by Hill Walker for The Register-Guard
Some years ago, my colleagues and I were developing a program for intervening with very aggressive children who teased and bullied others during school recess.
Ritchie, a second grader, was referred as a likely candidate for the intervention. During a playground recess period, I was observing him to see if he qualified for this program. Suddenly, for no apparent reasons, Ritchie attacked a kindergarten boy about two-thirds his size. He knocked the smaller boy to the ground and proceeded to choke him. The playground supervisor quickly broke things up and called the principal and school counselor, who escorted Ritchie into the school to call his parents. I wanted to know what was in Ritchie’s mind that prompted the attack.
“Can you tell me why you were choking that little boy like that?” I asked him.
Ritchie looked at me in utter amazement.
“Well, it was recess!” he replied.
Sarah, a fourth-grade girl, was universally regarded as a holy terror by her teachers and peers. Sarah was aggressive, smart, a natural leader, able to manipulate others, charming and a pain in the neck. Billie, a school psychologist who served Sarah’s school part-time, visited several times per week. Sarah was a regular customer of Billie’s each time she came to the school, and they were on a first name basis. One day, the principal and counselor were waiting for Billie at the school’s front door to tell her the latest things Sarah had done on the playground. Billie called Sarah into a conference to hear her side of things. The following exchange ensued.
“Sarah, I understand you’ve been having problems on the playground again.”
Sarah just stared at her, saying nothing. Trying to engage Sarah in a problem-solving process, Billie asked another question.
“What do you think people will say about that?”
Sarah thought a minute.
“Well, Billie, some people might say you’re not doing your job!” she said.
These true case examples illustrate how aggressive, antisocial children and youths then to think about themselves and the world in which they live. They are often self-centered and very inconsiderate of others. The standards they have learned for governing their behavior are different from those of other children. Children such as Ritchie and Sarah are reluctant to assume responsibility for their actions. In very young children, these social characteristics are generally not destructive and can occasionally be amusing. However, later in adolescence, they are highly destructive and anything but amusing.
Our society is producing thousands of children like Ritchie and Sarah who come from backgrounds in which they are exposed to a host of risk factors that can be very damaging over time. There are strong and clearly established links between these risk factors, their resulting short-term negative effects on the developing child, and unfortunate, often destructive, long-term outcomes that ultimately prove very costly to the individual, to caregivers and associates, and finally to the larger society.
Influence of risk factors
Risk factors operate at differing and sometimes overlapping levels. The contexts in which these risk factors exist include the family, school and neighborhood, community and, finally, society. Across these contexts, key risk factors can include poverty, dysfunctional and chaotic families, drug and alcohol abuse of primary caregivers, incompetent parenting, neglect, emotional and physical abuse, negative attitudes toward schooling, the modeling of physical intimidation and aggression, sexual exploitation, the growing incivility of our society and so on.
These risk factors provide a fertile breeding ground for the development of antisocial attitudes and behavior among children exposed to them. The longer one is so exposed and the greater the number of risks, the more likely it is that a young child will develop an aggressive, self-centered behavioral style. Taunting and provoking others, mean-spirited teasing, hitting, yelling, throwing tantrums, defying adults and social cruelty are examples of the early behavioral signs of long-term exposure to such risk factors.
Too many children are coming to school with this behavior pattern already established; these children are sometimes referred to as “early starters.” They tend to overwhelm teachers and peers with their destructive behavior. In adolescence, their behavioral characteristics often bring them into contact with the law because of such things as fire setting, stealing, cruelty to animals, burglary and robbery, stealing, assault, vandalism, drug use and so forth.
Specific risk factors have been identified through longitudinal research for both youth violence and delinquency. Some of the key factors include situations in which: the mother and/or the father has been arrested, the child has been a client of child protection, one or more family transitions have occurred (death, divorce, trauma, family upheaval), the youth has received special education services, and the child has a history of early and/or severe antisocial behavior.
Through careful research and analysis, the Oregon Social Learning Center and the Lane County Department of Youth Services (DYS) have jointly developed this profile that characterizes severely at- risk adolescents in Lane County. Any combination of three of these risk factors puts the youth at severe risk for delinquency and a host of associated problems. DYS reports that a number of youths they see have all five of these risk factors.
The American Psychological Association, in its 1993 seminal report on youth violence identified four accelerating factors that seem to propel at-risk youths toward violent acts. They are:
- Early involvement with drugs and alcohol.
