Introduction
The field of developmental psychology traditionally has taken the position that behavior develops in the child through biological maturation, although the field involves little actual study of biological maturation. The field has made many important observations of the developing behavior of the child. Without studying the causes of the behavior development, the conceptions accounting for the many types of child behavior development are generally different and independent ( 1996). The weakest link in the child’s cognitive development is that people leave the training of the various aspects of the basic behavioral repertoires in the hands of individual parents who have no special training with respect to what the child needs in his basic behavioral repertoire, or of the principles by which the repertoire is acquired, or indeed of methods to produce the learning. One of the purposes of the behavioral analyses is to produce information yielding training procedures appropriate for utilization by parents. It is suggested that the use of various training materials can be expected to constitute preventive treatment of central problems of child behavior and child development ( 1996).
Moreover, the materials can be used as behavior modification methods by parents whose children have already developed problems of development child behavior problems emphasized the importance of the child’s language development, especially that of following instructions, an analysis based on how the child learns the verbal-motor repertoire. It was said the child learned such compliance by virtue of training involving reinforcement principles. It is important to recognize that the field of child behavior therapy and the field of developmental disabilities in behavior analysis have been based, in good part, on extending the basic level of study to analyses of children’s behavior problems. With respect to simple behaviors for example, excessive crying, lisping, temper tantrums, refusing to go to sleep at night, acting-out in class, and aggressive or destructive behavior. Experts began its work with children employing the basic principles of conditioning and there are many important studies in the field of behavior therapy that have the same foundation. Methods of study and programs of training have been devised within this framework that is valuable to both practitioner and parent ( 1996).
The behavior of children depends on how they were brought up by their parents and the environment around them. If parents are not educated on how to rear their children and they did not use the appropriate parenting methods the child may end up having an inappropriate behavior. This behavior may be taken as the child goes to school or other places. The behavior of children can also be affected by the environment they belong to. If the child sees that the people around him/her has a habit of swearing he/she might imitate that and swearing will be part of his lifestyle. A child that grew from a refined culture may end up having a high degree of culture that he/she will use as he/she narrates with different kinds of people. The paper will evaluate a child that is presenting challenging behavior within the school context.
Behavior management
Occupational therapists have long considered personality to be composite of nature and nurture. In this conception nature represents those characteristics, both genetic and congenital, that are innate to the individual. Nurture consists of environmental influences, such as social expectation, opportunity, and mastery experiences, and the social and interpersonal behaviors that the individual uses to respond to the environment. All standardized pediatric tests reveal variations in the rate of skill acquisition ( 2001). Children also vary in the development of interests, habits, talents, and social competence. Therapists previously paid little attention to the range of differences in social and emotional development. Behavior management techniques are common in school and clinical settings. Among the techniques that therapists most often use are time out, performance contracts, self-management and personal responsibility training, and values clarification. Behavior management is based on behavior modification methods and is an effective tool for improving both social and academic behaviors ( 2001).
Behavior management includes the use of external controls and techniques to teach individuals to control their own behavior. The management of behavior is important with all occupational therapy interventions. Inappropriate behavior can limit the child’s function and the child’s progress on therapy goals. The therapist expects to manage the behavior of a child who is labeled emotionally handicapped, but most children seen for therapy need some degree of external behavior control during the course of therapy ( 2001). Children with disabilities do not always learn basic manners and social behaviors. These physically disabled, or ill, children who have no psychosocial disorders, often develop dysfunctional interpersonal behaviors that exaggerate their disability. Their behaviors often limit social interactions more dramatically than their disability ever would. Rude behaviors gain attention even though they isolate the individual. Children with disabilities need to be respected as individuals with feelings, ideas, and emotional needs. Likewise, children with disabilities need to respect other individuals ( 2001).
Manners are a social tool reflecting respect. The occupational therapist needs to model and expect developmentally appropriate social interactions in the therapy session. The theory and intervention models presented in this chapter provide specific approaches to this type of intervention. Society does not deal well with long-term disability, often allowing the individual who has a disability to break social rules. Society may inadvertently foster over dependency and passivity ( 2001). The behavior of children can be modified to the use of techniques such as behavior management. Behavior management makes sure that a child will act appropriately at a given place. It helps minimizing the unwanted characteristics of a child that prevent him/her to be good member of society. Behavior management also helps the child to subdue his/her behavioral problems. The behavioral problem is one of the causes of a child’s poor performance at school.
