The Toronto Star, Thursday April 23 1998, pp. B1-2,
by Gayle Vassar Melvin
Rage is a mighty big emotion - too big, one would think, to pack into the compact body of a preschooler.
But as Linda Duesler rubs the crescent-shaped gouges on her bruised left hand, she knows better. The gouges, says the preschooler director, were made by the tiny fingernails of a child who has already been expelled from five preschools in his short life.
Duesler, who has worked in preschools for almost 30 years, says she has seen an increase in extremely angry young children during the past decade.
"These children have no respect for authority at a very young age. They don't bond." It frustrates her to see them hurting so much. "And they are hurting, even as they try to hurt others."
She's not the only one seeing more rage in preschools. "I am profoundly concerned," says Ronda Garcia, an early childhood development instructor in California. "What I am hearing is that the kids today are different from even three years ago. They have shorter fuses, go from zero to 60 in a faster time."
But instead of blaming the child, Duesler and Garcia say society needs to take a hard look at how it is treating its youngest members. In the rush-rush pace of the '90s, many little children are missing out on the one-on-one nurturing they need if they are going to learn how to connect with others, they say.
"These aren't children of rage," Garcia says. "They are children who are trying to let us know it is getting to be too much. They are raising their voices and wriggling their little bodies in a way that is trying to get us to wake up."
While our social structure has changed dramatically in past decades, the needs of babies have not. Adults may have adapted to demanding careers or the stress of single-parenthood, but infants still need responsive, consistent care, says Robin Karr-Morse, co-author of Ghosts From The Nursery: Tracing The Roots Of Violence (Publisher's Group West, $36.50).
Karr- Morse and co-author Meredith Wiley describe how an infant's interactions with parents and caregivers form neurological connections in the baby's brain that guide his or her future relationships and emotions.
Children deprived of those connections are less likely to care about others, says Karr-Morse. "Empathy seems to be an endangered characteristic, not just in the children from the underclass, but from all ethnicities and incomes."
There is no end to stories about the long-term emotional scarring of kids who were shunted from one foster home to another, or left to languish in overseas orphanages with little human contact during their infancy.
Similarly, young children who experience multiple emotional losses by being moved from one day-care situation to another during their first few years might have more difficulty bonding, says Karr-Morse. She recalls one 4-year-old boy whose mother brought him to see her after he had been kicked out of another preschool.
"He literally took my office apart and let his mother have it in front of me, pulling her hair and kicking her." The child had been cared for by a rapidly changning series of nannies since birth, she says. "Neither of the parents was there for him when he was a baby. He had no consistency, no ability to trust that the same set of arms would be there for him."
While few child development experts are tellign parents to quit their jobs, many say the increase in angry children underscores the importance of choosing quality child care.
"Parents need to spend more time in the beginning making sure that the caregiver is a good fit for their child," Garcia says. "When you choose child care that doesn't fit your child, it's almost like choosing the wrong job for him. The child doesn't know how to turn in a letter of resignation, so he has to start biting his co-workers so he can get fired."
Among things to look for: A caregiver who is emotionally available to the child and a low-key, uncrowded setting.
Putting very young children in a room with scads of other kids can lead to aggression, says Dorothy Stewart, a longtime early childhood education professor.
"Children learn to withhold their aggression based on the fact that they fall in love with their parents and want to please them," Stewart says.
"If children are mostly with other children 10 hours a day, the other children become more important than adults. They learn what they have to do to get by with kids, rather than with adults. They learn that might makes right."
Children, even very young ones, also need space to be alone, says Stefanie Powers, who works on an American policy forum on children's issues.
"Day care providers need to provide places where children can be alone. That can be a factor I would look for as a parent."
Sometimes parents do not realize there is a problem until the child has been asked to leave his or her preschool. Duesler says she is frustrated by how many children she sees expelled from one school to the next.
"Can you imagine how hard it is to be bouncing from one preschool to the next?" she says.
"Don't just give them walking papers. Give the parents resources so they have somewhere to turn."
While it may be painful for parents to recognize their child's anger, denial is not the solution, says Garcia. A parent needs to look for help.
"Children aren't born into the world angry. These are children who, because they don't have language skills, don't know a better way to ask for intervention. They learn that by turning up the volume, they get attention."
For many parents, the thought that they may be unwittingly depriving their child during these formative years is terrifying, says Powers.
But the solution is simple: Working parents need to make educated choices about child care and all parents need to give their children plenty of loving contact.
"It's the little things, the daily routines of feeding, bathing, putting down to sleep, that teach children about themselves and the world around them," she says. "Those are potent times."
Contra Costa Times
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