The appearance of aggressive behavior in the 3-5 year old child: What’s it all about?
by Lorie Hammond, Ph. D., Academic Director
It happens all the time. Parents send a sweet three year old to preschool, only to find that he/she turns into an aggressive hitter or biter, in a manner they have never seen before. Soon we hear frustrated parents say:
“Clearly he/she learned this behavior at school! What do they teach the kids at that school, anyway? “
OR alternately,
“I know that MY child never did this before. So it must be that other child, ______. He learned it from him! We sometimes worry, do we want our child exposed to kids LIKE THAT?”
Or, if the child is shy or is a girl, we hear
“My child is upset by what s/he sees at school. I don’t think s/he should be exposed to children who act so rough.”
It is natural for parents to feel frustrated and question these things. For many parents, especially parents of first or only children, one of the greatest fears is that their sweet child will somehow become badly behaved, or even a bully. Or alternately, that their innocent child will become frightened of aggressive children.
In an attempt to answer parents’ fears, I have been doing some research on the emergence of aggression in young children. Please read this discussion if you would like to know what some of the “experts” in various fields have to say.
Common wisdom from the field of child development:
All children go through certain predictable stages, as most parents now know from reading various books on children’s development. Infants begin as beings who cannot distinguish between themselves and the external world, which they perceive as existing to meet their needs. While babies gradually learn to differentiate themselves from others, including their parents, frustrations at each stage of development center around the discovery that other people are not there just to meet their needs.
Children’s desire to be the center of the universe continues to play out when they enter their first social groups, generally in preschool. Having already negotiated the complexities of dealing with parents and siblings, they now encounter other children their age who, like them, want to control the show. As excited as they are to make new friends, young children are often confused by the behavior of their potential friends, who may not play the role in their fantasy that they imagined they would play. Becoming a social animal who can balance in a give and take with peers is a complex thing, which takes many of us a lifetime!
At age 4-6, children become very aware of gender, sometimes in an exaggerated form. Dr. Spock states: “Boys… often play at being superheroes, ninjas, or karate experts… Large, scary animals like dinosaurs are often fascinating to young children who may feel small and powerless. Guns, too, can hold immense appeal. If there are no toy guns around, many children—especially boys—will create make-believe guns from any likely object” (including their own fingers).
Is this aggressive behavior a precursor to becoming a violent adult?
It is important for parents to realize how much young children live in a fantasy world of their own making. Just as their sense of number, space and time are immature (if fascinating), their sense of morality is in its early development too. A child who wants to fight with toy soldiers or to become a scary dragon is not destined to be a violent adult, or even to hurt anyone at all. A fascination with power is normal in the 4-6 year old child, who is leaving baby-hood and sees before him/her the scary if exciting world of elementary school. No wonder he wants to be all-powerful! He feels anything but.
I asked my grandson Sammy, age 5 and a half, why he loves battles.
Sammy: “Because I like to see things crash down.”
Lorie: “But do you know that battles kill people? Do you want people to be hurt or killed?
Sammy: “No! Godzilla just likes to knock people over. I don’t want anyone to get hurt, just to crash down."
Most fairy tales have plots in which small children or powerless people conquer enemies much bigger or scarier than themselves, usually through using their wits and outsmarting the monsters. This is quite naturally what young children dream of.
Does this behavior come from the media? There is so much violence out there.
While I am not an advocate of children watching violent shows, the emergence of aggressive behavior in children from 3-6 years old goes back much farther than TV and other media. In fact, evolutionary biologists can now trace aggressive traits and their antidote, the learning of moral behavior, to the earliest of human tribes. In addition, psychological anthropologists such as Whiting and Whiting, have amassed a collection of studies of Children in Six Cultures, in an attempt to determine which human traits are universal and which cultural. These cultures are as different as subsistence farmers in Africa and Asia and American suburban children. While some traits do vary culturally, many of the basic developmental patterns are the same across all groups. Among these are the pronounced sex differences which emerge in 3-5 year old children, regardless of cultural setting. “Boys engage in more horseplay, rough and tumble physical contact; girls seek help or touch others more frequently.” Interestingly, “these behaviors decrease sharply with age.” (p. 182) Whiting and Whiting go on to say that how actual sex roles and how instances of aggression play out in later years depends a great deal on what cultures dictate, but that early development of these roles and of boy/girl differences in aggression seem universal. This may be why stories for young children from all over the world tend to center around the familiar fairy tale hero who outsmarts the huge and powerful foe.
