Challenging Behavior in Young Children: Understanding, Preventing and Responding Effectively

Are you a student of education or educator currently in the field seeking answers to challenging behavior in your young students? If your answer is a resounding “Yes!” then you have found your survival guide!  Award-winning writers Barbara Kaiser and Judy Sklar Rasminksy have penned the most up-to-date resource for pre- and in-service teachers struggling with the answers to understanding, preventing, and addressing challenging behavior in primary grades and in preschools or child care centers in Challenging Behavior in Young Children: Understanding, Preventing, and Responding Effectively, Third Edition.

Highlighting the importance of relationships, the revised edition provides new background information and additional research-based strategies to enable pre-service and practicing teachers and child care staff to understand, prevent, and respond effectively to challenging behavior. The authors have widened the book’s scope this time around to make this edition just as useful to primary school teachers as it is for preschool educators, furnishing numerous practical, indispensable tips for responding to children’s needs and helping them know what is expected of them. The text stresses that every child has some kind of special need, especially children with challenging behavior, and prevention is the best intervention. The authors have also added material on inclusion, autism, culture, and dual-language learning, as children with disabilities, children from diverse families, and children who speak languages other than English join the classroom mix in greater numbers.

The book retains its personal touch and real-life examples, drawing on Barbara’s three decades in the field, and is replete with in-depth background information, strategies, and evidence-based techniques necessary to help pre-service and practicing teachers understand, prevent, and address the behavior problems found so often in today’s primary schools and child care centers, to work with the most difficult behaviors, and to benefit every child in the classroom. Challenging Behavior in Young Children, Third  Edition emphasizes the teacher’s role in the behavior of children, encouraging students and educators to reflect on their own values, feelings, and actions. The result is an invaluable resource for everyone involved in the education of young children.

Barbara Kaiser is the former director of a child care center who has spent 30 years working with young children, their teachers, and their families. Now a consultant in early care and education, she frequently gives keynote addresses and workshops on challenging behavior throughout the United States and Canada. She has taught at Acadia University in Nova Scotia and Concordia University in Montreal.

Judy Sklar Rasminsky is a professional writer with special expertise in child care and family issues. She has won several awards for her work, which has appeared in American and Canadian magazines as well as college and high school textbooks.