- Easy access to weapons, especially handguns.
- Association with antisocial, deviant peer groups.
- Pervasive exposure to violence in the media.
These conditions combine destructively far too often among youths who come from at-risk backgrounds. Further, we find that larger and larger number of at-risk youths are in states of rage and carry high levels of agitation. Such youths are more likely to react aggressively to real or imagined slights and act upon them often with tragic consequences. They are also more likely to misjudge the motives and social intentions of others toward them because of the hostility and agitation they carry. As a result, they are frequently engaged with peers and their teachers in hostile confrontations and sometimes issue threats of bodily harm.
Short-term effects
A number of behaviors are linked to the above risks. In the short term, they include: lack of school readiness, antisocial attitudes, high levels of aggression and agitation, rejection by peers and teachers, affiliation with deviant peers, inability to regulate one’s emotional behavior, severe tantrums, refusal to abide by school rules and behavioral expectations, and so on. Very often the academic engagement and achievement of severely at-risk students lag well behind that of classmates and grade level expectations. These factors set the at-risk child up for school failure and eventually dropout. If school dropout does occur, the risks for juvenile delinquent acts skyrocket. It is estimated that 80 percent of daytime burglaries across the United States are committed by out-of-school youth.
Thus, the risks to which larger and larger numbers of our children are exposed tend to put them on a path leading to a host of negative, destructive outcomes. Unless they are diverted from this path relatively early in their lives and school careers, severely at-risk children are very likely to adopt antisocial behavior as a lifestyle during their later development.
Long-term outcomes
The long-term outcomes of investment in an antisocial behavior pattern are very destructive and extremely costly to our society. These outcomes quite often include the following: delinquency, school failure and dropout, bad conduct discharges from the military, severe depression, alcohol and drug abuse, violence toward others, dependence on social service systems, appearance on community mental health registers, incarceration and higher hospitalization and mortality rates. We find that severely at-risk youths have a high frequency of discipline problems in school with many referrals to the front office initiated by their teachers.
These same students often begin having contacts with law enforcement in middle and high school. There is a moderately strong relationship between a very high level of conduct problems in school and offenses committed outside school. For example, it is possible to make relatively accurate predictions about the arrest status of at-risk fifth-graders by using three simple school measures:
- The number of discipline contacts the student has during the school year.
- The amount of negative behavior a student typically displays with classmates on the playground.
- The teacher’s impression of the student’s social skills.
We have the ability to find these children early, but we have a tendency to wait, to not do anything, and hope that they grow out of their problems. In far too many cases, they grow into much more serious problems during their school careers.
It should be noted that some students adopt an antisocial behavior pattern in adolescence who do not come from an at-risk background. These youths are referred to as “later starters.” While such students can become delinquent, they are much less at-risk, as a general rule, than “early starters.” Most will come out of this behavioral aberration within a few years. Occasionally, however, these youths will become severely delinquent and/or violent.
What can be done?
What can be done to reduce and offset the effects of the risk factors to which more and more of our youths are being subjected? First and foremost, we need to reduce and eliminate as many of these risks as possible. As a society, we must recommit ourselves to raising our children safely and effectively. The Oregon Social Learning Center has spent decades identifying the parenting practices that produce healthy, well-adjusted children. Such practices involve consistent, fair discipline that is never harsh or severely punitive, careful monitoring and supervision, positive family management techniques, involvement in the child’s daily life, daily debriefings about the child’s experiences and teaching problem-solving techniques.
We should teach these parenting techniques to all of our children.
Second, we need to make prevention an effective reality. We give lip service to prevention strategies but are generally unwilling to invest in them at the necessary levels because of suspicions about their effectiveness and worries about their costs.
Third, we have to give greater support to our schools, which are struggling to educate an increasingly diverse and at-risk student population.
Finally, we need to forge effective partnerships among families, schools, social service systems, public safety, churches and other agencies to create the socializing experiences that will give all of our youths a chance to develop along positive lines.
We have a violent history as a country and many experts argue that we are, by nature, a violent culture. As a society, we need to hold up a mirror and examine ourselves in this regard to take a good look at what we have become, how we got here and how we might change for the better. There are some encouraging trends. Adult crime seems to be on a downward spiral. We need to discover why this is the case and figure out how to make it continue.
As we embark on a new century, we have the occasion to make a fresh start in this regard. We can ill afford not to.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1998, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.