Heads up: This post is 13 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
A few months ago, a picture of a 2 year old child with both hands tightly taped together (http://pocket.co/sZerG), kneeling on the floor in an activity room of a famous kindergarten in Hong Kong, surfaced on the web and caused quite a controversy. While lots of the comments are from parents who detest such atrocity, it’s unfortunate that I still read and hear comments like these:
“Bad kids need to be taught like this, so that they will learn to behave.”
“I need to send my son to this kindergarten so they can discipline him. May be not that extreme but he definitely needs to be disciplined by a teacher.”
“Is it really that big of a deal? It’s not like the teacher had beaten the kid till he was bruised and bleeding. You can’t even tell if he was kneeling or sitting either.”
Seeing these comments made me realized that there are still a lot of people out there who don’t understand child development or simply why children do what they do. There has been decades of scientific research on child development and with the latest brain imaging technology, we are knowing more and more about what a child’s brain is doing. Much of these information is in English and I feel that perhaps they just need to be translated into Chinese and other languages so everyone can learn about them.
One key thing about this incident that all early childhood educators need to be aware of is that your actions, your relationships with your students directly affect their brains for the rest of their lives!
“Education is a key component of a child’s development. The relationships that teachers have with their students and the experiences they provide for them directly shape the neural circuitry of the next generation.”
We know from 50 years of research in neuroscience that an infant’s experience can have permanent effects on the wiring of the brain. Neurosurgeons know there are truly critical periods—stages of development—in which the brain needs certain types of experience, or the circuits don’t get put together properly. Babies’ brains need stimulation to develop their full potential. Their best learning is from being highly attuned to human stimuli—interacting with your face, voice, and touch. If children have stressful or impoverished early environments, there will be long-term implications for the building of the brain.
Eliot, L. (2006). Experts’ opinion, nurturing brain development National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2006). Early influences on brain architecture
I think we can safely assume that by binding this two year old’s hands, the teacher’s intention was to punish him for a certain behavior, thereby stopping him from doing it again. Do you think the teacher’s intention was achieved?
Certainly, you can teach a two year old to stop doing something by inflicting pain, fear and shame on her. However, she has only learned to stop doing what she wants to do out of fear of punishments. What we want in our children is for them to have an internal locus of discipline, and you can only achieve that by having a warm relationship with the child. Calmly but firmly communicate to her your expectations and boundaries. She will keep pushing those boundaries again and again, that’s natural for a two year old. You just need to stay consistent and keep reminding her your expectations and boundaries.
There are so many questions we parents and teachers need to ask about in this incident. How would it affect the child? Will there be any long-term effect? How would it affect other children? Their relationship with this child? Has the teacher set up an example for other children to bully and ridicule this child?
There are several topics here that I want to get to - learning to be a social being, anti-social behavior, socially acceptable behavior, an 80 years longitudinal study of Harvard men, self-worth, but probably the most relevant and urgent of all, how do you deal with a “terrible” two year old who “just don’t listen”, do the exact things you tell him not to, making you so mad you’re yelling at him at the top of your lungs? (I faced this issue with my son when he was 2 years old.)