By Trudy Simpson, Freelance WriterTOO OFTEN parents and teachers spend more time berating than praising children. But researchers at the Child Development Centre at the University of the West Indies (UWI) are trying to change this, thanks to a $3 million grant from the Culture, Health, Arts, Sport and Education (CHASE) Fund.
They are piloting a new approach that aims to reduce aggression in children by teaching several teachers and parents to lay down the belt and learn to play.
Principal investigator, Dr. Julie Meeks Gardner, said recently the aim of the 'Child Aggression Intervention' pilot-project is to use workshops to teach parents and teachers to 'praise and play', meaning they should focus on encouraging and rewarding positive behaviour in children and spend less time focusing on children's non-destructive negative behaviour.
"It's not that you mustn't correct children but as far as possible, don't make a big deal of it unless it's destructive," Dr. Gardner said.
"But if a child is doing something you want them to do It doesn't have to be perfect but if you see real effort being made make a big deal out of that. If a child is sitting quietly, (he or she) tends to be ignored. These are the behaviours that we should focus on so that those behaviours are positively enforced," Dr. Meeks-Gardner said.
THE PROJECT
The project, which started in the post-Easter school term, is being piloted in four primary schools in violence-prone sections of the Corporate Area.
Dr. Meeks-Gardner said under the programme, workshops are being carried out for teachers and parents to teach them these values.The workshops, which also cover topics such as using 'play'/ fun activities to teach children lessons and classroom and child-management, will spend eight hours over a term teaching 30 teachers the new approach and 20 hours over 10 to 12 weeks bringing the concepts to parents of 80 children identified with problems. The researchers plan to compare the responses from the workshop groups to 30 teachers and 80 parents who did not participate in the programme, who are seen as a control group.
THE PILOT
Researchers plan to survey what teachers and parents say about how they respond to children's behaviour and school achievement before and after the workshops, Dr. Gardner said. The pilot is expected to last six months and is based on 'The Incredible Years Programme', which was first developed in the United States and is being used in a number of countries including the United Kingdom. It involves the development of "cost-effective, community-based, universal prevention programmes that all families and teachers of young children can use to promote social competence and to prevent children from developing conduct problems in the first place," the programme's website said.
