Looking for Help with Aggressive Children?

However, for children diagnosed with a pervasive developmental disorder(PDD NOS), sensory processing disorder, or behavior disorder, including signs of ADHD, aggression may persist into adolescence. There is hope! With proper intervention techniques, you can eliminate and decrease this undesirable behavior.

I also feel that the following books are phenomenal for helping parents learn how to provide logical consequences to aggression that the child learns from. You may have noticed them on other pages, but I can't praise the information they provide enough! They even teach you how to deliver consequences without the dreaded escalation into a full force scarier then ever incident.

The transition strategies page and compliance strategies page provide good techniques for helping to avoid aggression in a child that doesn't want to change activities or that is trying to escape from a request you have made. Some aggressive children may be trying to get attention, in which the attention seeking page would be helpful.

Finally, if you have frequent or severe aggressive behavior in children you will definitely want to seek outside help. Having a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) come and observe your exact situation and conduct a functional assessment, would be a good option to help determine the best treatment interventions. However, there may likely be services available in your area for a minimal fee that would be able to help as well.

Aggression is a very serious behavior that should not be taken lightly. Especially when dealing with young children, it is your best opportunity to effectively intervene and hopefully eliminate future incidents when the child is older and much stronger. Other things you can do include:

Identifying Common Triggers for Child Aggression

You may start by identifying what are common triggers or things that are known to precede the behavior seen in aggressive children. Once these triggers are recognized, be sure to create a list of them for all individuals to read and be aware of when working with the potentially aggressive child. More about how to do this can be found by clicking the link above.

Teaching Anger Management Techniques for Children

As behavior escalates, some parents find it very difficult to calm their child and are unsure of ways to do this. One way that I have found to be effective for caregivers and parents that correctly apply the technique is to work with their child on anger management to develop coping skills with relaxation training through the use of music. You can learn more about this by clicking the link above.

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