Runaway Success
I’ve previously shared a few stories of the time I used to volunteer to help at a Sunday school for kids ages 3-6 when I was a teenager. I volunteered not out of religious devotion (at the time, I was still trying to be a good Christian, now I’m sadly a heathen atheist) but mostly because I was just starting to realize I loved working with children, and this gave me my first real practice with kids.
As an aid, I was responsible for filling in for all the odds and ends the teacher couldn’t do. I’d handle helping welcome kids to the class and get them situated and happy, handing out snacks, bathroom runs, doing the weekly puppet show, etc., but probably my most important job was handling unruly children to keep them from disrupting the rest of the class. Usually, this was as simple as a whispered correction in their ear or setting a kid on my lap during lesson time.
That is, until [Boy] started coming to our classroom. [Boy] was the exact opposite of what a teacher wants out of a student; he was a disruption and a distraction that could bring the entire classroom to a halt single-handedly. As a teen who was still relatively inexperienced with children, I didn’t have a clue how to handle him. He would talk over the lesson constantly, get too physical with other kids, Whenever we took the kids for a mid-class bathroom break he would bolt down the hallway and make me chase after him as I tried to escort the boys back to the classroom, It was almost as if he was trying to be as disruptive as humanly possible.
His mother knew he could be a handful and had warned us when she first left him with us. She’d told us if he was ever too much trouble, we could take him back to her, and on more than one occasion, the teacher in the class instructed me to do exactly that when he was single-handedly interrupting the entire classroom.
I’d figure [Boy] would hate me, considering it was basically my job to show up and interrupt all his fun during class, but then one day [Boy] came in to class feeling sick and tired, and all he wanted to do the entire class was have me hold him. He cuddled into me as if I was his favorite person in the world and the only one that could make him feel better. I couldn’t understand why he would treat me like he valued me rather than see me as an adversary! It was so unusual that it made me think back and start to reevaluate our little problem child’s past behaviors.
What I realized was that [Boy] just wanted attention but didn’t yet distinguish between positive and negative attention. He ran from me only because he knew I would chase him, and he saw it as a fun game to play. Likewise, most of his other interruptive behavior during class was attention seeking, and he liked me because he was getting attention from me whenever I stepped in to handle whatever disruptive behavior he was getting up to.
Now that I knew this, I set out to teach him that he should be seeking positive attention instead of negative attention. This started by simply not chasing him when he ran off down empty church hallways. I’d get the rest of the kid into the classroom and then pretend to go in myself and ignore him – though I did secretly keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or anything while in the hallway, and sure enough he soon came back to the classroom on his own disappointed I didn’t chase him. After a few repeats of this, he stopped trying to run away.
I got permission from his mother to use a time-out with him, and next time he interrupted class, he was moved into a corner for a time-out. He only had to sit there for a minute before he could return to the class, except he had to be sitting still and quietly for that minute. He would try to get up and run away, so I had to sit beside him during this time to stop his running, but despite this, I refused his many attempts to engage me. I’d stop him if he tried to get up from the chair, but otherwise, he got no interaction beyond an occasional reminder that we couldn’t interact during time out.
His refusal to sit quietly, even for half a minute, meant he went the entire lesson in time out for three weekends in a row. I was about ready to give up on my goal when he finally managed to get out of time out after only half a lesson of his fighting time out. I applauded him for sitting still long enough to get out and offered to let him come back and sit on my lap during the rest of the lesson.
This wasn’t the only time he sat on my lap. In conjunction with my trying to remove the attention he was seeking when he misbehaved, I tried to give him as much positive attention as I could when he behaved. He got first dibs on sitting on my lap during lessons – though he would get moved to the floor next to me when my lap was needed for another child. He got praise as soon as I could give it for relatively minor feats of going a half a minute without interrupting the teacher, and or not upsetting any fellow classmates during snack time. I found every possible excuse I could to give positive reinforcement at first.
He eventually got the message that he got the attention he so desperately craved only when he behaved. Over time he got fewer and fewer time out and he could almost go the entire lesson without interrupting – though he did have a tendency to stop listening to lesson so he could turn to me and ask if he was ‘being good’ which left me stuck explaining he had been good but interrupting lessons to ask if you are good was an example of a not-good behavior.
Over the months, I slowly pulled back on the positive attention as well. I still praised him, but I required more and more positive behavior before he got his praise, rather than my original desperate attempt to find just a few seconds when he wasn’t being disruptive, so I’d have an excuse to praise him. And he adjusted accordingly, being less disruptive and clearly doing the best his little hyperactive self could manage to earn that praise.
I was rather proud of his progress with us over the next half a year, but the moment I most remember came shortly before I had to leave the Sunday school entirely to go to college. The teacher of the class informed me, as I was about to leave, that she had just spoken to [Boy]’s mother and [Mother] had informed [Teacher] that she had decided to send [Boy] to his first year of kindergarten at the end of summer. She had originally planned to wait another year, knowing how disruptive he could be, but she had noticed how much progress he had made in our class, and she now felt he could manage in a school environment. [Mother] had wanted to relay her thanks to both of us for helping [Son].
I doubt that kid remembers me all these years later, but I sure remember him. I’m glad I could help him to do better in our class and, hopefully, in school as well. But more than that, I feel I owe him a thank you for teaching me a valuable lesson that I’ve tried to remember as I continue to work with kids all these years later. That I shouldn’t be so quick to label a child a ‘bad’ child, and that often it’s the ones that others are quick to write off as problems that most need an adult willing to listen to them and care for them.
