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Special Children

Schools will always encounter children who have special problems, such attention deficit, hyperactivity, autism, violent tendencies, bullies, or physically disabled, as well as those who are specially gifted, either in general intelligence or in a particular field such as math or music. Teachers will need to give individual attention to each case.

In dealing with such cases, there are already many studies and references that teachers can study and learn from, and hence I will not repeat what is already available elsewhere. What I would like to touch on here as aspects or principles which are seldom given attention in standard approaches.

Resolving the Root Cause and Not Suppressing the Symptom. Children are not “naughty” or “bad.” These labels are usually given by elders whose patience have been exhausted and who would now want to simply stop the children from their behavior, usually through fear, threat, or physical punishment.

When children are recurrently violent, for example, there is always a reason behind it. It can usually be traced to the home environment. When they are unloved at home, they may try to assert themselves in school through bullying behavior. It will be noticed that when they feel the love of the teacher, they begin to behave responsibility, and will follow the rules of the classroom without resentment or suppression.

Energy level and balance. In trying to understand the root cause, it is helpful to understand the energy element of behavior. This is the actual energy being felt in the body which is the immediate cause of the behavior, whether restlessness, violence, or fear. For young children, the normalization of the energy imbalance is often sufficient to calm them. The drive towards the abnormal behavior will diminish naturally.

This energy imbalance should be distinguished from a more complex cause that arise from perception problems in the children. Such perception problems eventually lead to what Sigmund Freud referred to as psychoneurosis as opposed to actual neurosis, which is the damming of the energy in the physico-psychic system.

Knowledge of how to help children deal with such energy congestion will often resolve recurrent behavior problems of children, such as hyperactivity. Activeness in children is normal, and should not be suppressed. Hyperactivity is the damming of energy in the system such that it accumulates and creates pressure that need to be released. Such energy congestion should be prevented, and when it has accumulated, the teacher must help the children to allow it to flow naturally.

Such phenomena are true not only for kindergarten kids, but also for teenagers and adults. I have often observed teenagers tapping their feet while in class or listening to the teacher. Or they may be restlessly shifting their feet, moving their hands, looking at one thing and then another, etc. They are distracted by energies within the body that are supposed to flow smoothly but are not. They are not even aware of what is happening to them. They are victims rather than culprits. They should be understood and helped rather than condemned and punished.

Love and Discipline. The best motivator for wholesome behavior is a loving relationship. When a child feels loved by a teacher, the child is motivated to listen to, and cooperative with, what the teacher is suggesting. This is of course true with parents. Many well-meaning parents however fail to let the children feel their love. And when the children do not “behave” according to their wishes, they all the more become authoritarian and impose themselves upon the children. This creates a cycle of discipline and resistance which can lead to disastrous results when, as young adults, the children begin to rebel against their parents.

When bullies in school feel loved by the teachers, they cease to be bullies. The unconscious psychological drive to assert themselves have disappeared safely. When rowdy children are given responsibilities — that is, they are shown that they are trusted — they try to live up to such expectations and will naturally desist from disappointing the teachers who have shown faith in them. This is common observation and we don’t need to be psychologists to see the truth behind this.

But to do all the above, it is essential that the teachers themselves are not high-strung and inwardly distracted by their own energy imbalance. In the latter case, they will not have the energy to observe students. They themselves need help.