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SUBTLE STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH TOUGH KIDS

 Have you been in a space where it feels like you’re getting it right with all the other children but this one child won’t let you drink water and drop cup. They are the ones who see a hole in every plane and a motive in every gesture. They go left as soon as you say everyone should  “go right” and sometimes get to influence the others with their actions too.

 This is not the moment where I give you a magic wand that will transform that child into the obedient child you want, this is what you resort to when you’ve tried all the yelling and punishment strategies that you have got up your sleeve and it’s still not working. 

Tough kids are a combination of strong will and a sort of closeness, now we are not about to take the strong will out of our kids because that attribute is one that would enable him/her question status quo, challenge popular opinion even if it means standing alone and would enable the child run with the dreams once their minds are made up about them. What we need to work on is that “closeness” as it is okay to be strong-willed but we have to be sure you are headstrong about the right things, which means that you have the openness to put all the cards on the table without bias to ascertain which one needs to go and which one stays and is valued.

As an educator/parent watch out for that tough kid, he knows that he is always flagged off for doing something wrong-this time watch out for the slightest thing he does that is right, and commend and complement him immediately. Children have a way of repeating positively reinforced behaviours.

Agnes with her pupil during after-school hours

Elizabeth is a pupil in my class who is always looking for how to dodge tasks and disturb the class when she gets the opportunity so because of this she is always on the list of noise makers, those walking or running around or those playing so she always gets all the punishments and yelling on a daily basis. On this very day, I saw her sitting very quietly and writing, sitting still for just a little while, the next thing I did was to call the attention of the entire class to her-I mentioned how I had noticed her for a while and I loved how she is going about her work without disturbing. For someone who is always receiving “the stick,” she was so excited that she kept giving me the shy smile, I promise you, Elizabeth didn’t go on running around disturbing the class, she sat down, wrote, and listened when she was being taught. I used this strategy say three times in the entire day as soon she did something worthy of note no matter how little it was.     

Bolu is another pupil, in fact at first when I started teaching her class, I thought that she just didn’t like me. My experience with children has made me understand that sometimes these children just want a little bit more of your attention but now as a teacher with more than twenty students in a class, how do you want to give everyone a little bit more attention at the same time? For me, Bolu at the time was always against everything I wanted to do and she has a way of influencing the entire class to say no to what she does not agree with- amazing quality for a child right? But at that point, I was on the bad side of things. 

One day, I cleared out my schedule and told Bolu that I would be visiting her and her parents to say hi to them and also get to meet her other siblings, for some weird reason, she was so excited that she told all her friends that miss Agnes was going to her house when I got to her house, I met her mom who thought I came to report her daughter to her but instead, I spoke to her about how much she is able to naturally influence others towards a particular goal and I could see the smiles on her face through the side of my eye. The mom thanked me for coming to say hello to them and on my way out I took her aside to tell her the amazing qualities I liked about her and that I wanted us to be friends from now on but she’ll need to agree with the partnership if it’s going to work, she agreed, we even shook hands and that was the beginning of our friendship.

 

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