Is this good news or bad news?
Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists, writing in the book Evolutionary Origins of Morality, think it is good news. Christopher Boehm, who writes about “Conflict and the evolution of social control,” begins with a statement which might at first sound daunting:
All human groups experience competition and conflict, and one major type of within-group conflict is political, in the sense that humans are innately disposed to vie for power and position.” (p. 83)
However, this argument is actually used to support a theory on why human beings have evolved morality. In Boehm’s argument, early humans (for 100,000 and more years!) and current isolated tribal people, are almost always egalitarian and morally supportive of the common good of their group. Where does this morality come from? Boehm and other social scientists argue that morality is a group phenomenon, which is learned through dialogue with others. It is because human beings interact and experience the things they don’t like, such as bullying, that they become skilled at creating a social order which does not accept these behaviors. And because humans, as social animals, want group acceptance above all, they learn to “work it out” with others, and to suppress their overly selfish desires, in order to become a member of a group. In fact, there is much evidence that human beings have evolved strong instincts not only to be fair, but actually to be altruistic. These instincts have evolved in response to empathy, the human ability to see someone else hurt and feel the pain.
What does this mean for my child? Is it good to experience conflict and learn to get along?
In many ways, each generation of human children invents their world together, working out age-old conflicts and opportunities in their own terms. This is how we learn as human beings.
Human beings learn math by trial and error, piling up blocks to see which tower is higher and which will stand. No child can learn without experiencing many towers which fall, and sometimes shedding tears before starting to build again.
For some reason, most of us know and tolerate this process, but are more upset if a child pushes another child down, or experiences being pushed. Part of this, I think, is that we tend to have one or more misconceptions about social behavior in young children. These may include:
· A notion of innocence. That very young children are innocent, and should be shielded from the “bad” world in which aggression exists. The truth is that conflict is in the human condition since birth.
· A notion that “bad” behavior is learned by watching it, and then will persist in the child who learns it. While there is truth in the idea that children will imitate what they see, they will try out various behaviors to see what the result will be. This is how humans learn, by trial and error. Children will soon see that unacceptable behaviors do not achieve their goals, and will learn the behaviors which the group accepts. (This assumes that teachers, parents, and other children are generally behaving in positive ways.)
· A notion that behavior is learned didactically, by adults telling children what to do and children obeying. This is an old-fashioned idea about learning, which does not fit how children learn math any better than it fits how they learn to be “good”. Children learn best by trying things out and seeing the results. If they want to make friends, they will learn through trial and error that being nice achieves this result, and hogging the toys does not.
What role do the adults at school play?
The most important thing left out of this discussion so far is the important role played by the group, and in our case, by a group of adults and children who create a positive environment in which children can learn to be social beings. It is true that children learn how to be social by imitating those around them. Children who grow up in negative environments, where older people do violent or cruel things, will continue in those behaviors to survive. But children who come to preschools where teachers model positive behaviors and positive discipline, will learn that this is how things work best. Of course, a parallel process is occurring even more strongly in their families at home. If a community shares a positive vision for its children, it is extremely unlikely that any child will not learn to be a moral being, capable of self-control and empathy, in the long run.
Will there be mistakes along the way? Of course. And we would argue that since the most important thing children learn in preschool is how to be social beings, that there will be many mistakes and disappointments along the way, but also may joys and friendships. The point is that this is how it works for human beings. If a child stayed at home during these years, s/he would experience fewer conflicts, but would just have to learn these lessons later, when there is less time for them, in elementary school. How wonderful it is to watch our children re-invent human history in their social groups, with all its ups and downs, and to see them come out on top!
References:
Katz, Leonard D. (ed) (2002) Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives. Imprint Academic: UK.
Dr. Spock. “How Aggressive Behaviors Change over Time, ” and “Aggresssion: Three to Six Years.” http://www.drspock.com/article/0,1510,4746,00.html.
Whiting, Beatrice B. and John W.M. (1975) Children of Six Cultures: A Psycho-Cultural Analysis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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