Sunday, Dec. 07, 2003
Temper tantrums are nothing new in kindergarten and first grade, but the
behavior of a 6-year-old girl this fall at a school in Fort Worth, Texas, had
even the most experienced staff members wanting to run for cover. Asked to put
a toy away, the youngster began to scream. Told to calm down, she knocked over
her desk and crawled under the teacher's desk, kicking it and dumping out the
contents of the drawers. Then things really began to deteriorate. Still
shrieking, the child stood up and began hurling books at her terrified
classmates, who had to be ushered from the room to safety.
Just a bad day at school? More like a bad season. The desk-dumping incident
followed scores of other outrageous acts by some of the youngest Fort Worth
students at schools across the district. Among them: a 6-year-old who told his
teacher to "shut up, bitch," a first-grader whose fits of anger ended with his
peeling off his clothes and throwing them at the school psychologist, and
hysterical kindergartners who bit teachers so hard they left tooth marks.
"I'm clearly seeing an increasing number of kindergartners and first-graders
coming to our attention for aggressive behavior," says Michael Parker, program
director of psychological services at the Fort Worth Independent School
District, which serves 80,000 students. The incidents have occurred not only
in low-income urban schools but in middle-class areas as well. Says Parker:
"We're talking about serious talking back to teachers, profanity, even biting,
kicking and hitting adults, and we're seeing it in 5-year-olds." And these are
not the kids who have been formally labeled emotionally disturbed, says
Nekedria Clark, who works in Parker's department. "We have our E.D. kids, and
then we have our b-a-d kids."
The alarming trend has been confirmed by Partnership for Children, a local
child-advocacy group that has just completed a survey of child-care centers,
elementary schools and pediatricians throughout Tarrant County, which includes
Forth Worth and suburban Arlington. The final report is due out in January,
but a preliminary version obtained by Time shows that 93% of the 39 schools
that responded to the survey said kindergartners today have "more emotional
and behavioral problems" than were seen five years ago. More than half the
day-care centers said "incidents of rage and anger" had increased over the
past three years. "We're talking about children—a 3-year-old in one
instance—who will take a fork and stab another child in the forehead. We're
talking about a wide range of explosive behaviors, and it's a growing
problem," says John Ross, who oversaw the survey.
Is Tarrant County a unique hotbed of precocious delinquency? Not at all, says
Ronald Stephens, director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake
Village, Calif. Across the country, he says, "violence is getting younger and
younger." In the past five years, Stephens says, an increasing number of
school districts in the U.S. have instituted special elementary schools for
disruptive youngsters. "Initially, it was high schools that created these
schools, then middle schools. Now it's elementary. Who would have thought
years ago that this would be happening?" he asks.
Despite the proliferation of such programs, few school districts will admit to
a violence problem—and certainly not at the kindergarten level. Philadelphia
is a rare exception. "We aggressively report serious incidents regardless of
the age of the child," says Paul Vallas, ceo of Philadelphia's schools, which
serve 214,000 students. This year the largely poor urban district has already
had 19 reports of weapons possession and 42 assaults by kids in kindergarten
or first grade. Last year at the McDaniel elementary school alone, there were
21 assaults in the first two months of school, including one by a
kindergartner who punched a pregnant teacher in the belly. Vallas adopted a
get-tough policy and suspended 33 kindergarten students in the first six weeks
of last year, up from just one in the same period the year before, earning him
local notoriety as a "kindergarten cop." This year he has chosen instead to
send the youngest offenders to "accommodation" rooms to cool down and learn to
behave.
Not every school district in America is besieged by kamikaze kindergartners,
but those who see a problem believe they are witnessing the result of a number
of social trends that have come together in a most unfortunate way. Many cite
economic stress, which has parents working longer hours than ever before, kids
spending more time in day care and everyone coming home too exhausted to
engage in the kind of relationships that build social skills. "Kids aren't
getting enough lap time," says Karen Bentley, a seasoned elementary school
administrator in Miami, who sees increased aggression in young students.
In addition, many educators worry about rising academic pressure in
kindergarten and first grade in anticipation of the yearly tests demanded by
the No Child Left Behind Act. In Texas, which has led the nation in embracing
such tests, most kindergartens now go the full day, yet some have eliminated
recess or limited it to 15 minutes a day. "It's a mistake to focus exclusively
on academic readiness," says Stephen Hinshaw, chair-elect of the psychology
department at University of California, Berkeley. "Even more vital than early
reading," he says, "is the learning of play skills, which form the foundation
of cognitive skills." Hinshaw points out that in Europe, kids often aren't
taught to read until age 7. Insisting that they read at 5, he says, "puts
undue pressure on a child."
Hinshaw and other experts on child behavior also point out that aggressive
behavior in children has been irrefutably linked to exposure to violence on TV
and in movies, video games and other media. "Dozens of studies have shown this
link. Probably hundreds," says psychologist Jerome Singer, co-director of the
Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center. "The size
of the effect is almost as strong as the relationship between smoking and
cancer."
There is little doubt that very young children are watching loads of TV before
they even reach kindergarten. In October the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
released the results of a survey of 1,065 parents with children ages 6 months
to 6 years. The stunning finding is that 43% of the kids age 2 and younger
watched TV on a typical day and that 26% had a TV in their room. The median
amount of time spent watching: two hours a day.
And that's two hours a day that are not spent doing what toddlers most need to
do: interacting with people who love them and can teach them how to behave.
Parker, in Fort Worth, blames this lack of socialization at home more than
anything else for the wild behavior he's seeing in his district's youngest
students. He recounts, for example, that the mother of an obstreperous
4-year-old told him the child has no formal mealtimes and eats whenever he
wants. "If you don't have to sit down at a dinner table and stay there, how
are you going to learn to sit in a seat at school and finish an assignment?"
Parker wonders. Kids who are chronologically 6 years old are showing up in
school with "emotional experience you would expect of a 3-year-old," says Dr.
Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist who works with the nonprofit group
ChildTrauma Academy, based in Houston. "Imagine a child with the terrible twos
in a 6-year-old body. It's a huge problem in education and mental-health
circles." This "relational poverty," he says, affects even the wealthiest
kids.
On the front lines in Philadelphia and Fort Worth, schools are trying to teach
kids what they have failed to learn at home. Philadelphia has extensive
anti-bullying and character-education programs. It has Saturday counseling for
troublemakers and truants, and requires parents to attend. This year it has
extended the program to kids in kindergarten through fourth grade. For now,
the Fort Worth district is working mainly with individual students and their
parents. But sadly, it, along with districts throughout Texas, is also
training more and more teachers how to physically restrain a furious, flailing
5-year-old.
—Reported by Cathy Booth Thomas/Fort Worth, Simon Crittle/New
York and Polly Forster/Portland