Aggressive behavior
Aggressive behavior at very young ages has been found to be highly predictive of aggressive behavior in adolescence and adulthood. A process by which difficult temperament might be linked with later aggressive behavior disorder could involve the interaction of a child constitutional tendency to be demanding of social responsiveness interacting with parental tendencies to be depressed or otherwise unresponsive to mild initiation attempts by the child, and consequently, coercive process and system-maintaining cognitive and affective biases ( & 1991). Aggressive behavior leads to rejection, but in the long run peer rejection may function as a determinant of who drops out and who stays in the antisocial process. The transformation of the child’s initial aggressive behavior into habitual aggressive behavior may depend as much on the responses of the child’s environment to the aggression, the continuance of precipitating factors, and the convergence of other causal factors as on the initial exposure to violence ( & 1991).
Parents can provide critical input into both the enactive and observational learning processes. The parents’ aggressiveness, punitive ness, and rejection serve both as reinforcements and as models of behavior for children to observe and incorporate into their own behavioral repertoires, especially when children observe the rewards that such behaviors provide. Furthermore, children’s cognitive processes may well be influenced by the parents’ own cognitive processes. Experiences are ones that enhance the child’s repertoire of aggressive tactics, limit the child’s repertoire of competent non aggressive tactics, and lead the child to evaluate the outcomes of aggressive behavior in positive ways. A child who has been exposed to high rates of violence on television, in the neighborhood, or among family members, will develop a large repertoire of aggressive responses ( & 1991). When these responses are endorsed either explicitly or implicitly by the environment, the probability is even greater that they will be easily accessible in problematic situations. That is, they will be at the top of the memory storage bin, ready to be called into action. Thus, parents who teach their children to value aggressive heroes and to hit back when pushed around will be likely to have children who develop proactive aggressive behaviors ( & 1991).
It is important to point out that these parents rarely explicitly teach their child to be proactively aggressive; they feel that they are teaching appropriate reactive aggression ( & 1991). One of the challenging behaviors within the school context is when the child has an aggressive behavior. When a child has an aggressive behavior he/she tends to hurt another child by hitting, kicking or biting him/her. Another sign for aggressive behavior is when the child does certain things without much thought. The aggressiveness of a child can be brought about how he/she is raised up by the parents. It can also be due to the child’s exposure to violence in the environment. The aggressive behavior should be minimized before the child grows up. The aggressive behavior can be minimized by strategies such as behavior modification.
Behavior modification
Psychologists are not likely to solve the problem of detrimental environmental change, but they can make important contributions to this effort. Inasmuch as many aspects of the problem are the consequences of human behavior, a primary approach to their solution or amelioration must be efforts to modify that behavior. Psychology should be uniquely well positioned to contribute to an understanding of environmentally detrimental behavior and to its modification when that is what is required. Inasmuch as behavior is influenced by knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values, and desires, efforts to change behavior in ways that would benefit the environment will have to take cognitive and affective variables into account. Beyond the objectives of understanding behavioral causes of environmental change and finding ways to modify environmentally destructive behavior to make it more environmentally beneficial or benign, there are other opportunities for psychological research to contribute to the general goal of managing environmental change ( 2003).
Some of these fall within the mainstream interests of engineering psychologists and human factors specialists because they have to do with equipment design and the interaction of people with machines; they relate not so much to the goal of modifying behavior through persuasion and attitude change, but to that of designing equipment and products that effectively meet users’ needs without doing so at the expense of environmental damage. It seems natural to assume that beliefs and attitudes are major determinants of behavior that people tend to behave in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and attitudes. On this assumption, if one is interested in modifying behavior, it makes sense to try to change the beliefs and attitudes from which the behavior is assumed to flow. The position can be argued, and it has been argued, that it is sometimes more cost effective to try to change behavior directly than to do so via a change in attitudes, and that attitude change is likely to follow the change in behavior ( 2003). The fact that changes in attitude sometimes do follow changes in behavior that have been induced by persuasion or coercion has been a focus of experimentation and theorizing among social psychologists and supports the belief that attitudes are as likely to be the consequences of behavior as to cause it. Much of the work in this area has been done by psychologists who use the techniques of applied behavior analysis, or behavioral engineering, to study the possibility of modifying behavior in specific ways by the use of incentives or disincentives and rewards or punishments ( 2003).
There are many ways to attempt to effect changes in the behavior of individuals and corporate entities in addition to that of doing so indirectly through the change of attitudes: legislation and governmental regulations backed up by the threat of civil or criminal sanctions; incentives in the form of tax deductions for the costs of environmental preservation or cleanup activities; disincentives in the form of taxation of pollution-producing activities; public recognition and awards for noteworthy environmental activity; persuasion, as represented by appeals to moral responsibility or altruism; and the dissemination of information designed to make people aware of problems and what can be done about them (Nickerson 2003). Education must be a major component in any approach that has as its aim the influencing of people to behave, intentionally and intelligently, in environmentally beneficial ways. People cannot be concerned about environmental issues if they do not know about them, and they cannot be faulted for behaving in environmentally detrimental ways if they are unaware of the implications of specific forms of behavior ( 2003).
