5-year-old Self-esteem in new school

[praxedis]

This is a follow-up to a previous post at http://www.medhelp.org/forums/ChildBehavior/messages/31942a.html.

I have a 5-year-old that started school this year. He is what our pediatrician calls a "hands-on learner." He is fidgety but can concentrate on certain tasks for relatively extended periods.

According to his teacher, his behavior has taken a turn for the worse over the past few weeks. She says he's disruptive and can't focus.

She tried to implement a behavior plan that included having him sit by himself at lunch and no recess for an entire week.

I disagreed and spoke to the director of the school telling her that having him sit by himself at lunch is the equivalent of ostracizing him and, in my view, does more damage than good.

I also told the director that taking his recess away for an entire week gives him no incentive to remain on track for the whole week.

He is now saying things like "I'm bad" or "They're mean to me" and it breaks my heart because I don't know what to do.

I sat in on lunch yesterday with his class and the other children in the class seemed to treat him like an outsider.

The teacher flat out told me verbatim "I hate to say this, but the other kids don't want to play with him because he's always touching them or bothering them."

We are very loving parents to him and we do our best to build his self-esteem. We just don't know how to handle this situation.

Our gut feeling is to take him out of the situation and place him somewhere else.

Please help!

[Kevin Kennedy, Ph.D.]

The feedback that your child is having problems in his relationships is definitely worth pursuing in some detail. That is, you'll want to know precisely what he is doing and the contexts in which he is doing it. Now, relative to management, the interventions do sound a bit off the mark. For such young children it's perfectly OK to experience some punishment or negative consequence for not following the rules, so to speak. But it's usually unwise to extend such consequences for any length of time beyond a day. So I'd try to arrange a management plan that rewards him for positive behavior during several periods of the day, and which penalizes him by way of time out for infractions. If he demonstrates, for example, during any particular lunch period that he cannot behave appropriately at a table with other children, he should be moved a bit away. However, he should receive another opportunity the very next day. There should always be 'light at the end of the tunnel' for a child so young.