“But I want to be good!” offers practical, insightful guidance on how educators and a service as a whole can support children displaying challenging behaviours in early childhood settings. It’s grounded in the author’s four decades of professional and personal experience of early years education and young children with diverse and significant needs.
The book describes issues related to neurodiversity and trauma and strategies for responding to them. It has a proactive focus in seeking to prevent the impact on an educator’s well-being that occurs where severe behaviours persist or the educator feels unsupported.
Increasingly in early childhood settings, children are displaying disruptive, aggressive, violent and defiant behaviours that make learning and teaching difficult for educators, the child is playing the behaviours and the other children in the group. In response, many educators understandably struggle to be adaptive to the individual needs of a child with behaviours that challenge in a room full of other children, each with their own, usually very different needs.
Taking its inspiration from the distressed cry of a disruptive four-year-old – “But I want to be good!” – this book has as its starting point that children are doing the best they can in the moment. It looks in depth at potential causes of a range of behaviours that challenge – which typically relate to either normal development or unmet needs that cause stress. Based on this understanding and vividly illustrating the issues through case studies, “But I want to be good!” shows how educators can compassionately and professionally explore all possible reasons behind the individual child’s behaviour, including the environments their setting currently provides, so that they are better able to support all the children in their care.
