By Karen Cay

A caring community healthy start for all children

Can Early Learning Prevent Youth Violence? Part 1

Feb 13, 2019 | 10:37 AM

Recent public opinion research has found that most Canadians, over 60%, believe that the age group most likely to engage in physical aggression is adolescent boys aged 12 to 17. Only 2% of those surveyed thought of preschoolers. However, in fact, those 2% have it right.

Children violently express anger soon after birth and are sufficiently well coordinated to hit, bite and kick before their first birthday. By the time children reach the age of three, they are capable of a wide range of acts of physical aggression. In most cases, for most children, this behavior starts to decline after toddlerhood as they learn to control their emotions, communicate through language and express their frustrations in more constructive ways. The most challenging age group for this aggressive behaviour for us in the child care field are the toddler years where up to 10 children from ages 19 months to 2.5 years are all learning, growing and challenging at the same time!

Most children who are nurtured in a supportive environment, in which parents and other caregivers provide positive guidance, will follow a path toward socially appropriate behavior. The preschool years are the critical time to teach children the fundamentals of social interaction – sharing and compromise, cooperation and verbal communication.

Those who fail to learn these lessons early in life, about 5 to 10% of Canadian children, are more likely to run into serious trouble later, from difficulty at school and substance abuse to risk-taking, mental illness and criminal activity. In light of recent research the evidence is growing clear: childhood aggression must be taken seriously. Like most kinds of problems, aggression is best addressed early, and the earlier the better. Even the youngest children can be taught to change their behavior and share space with the rest of the world.

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Consider this – Canadians pay more than $100,000.00 per year to keep an adolescent in detention while a university education costs, on average, $12,000.00 per year. That a juvenile placed in residential care is close to 40 times more likely to have a criminal record before he is aged 24, than those who are not. That research has shown that each dollar invested in preschool prevention programs produce a $7 benefit by the time a child is a young adult and a $13 benefit by the time he is a mature adult. The conclusion is that early prevention creates health and well being and benefits all of our society.

Much of the above information comes from research and studies available at the Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development. This is a Canadian site that has a lot of information available on a wide variety of subjects concerned with the early years.

Next time we will continue this subject with thoughts and suggestions on why young children’s behavior follows a natural course and what parents and caregivers can effectively do to reduce aggressive behavior and guide their children down a path to succes