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Changing Student Behavior: Part 1

Research data consistently shows that there has been an increase in negative student behaviors in schools, students exhibiting ADD/ADHD like features, and students with mental health issues (anxiety/depression).


This upward trend started in the 1990s with a marked increase between 2010 and 2015, then again after COVID, 2021 to now.


WHY are we seeing this trend? WHAT can we do about it?


This summer, I immersed myself in researching this visible change which is making it very difficult for teachers to provide effective instruction. 


I read the following books:


Changing Student Behavior

My reading led to self reflection. As a veteran teacher, earning my teaching credential in the mid 1990’s, I thought back to the expectations of teachers at that time in regards to curriculum, data tracking, and effective instructional strategies.


I also reflected on my former students, their achievement levels and behavior in the classroom.


**This is presented in detail in How to Teach Elementary School Chapter 3: Academic Content Standards


I have come to the following conclusion:


There was a noticeable shift soon after the turn of the century. 

Prior to the 2000s, MUCH LESS was expected of teachers and students at school. 

Prior to the 2000s MUCH MORE was expected of children in the home.


Changing Student Behavior

In the last 20 years, this MUCH LESS and MUCH MORE model has completely flipped.

MUCH MORE is expected of teachers and students at school.

In the last 20 years, MUCH LESS is expected of children in the home.


Changing Student Behavior

Prior to the 2000s, students would have been MORE equipped to handle increased academic rigor and likely would have thrived with increased expectations and accountability. 

In the last 20 years, students are LESS equipped to handle the increased expectations and rigor of school. Because of this, we are seeing a rise in student behaviors and mental health issues.


WHY are we seeing this trend? And WHAT can we do about it?


The WHY is much bigger than one blog post, therefore I will summarize some of my findings with the resources cited so you can do your own reading in this blog post.


There are REASONS why we are seeing an increase in student behaviors, an inability to maintain focus, and student mental health issues.


First, this is a systemic, societal, cultural issue. It is being experienced in every school, in every state across the United States and in other countries across the world. How these changes are managed, by being proactive or reactive, varies from school to school. Therefore, the experiences of teachers will vary in degree.


The rise in student mental health issues, lack of focus and attention, and exhibited behaviors in the school setting stem from environmental and cultural changes.


ENVIRONMENTAL - OUTSIDE THE HOME

CULTURE, ECONOMY, TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET

  • A cultural shift in the 1970’s caused by the Vietnam War, increased divorce rates, the changing economy and more meant that single parents needed to work or both parents in a two parent home needed to work. 

  • This cultural shift, along with other factors (24 hour news, cable TV 1980’s) have changed the way adults parent their children.

  • With an increase in mobile technologies we are living in a fast paced world with any information you could ask for at the tip of your fingers. 

  • We are living in a world of distractions -100’s of them a day - and that’s just from our computers and cell phones.


ENVIRONMENTAL - INSIDE THE HOME

  • Parents are stressed, exhausted, and distracted by their own emails, texts, and apps. 

  • 70% of parents say they are distracted by their phone when spending time with their child. Smartphones are interfering with the emotional bond between parents and children. Some parents attend to their smartphones more than their children, even when they are playing together. -Pew Research Center

  • The parenting style for both working parents and stay at home parents has gone from FREE RANGE to SAFETY PARENTING.

  • Today's parents limit the independent activities of their children to a far greater extent than previous generations of parents. Playtime is structured and monitored by adults. Kids are enrolled in multiple extracurricular activities monitored by adults. 

  • Starting at a very young age, toddlers are put in front of a screen to keep them busy, occupied, quiet; at home, in the car, at a restaurant. 

  • When children are not busy with a dance class or sports practice, they are glued to a screen watching videos or playing games.


Changing Student Behavior: What Does This Mean For Our Students?

CAUSE - LESS FREE PLAY, MORE SCREEN TIME

Increased exposure to screens reduces the time available for face to face play in the real world. Tablets and smartphones in children's hands are experience blockers.


Parents (around the world) tried to remove stressors and rough spots from children’s lives beginning in the 1980s. Parents and schools banned activities that they perceived to have any risk, due to physical injury and emotional pain.


BUT when children are at home on video games, tablets, the computer, they are removed from the experiences they need for proper mental, social, and emotional development.  

The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt


Play is the work of childhood. In play, children learn the skills they need to be successful adults. They learn from repeated activity with feedback from success and failure in a low-stakes environment.


Free play is an activity that is freely chosen by the participants not arranged and supervised by adults. Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Playing with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.


When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults often can’t stop themselves from directing children at play.


Experience, NOT INFORMATION, is the key to emotional development. Unsupervised, child-led play is where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.

The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt


EFFECT - ADD, DIGITAL ADDICTION, LACK OF CONFIDENCE AND EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS

The effects of a changing world, parenting style, increased technology use, more distractions, etc. are damaging our children and affecting our ability to teach them.


ADHD

When children have continuous access to screens/smartphones at a developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus. Studies show that adolescents with ADHD are heavier users of screens and video games, and people with ADHD are more likely to seek out the stimulus of screens and the enhanced focus that can be found on video games. A screen-based childhood intensifies existing ADHD symptoms

Stolen Focus - Johann Hari


DIGITAL ADDICTIONS

Children with excessive exposure to screens have digital addictions. The brain adapts to long periods of screen exposure with elevated dopamine levels. Dopamine is the hormone in the brain that affects emotions and behavior. Dopamine plays a role in how we feel pleasure and rewards. This addiction to dopamine from screen use alters children’s emotions and behaviors. Ordinary life can become boring and maybe even painful. Without their digital device, they may feel anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria (a feeling of discomfort or unease.) 

-Dopamine Nation Anna Lembke


TAKING RISKS FACING CHALLENGES

Today's kids are far less likely to engage in even the most routine activities that entail some measure of independence, like walking alone to a friend’s house or going to a public restroom unattended. Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations. This cultural decrease in unsupervised play is linked to major emotional deregulation;  increased depression, a tendency to become inflexible in thought, diminished impulse control, less self-regulation, poor management of aggression, and fragility and shallowness of enduring interpersonal relationships.


EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS

More parents are sitting their young children in front of screens or are using their own technology instead of connecting with them. With added stressors from work, marriage, and money it impacts the emotional connections that parents make with their children. Emotional Connections or Attunement with adults form the foundations for later emotional self-regulation. Children who are deprived of this joyful, mutually trusting social experience often face emotional difficulties and exhibit erratic behavior in their later years. They have difficulty forming healthy attachments as adolescents and as adults they may be less able to cope with unexpected challenges, regulate emotions, and make sound decisions. 


Changing Student Behavior

WHAT CAN WE DO AS TEACHERS?

Part 2 of this Blog series - Changing Student Behaviors will take a closer look at classroom specific behaviors and what we can do as teachers to manage them.


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