An 11-year-old who is consistently aggressive is a “bully.” The five year old is acting out at school because that’s where he has power. His brother is teaching him that, and the older brother is getting away with that type of behavior. The father has to address the 11-year-old, and help the 5-year-old see that there are better ways to manage aggressive behavior. He really has to address whatever is causing the 11-year-old to act so aggressively. If they don’t solve the problem with the older son, they can’t do anything with the 5-year-old. The sad thing is, the 5-year-old is exhibiting expected behavior. He’s learning negative behaviors, and exhibiting them. The 5-year-old has to see that someone is stepping in and he’s not a victim all alone.

With pre-schoolers, we don’t really see bullying behavior. Bullying is more of a thought out process. A bully chooses victims who are smaller and easier to victimize. Children under 5 are more impulse-driven. They’re not so connected to their behavior. You might see a kid consistently being aggressive or randomly acting out, but that behavior isn’t really set yet, and it’s something we can work with in a preschooler. A teacher’s job is to ascertain why the child is doing that.

Providers should use positive discipline techniques to avert and respond to any incidences of aggression, whether physical or verbal. If, for example, you have a 3-year-old and another child takes his toy and he hits that child, the child ‘s behavior was provoked.

But let’s say you have a child who every 5 minutes disrupts. That’s an aggression that’s harder to resolve. It’s random and difficult to find the source. That’s a child who doesn’t have good social skills. That’s a child who’s potentially on a path to continued aggression as a way to get what they want. It’s not only how much it hurts everyone else, but how it damages that child’s self-esteem, too. They’re in trouble all the time when they get older. They have fewer and fewer opportunities to get out of those patterns. It’s best to solve that behavior while they’re still in pre-school.

There are also children who are victims more often than others. If a child is constantly a victim, you have to teach them to get out of that behavior. I’m not suggesting you tell kids to hit. Lots of times, the kid who’s hitting is bigger or more aggressive and it doesn’t move them past fighting. It’s good to tell kids under the age of 5 that they also should use their words. They have to be able to speak for themselves and feel some sense of empowerment. Sometimes it takes the teacher being right there to show the child. The victim learns they have a voice they can use.

Child care providers should work with parents by first finding out how parents deal with the child’s aggression. Aggression should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. With a child who’s aggressive a lot, we work with his or her parents. Kids who are aggressive at school or in a child care setting are either overly controlled or under controlled. Aggressive behavior is usually because young children need a reaction. If they come from a home where everything is a “No,” then they come to school where they’re not spanked, and they don’t have that sense of external control. So they act out a lot to see where the control will come in.

Some kids without limits act out to get some kind of limited force. We all need to know we’re in controlled environments. On any given day, any child might behave aggressively. If the provider or teacher feels the child didn’t continue with that behavior, it’s not necessary to tell everything to the parent. But if a provider observes a pattern of aggression, they should definitely talk to the parent right away. Our goal is to get children to develop self-control.

As a child care provider, when you see a child exhibiting negative behavior against another child, you need to get involved. This one child just wanted attention. It didn’t matter if it was positive or negative attention. He didn’t just bully one child, he would bully any child who would let him get away with it. I shadowed him to watch his behavior, but I also concentrated on the child who was being bullied. I sat next to the kids he liked to bully and try to redirect his attention away from them. Sometimes he would go for it. If I had him engaged in something else and was giving him attention, he would leave those children alone.

It’s usually the bigger child who does the bullying, but they have usually been bullied themselves. When a child sees another child they can bully, they do it.

My daughter, Kailyn was 3 and a half and I went to pick her up from school. She told me that a little girl was bothering her. Then I started to see bite marks on her, so I reported it to the supervisor. The bully’s parent was spoken to, but the child kept doing it. I started to tell Kailyn to fight back, but it didn’t work. The other child continued to hit and started spitting on Kailyn. The site supervisor had told me that other people had complained about the same child and said it was just too late in the semester to change the little girl out. At the time, I didn’t really know how to handle the situation.