Using Your Words
Source: Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall
Topics: Speech and Language Issues, Child Behavior Issues, Children and Behavior Problems
Language and verbal skills are utterly essential, and it is easy to see how children without them might turn to challenging behavior. In The Explosive Child (1998), child psychologist Ross W. Greene describes some of the barriers that such children encounter.
- Understanding. When a child doesn’t understand the words of the people around her, she becomes confused and frustrated and finds it hard to respond appropriately.
- Categorizing, labeling, and storing emotions and previous experiences in language. If a child can’t use language to classify and store her feelings and experiences, she doesn’t really know how she feels or what she did the last time she felt this way.
- Thinking things through in language. When a child can’t use words to think things through, she can’t figure out what to do, even when she knows what she’s feeling.
- Expressing complicated feelings, thoughts, and ideas. A child may have trouble going beyond simple language to articulate what’s bothering her.
Excerpted From:
Excerpt from Challenging Behavior in Young Children: Understanding, Preventing, and Responding Effectively , by B. Kaiser & J.S. Rasminsky, 2007 edition, p. 30.
© 2007, Merrill, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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