways to channel our attention. Generally speaking, children, young people, and adults find it easier to engage when they are hands-on with learning or when the learning links to something they already know about, and when there are multi-sensory elements to an activity.

Could an unidentified SEND lead to extreme behaviour in young children?

When you are faced with a pattern of extreme behaviours from a young child, this is often an indicator that the child has some form of SEND. Get your SENDCo to undertake some observations of the child and ask for support from your local authority SEND team.

How do I move the focus from the behaviour to what the child needs?

A useful way to analyse extreme behaviour is to look at the issue from the point of view of what the child might need, and what you can do to meet those needs. Young children find it difficult to communicate or express their inner emotional state, and so we need to look at their behaviours and interpret these on their behalf.

Make a list of the behaviours you observe happening in the child. Now consider, what might the child be telling you that they need through these behaviours. For instance, a child who screams and has tantrums might be telling you that they don’t understand how to calm themselves, or that they are finding their experience in the setting overwhelming. In response, you might adapt the way you organise your environment, to create opportunities for the child to have some calm and quiet time out.

How does educator role-modelling support children to manage their feelings and behaviour?

Just because poor behaviour, or a child becoming dysregulated, might not be directly our fault, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about how we contribute to it. If we reflect honestly and openly, we give ourselves the power to change how we might react in the future.

If we are willing to think about our potential role in the problem, we can understand our potential role in the solution. Think about how you can make a difference to outcomes – put simply, focus on what you can change.

A child from a supportive home background is normally better at regulating their behaviour than a child from a home where the adults are confrontational and inconsistent.When children are young, they quickly pick up on what the adults around them model. If we are rude, they learn to be rude. If we are calm and well-mannered, they learn to act in the same way.

We model behaviour all the time in our settings, and not just in terms of how we treat others. We model behaviours around learning too. Do we come across as interested, curious, involved, aware, engaged? Model an interest in the world to your children, just as you model how to be kind.

How does self-regulation and impulse control influence behaviour?

Self-regulation is a complex concept but put simply, it refers to the ability to regulate our own behaviours. This might be about understanding what to do when we feel angry, how to cope with not getting our own way, and how to behave in a way that keeps us safe.

Young children’s misbehaviour is often a result of poor impulse control. The child snatches a toy, hits a friend or throws a tantrum because they cannot yet regulate that impulse. Part of our role as practitioners is to help children develop the skill of self-regulation.

In order to build self-regulation, it is a good idea to encourage the children to manage their own behaviour in the early years, rather than for practitioners to try and control behaviour with systems of extrinsic rewards and consequences. Help your children learn to do the right thing in order to learn and be kind, rather than to win a reward or avoid a sanction. This will help them make better choices around behaviour as they get older.

At our setting, we do not use any external rewards or consequences. We believe that they can interfere with the children’s intrinsic motivation to learn. We think that it is better to talk about behaviour with the children to develop their understanding of it, and we maintain high staff-to-child ratios to make time for these conversations to happen.

Another way to do this is to use activities that require patience and turn-taking. Talk about emotional reactions to reassure your children that you understand how emotional impulses affect them – ‘I can see that you are angry’, ‘I can tell that you are upset’, and so on.

Does using an ABC chart help with extreme behaviour in the Early Years?

With repeated examples of extreme behaviour, it is very helpful to use an ‘ABC’ Chart.

This is a chart on which you log details of the behaviour incidents, under the headings of antecedent, behaviour and consequences. The chart can help you look for patterns of behaviour over time, and to identify causes that you might be able to prevent. Noting down the specifics can help you get an overview of the situation.

• ‍Antecedent
  This covers the things that happened before the situation arose – the aim is to identify any potential triggers for the behaviour, such as signs of distress from the child or negative environmental impacts.‍
• Behaviour
  This deals with the incident itself – aim to log specifics of the behaviour in a dispassionate way. What did the behaviour look like? What specifically happened? Who was involved?‍
• Consequences
  This is where you analyse the aftermath of the situation. This might include other people’s responses to the situation, and what happened after the event, for instance how long it took the child to calm down or which adults discussed the situation with parents.

Reflecting on an incident in an Early Years setting

1. After poor behaviour has happened, ask yourself some tricky questions about how your practice might have impacted on the children:

• Were they bored or lacking focus?
• Were they over-stimulated or over-excited?
• Was the way the provision was set out partly to blame?
• Were they adequately supervised?
• Did you miss a chance to intervene earlier on?
• Did you miss any clues or cues when the child arrived?
• Did your own situation (tiredness, stress) impact on how you handled things?

2. When something goes wrong, don’t be too quick to pass the buck. When the situation is over, and everyone is calm, think about what might have caused the incident and how you could prevent it from happening again.

3. Reflect on the layout of the space, as this is often the root cause of issues. Are there areas where poor behaviour often happens? Could you change the space around, improve the quality of your provision, or adapt the way you supervise the children?

4. Ask colleagues to observe you, and act on their feedback. Pick one area you would like to develop – for instance, tone of voice – and ask them to critique you on it.

5. When you plan an area of provision, think about how you would feel about it as a learner. Would it engage you? What would you learn from it? What might go wrong?

6. When faced with tricky behaviour, instinctively we tend to become defensive and overreact. Counteract your instinctive responses by taking a deep breath before you intervene. Take a moment to reflect on the best reaction, rather than letting your emotions take hold.

7. Consider the boundaries you set. If you are clear with the children where the ‘line’ on behaviour is, then they will be in a much better position to stick to it. Have a clear set of agreed boundaries in your setting, sharing these and talking about them with the children. Keep your rules short and simple, and create a display so that you can refer to it regularly.

8. Reflect on emotional responses and encourage children to join in with discussions about behaviour in the early years, and to reflect on how their behaviour makes other people feel. This helps to build their sense of empathy, which in turn supports them in developing self-regulation. You might ask questions like: “How do you think Sally felt when you took the toy from her?”

9. Acknowledge the child's feelings. As well as talking about the impact of behaviour on others, it is also useful to examine what the child is feeling. Use phrases such as “I can see you are upset” or “I can tell that you are angry”. By acknowledging the child’s emotions, you help them understand that it is okay to feel this way and that it is possible to bring our emotional responses under control by regulating them ourselves.

1‍0. Support non-verbal communication. The great thing about non-verbal signals is that they bypass the need for verbal understanding, and so they are especially useful with pre-verbal children or those who have English as an additional language.

A quick frown at a child who is about to do something they shouldn’t may be more than enough to stop them. A smile at a child who is listening well can be sufficient to reinforce the fact that these are the behaviours you want to see.