One factor that causes the aggressiveness of a child’s behavior is the culture of the environment. The nation’s cultural environment dictates what are the possible events and situations in the society with regards to the way a nation works for its betterment. The nation’s cultural environment leads a certain country into doing what it thinks will be the best action for its future and avoiding any action that will result into problems. It creates models that the children follow without them knowing whether the action is acceptable or not. To counter the effects of the cultural environment to a child, they must undergo behavior modification while they are little. Behavior modification intends to change the child’s behavior by various means. Behavior modification has been used by psychotherapists, parents and guidance counselors to try finding ways to alter the human behavior. Behavior modification can be done through methods such as positive or negative reinforcement and the extinction of maladaptive behavior through positive and negative conditioning. With proper use behavior modification can help a child to grow up with lesser instances of aggressiveness.
Reinforcement
A fountain usually produces a stream of water; flipping a light switch usually results in increased illumination; and pressing keys on a keyboard results in letters and words appearing on a monitor. These relations between acts and consequences are called operant contingencies, because the act operates on, or changes, the world. Principles of selection describe the functional relations between acts and consequences or the operant and the subsequent frequency of the act. Relations of that kind have the name contingencies ( & 1997). As it turns out, some act-consequence relations result in increased or sustained frequency of the act that is part of that contingency, and other act-consequence relations result in decreased frequency of the act that is part of that contingency. Some act-consequence contingencies have no effect on future frequency of the act. When the contingency accounts for increased frequency of an act, the reinforcement principle is being described. When the contingency accounts for decreased frequency of an act, the punishment principle is being described ( & 1997).
Reinforcement and extinction principles are considered scientific principles because the functional relations they describe do not pertain only to single occurrences: not just to someone’s behavior, or to button pressing, or to tones as consequences. They pertain to any and all relations where the frequency of an act can be shown to increase and decrease as a function of the presence or absence of an operant contingency ( & 1997). The effect of the antecedent reflects the effect of the consequence it signals: The antecedents of reinforcement evoke the behavior reinforced; the antecedents of punishment and extinction suppress the behavior punished or extinguished and often evoke any previously established avoidance, escapes, or counter controls. The probability of an individual’s learning at a given developmental point varies not only as a function of reinforcement, but also as a function of the historical and contemporaneous contextual variables interacting. Knowledge is not just a group of responses; it is a group of responses to the stimuli defining the problem that gain the reinforcers programmed only for correct solutions to the problem. A problem’s solution is correct if the agency programming reinforcement of its solution presents the reinforcer systematically enough ( & 1997).
One way to minimize and guide the child who has aggressive behavioral issues is to provide reinforcement to the child. Reinforcement can be done in both a positive and negative way. Positive reinforcement focuses on giving kind words and ideas to a child who promises not to commit any aggressive acts. Positive reinforcement can also be in the form of tangible rewards that they child want. Negative reinforcement is when the child is warned about punishment when he/she commits any aggressive act. Negative reinforcement can also be in the form of reduction of certain things the child likes. Reinforcement tends to make the child try to refrain from showing compulsive behavior. Together with proper medication and clinical sessions reinforcement can help bring out the best in the child and reduce instances of aggressive behavior.
Conditioning
Evolution is not the only thing that determines a being’s behavior it is also determined by learning gained from the being’s experience in its environment. In psychology learning refers to a relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as the result of reinforcement. One type of learning is conditioning, of which there are two explanations: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Both classical and operant conditioning attempt to explain exactly how humans learns such new behaviors; thus they are learning theories. Furthermore, both classical conditioning theory and operant conditioning theory are based on behaviorism ( 2002). Behaviorism is an approach in psychology that argues that the only appropriate subject matter for scientific psychological investigation is directly observable and measurable behavior. Therefore behaviorists claim that internal mental processes are not appropriate subject matter for scientific psychological investigation as they are not directly observable and measurable ( 2002). Conditioning is the use of strategies to make a child follow the teacher or any other adult without using force or other method to motivate the child. In conditioning the mind of the child is set into doing the things instructed by the one who stands as his/her behavioral coach. The coach doesn’t have to tell him/ her to do. This creates minimal occurrence of aggressive behavior because the child thinks twice before doing aggressive actions. The focus of the child shifts from the aggressive act into what the behavior coach instructed him/her to do. In this technique the child gains more drive to do things approved by the behavior coach.
References
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