Approaches to Dealing with Conduct Behaviors in Children (Essay Sample)

Approaches to Dealing with Conduct Behaviors in Children
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Introduction
Counseling can be defined as the contact and the relationship that ensues between the counselor and the individual that is seeking help concerning a certain problem. The counselor helps the individual understand themselves better in the process of finding solutions to their problems. This in turn helps the affected overcome their challenges. Children in the course of their growth period undergo many challenges that make it necessary to seek counseling. These challenges range from child abuse to cases of violence in children. These are grave matters that if a child is not assisted and counseled at that tender age may end up ruining their future. However to bail these children out of these horrific acts requires appropriate steps and guidelines together with both the parents and the community cooperation.
Violent behavior or the conduct disorder is a major challenge to many children and parents which must be treated for a smooth growth of a child. Conduct disorder manifests in many forms, kinds and actions. It can be defined as a bad behavior that is intended and meant to hurt another person or another child in the case of children. These behaviors manifest in form of threats to other kids and even adults, open and hostile aggression towards others, the children show explosive and uncontrollable temper tantrums, bulling, armed assaults and causing intentional harm to animals. Children who depict these kinds of behavior are often diagnosed with a disorder referred to as the conduct disorder (Scott, 2014).
Conduct disorder in children manifests itself during the initial periods by having a fussy child who exhibits inconsistent eating and sleeping behavior patterns. This progresses to a difficult temperament and lastly the kid starts showing signs of low frustrations for novel events. During the early ages and preschool ages the kids are seen to be more hyperactive displaying oppositional and aggressive behaviors. It is due to these behaviors that the children are isolated by the others hence adopting and incorporating antisocial characters in their lives. Due to this isolation from their peers, the violent children school lives are mostly full of academic failures. In addition to this the children also has reading problems and exhibit truancy in their characters (Scott, 2014).
Conduct disorder may be exhibited in the children’s adulthood if appropriate measures are not undertaken to correct it when the children are still young. Children who are left to continue with this behavior to their teen hood and eventually to the adulthood encounter many major challenges. These include being in and out of jails and constantly being convicted for criminal activities due to associations with deviant peers. However some children are known to improve as they grow. These are usually the kids with few or no deviant friends, have parents who are more socially skilled and show fewer problems of themselves and the kids who have low levels conduct disorder. In order to help these children out of conduct disorder the counselor and the parents have to understand the possible causes of these disorders and the way to approach the situation.
Illustrative cases of conduct disorders
Tim’s mother narrates the history of his six year old boy Tim to a physician. She narrates a series of destructive behaviors that the boy had adopted that had earned him four suspensions while the boy was in his kindergarten year. She says that Tim usually gets uncontrollable at home. The boy has also broken and destroyed many glasses and furniture in the house. Tim had started a small fire as he was playing with the gas stove in their house. Tim’s older sisters had also refused to look and take care of the boy as they had been doing since he was young as the boy had been reported to through a can of hot soup to one of them. Tim had also developed a habit of pulling and dragging their dog around the compound by the tail. The mother also explains that they had visited a lot of physicians in the bid to have Tim receive an immunization. They however could not succeed due to Tim’s disruptive behavior that saw the nurses and physicians giving up on the boy (Russell et.al 2014).
Another illustrative case study of the boy Brandon as narrated by his the teacher. The teacher begins by referring to Brandon as the terrorist of the four year old kids back in the daycare classes. The teacher says that the boy always results to an aggressive behavior when dealing with his classmates. The children always reports Brandon of having punched them, biting and even going to the extremes of throwing the kids off the swings during break time in the playground. This happens without any form of provocation the boy. The boy is also reported to be rude to animals. Despite the much he is told that swinging the cat by the tail is painful to the animal he continues doing it. He frequently swings the class pet rabbit by the tail. The parents tell how temperamental and difficult the boy has been since the time he was an infant (Russell et.al 2014). These two illustrative case studies give an insight of the common behaviors of the violent children.
Causes of conduct disorder
Many of the conduct disorders are seen to originate from environmental factors, psychological, biological, social and genetic causes. In the environmental factors one of the main causes of conduct disorder in children is believed to be from media exposure. The exposure of children to violent television programs and movie scenes increases the chances of children turning aggressive towards the others. This is because watching these violent scenes and exposure to the young children triggers an aggressive thinking in them as they try to emulate and imitate the violent characters in the scenes. The children also adopt aggressive emotions and have low tolerance to aggression from other kids. The kids tend to be more violent in line with the mental pictures of violence that the violent scenes create in their brains (Soledad & Chaves, 2008).
In an experimental study that was done to establish whether those children who watched many violent television programs and movies tended to grow and became more aggressive proved right. Two groups of five to six years old children were exposed to different types of movies. One group of children was exposed to the violent movies while the other group of the children was exposed to non violent movies. These two groups of children were later put in the same room and their behaviors observed. During their play sessions, the kids who had watched the violent movies were seen to portray physical assault to other kids and were much aggressive (Soledad & Chaves, 2008). These children exposed to media violence tend to be more aggressive verbally, physically and indirectly in their adult life. They may result to beating, punching, using treats and even using weapons towards others.
Poor parenting and the people who interact with the children during their tender age is another great contributing factor towards child conduct disorder that cannot be overlooked. Infant and young children of three to ten years temperament have a direct proportionality to the parenting styles which also tend to affect their later life. Harsh parenting styles during the early ages of the children which in turn lead to an insecure or shaky parent-child relationship lead to conduct disorder. In addition to this, inconsistence in the parents and coerciveness in disciplining the children have been proven to result to poor outcomes in children. Temperamental infants are more susceptible to conduct behavior upon reaching the age of three. This is solely because by this age their mothers are usually seen to result to coercive styles hence exposing the children to the effects of coercive parenting styles (community, 2014).
Related to poor parenting styles is the exposure of children to violence within the family. This exposure of conflicts in the family inflicts both mental and emotional harm to the children who endure with it. These children are seen to likely to engage in violence during their childhood and also as adults (Scoot, 2014). In high conflicting families, the children are believed to have more temperament as compared to children who come from calm families that are conflict free. However the opposite could be true where children with conduct disorder who are violent but come from a family that has less conflict tend to become resilient. Meanwhile, children who are less temperamental but come from families that have a lot conflicts turn out to be more difficult (Community, 2014).
Genetic factors are other major causes of violence in children aged three to 10 years. Some behaviors have been proven to be highly to moderately inheritable to the children from their parents. Cognitive deficits which have been highly associated with aggressive behaviors in children fall under this category of sustainably inheritable characters. Other inheritable characters although they are not as highly inheritable are the antisocial and temperamental behaviors. However it is equally important to appreciate the fact that these genetic influences are mostly probabilistic and not necessarily deterministic. This stresses on the importance and the need to have different types of genes and their correlations with the environment. Also of great importance are the genes and the interactions they have with the environment. This way the chances of passing the disorder to the children are minimized (Community, 2014).
Family dysfunction and parental stresses during the children tender age positively contribute to making the children more vulnerable to violent and aggressive behaviors. This is not leaving behind the other variables like poverty and lack...