Aggressiveness in Children: an Alarmant Reality
Abstract
Motto: Who did not feel it, he cannot believe what violent passions he or she is doing in the heart of the child, like a snake nestled in the breast. (by Joan Lluis Vives)
Aggressiveness is an attribute present in the animal world on all its evolutionary scales, ethologists have affirmed; they draw attention to the fact that, in the case of the human being, beyond its usefulness for the success of an action, aggression has evolved from the innate reaction to adaptation to destructive and violent behavior towards persons, objects or to oneself.
Aggressiveness in children is a very important problem that we often encounter in our society. This behavior, beginning at very young ages, 2, 3 years, can have very serious consequences leading to unhealthy aging.
Parents often do not know how to manage this situation even reaching out by accepting this behavior of their children. However, there are parents who are intuitive about future issues and are looking for specialized help, often reaching to a psychologist. But the problem of aggression in children may have other causes, of a medical nature.
A series of biochemical investigations they led me to see that aggressiveness is caused by a high level of heavy metals – lead in their blood and a high level of testosterone.
The desired outcome is to achieve a treatment that will improve or even stop aggressiveness in children. She can be stopped with a good collaboration between parents, teachers, doctors and psychologists. The healing of society must begin with the healing of children. They have to grow healthy.
Motto: “Violence is everything that disfigures the human condition”. (by Costel Zagan)
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. The importance of educational factors
3. Biochemical tests required in aggressive children
3.1 Hormonal tests
3.2 Identification of heavy metals in the blood
3.3 Patient analysis V.V.G
3.4 Hormonal tests
3.5 Analysis of heavy metals in blood
4. Conclusions
1. Introduction
Children living in a family with violent behaviors often end up having the same behaviors as their parents, given that at the younger age children learn by imitation. In these families, regardless of age, children are taught that violence is an effective way of controlling other people and doing everything to achieve the goal.
But yet these children cannot grow without becoming violent? Who can help them? I think teachers have a very important role in how they form characters and values. Is not this one of the roles of education? The child of today will be the adult of tomorrow.
If in the family he cannot be properly educated, or the state intervenes, or the education offered by the school will have the essential role of repairing what has broken down in the family. But this child is back home and will have the same ambience. It is very important for the family to understand that when they are tired with those around them it affects in some cases irresistibly the lives of their children. Light on the faces of little ones will fade with time, and this is tragic.
Teachers can take classes even with their parents.
A parent is obliged to know his child, to communicate with him. Teachers have the obligation to inform parents in a very objective way about the evolution of children about their performance in school activities. The teacher should prevent the parent if his child has aggressive behaviors and direct them to the psycho-pedagogical counseling office.
Parents, in their turn, for the good of children should call on the teacher, the counselor and together to establish common rules for the prevention of aggressive behaviors, the first step being to limit children’s access to television programs, their rigorous selection. There are several cases that lead to the manifestation of non-adaptive behaviors: lack of parental attention and long exposure to television programs, the proximate environment in which they live, the family environment, clothing.
2. The importance of educational factors
“Along with the family, school is the most powerful socialization factor, being at the same time the first” court “of social demand and having” access “to the systematic acquisition and learning of desirable norms, values and rules of conduct.” [1].
When a student is violent, the teacher must find the right methods to get him to control his anger. These children are not bad but just misunderstood and surely unloved. Love is the antidote to violence, so it is the best medicine for this disease [2]. The teacher needs to know when to be authoritarian and when to be gentle. Students who show vivacity need to feel appreciated because only that way will feel part of the group. It is not easy for them. I do bad things to attract attention.
These children have at least one quality and then the teacher needs to know how to take advantage of this, valuing it.
It is the school that, through formal education, shapes the child’s personality. The child acquires through education norms, values, patterns that then manifest as personal opinions in behavioral manifestations.
The formation and development of human personality is therefore an organized, organized and educated process.
In this respect, E. Surdu points out: “Education traces hereditary arrangements, differentiates them, modifies them, speeds up their functioning, adds to their strength, makes them qualities [2]”.
At the same time, “the influences of the environment, not organized, are directed to education, giving them the pedagogical form, to make them sustainable and consistent [3]”.
Since 1974, P. Freire has insisted on identifying and understanding educational needs by showing that it is not enough to find a performance gap to identify a learning need; the essential condition is that first the individual, aware of his or her deficit, wants to fight it.
Under these circumstances, given that the essential questions concerning the determination of learning needs have not been answered, granting students’ rights (such as the ten student rights analyzed by C. Cucos) [4] raises the issue of long-term and short-term consequences. In the short term, the most important effect is the diminishing of minor forms of school deviance.
If everything (or almost everything) is allowed, then behaviors such as running away from school, indifference to learning, insubordination, non-participation in the school curriculum, or refusal of school authorities will no longer be charged as deviations, but can be interpreted as an exercise of students’ rights in school.
In the long run, there is the risk of forming overly individualistic young people; the rights of the student, as formulated by the Geneva specialists, invite students to focus on themselves and on their own needs.
Unencumbered by appropriate educational activities, these rights can encourage selfishness, individualism, the spirit of competition, in the conditions in which integration in contemporary society pretends the opposite value [5].
The teacher’s personality is particularly important in the successful development of the educational system in any society in the world.
Patience, tact are important skills for a teacher that motivates pupils to learn. If students are strongly motivated to learn, they have a good chance of completing their studies and becoming the people of their community. Teachers have a great responsibility and I think that if they find the appropriate ways to stimulate motivation for learning then they will certainly continue to learn regardless of family problems.
Answers to the following questions I consider to be the essence of education:
What is the dream of a teacher? What is the dream of her students? The two dreams must have the same purpose and ultimately the same result. It has been observed that, most of the time, the teacher’s expectations towards the student and the student towards the teacher complement each other. The profession of teacher is, in contemporary society, a hard but very beautiful job as well.
Being a teacher means knowing how to shape the children. Knowing how to help them learn not only what you teach, but first of all to help them become good people to succeed in life.
Encouragement from teachers is very important for a student. It is like a “motor” that makes life go forward. The teacher should never give negative rewards because this can “cut the wings” of children and can lead to their demotivation for learning and why not to school dropout. Her choice is more of a vocation. A person who chooses to become a teacher knows he will not have a very high salary, but he wants to help shape the proper personality of his students. Teachers should be an example to follow for students.
Students and teachers meet, each of them meeting the needs of the other. The child needs to receive, and the teacher offers.
The way he manages to structure or organize learning discipline is a determining factor in his efficiency. Some students draw attention to the risk of school failure by their conduct, being either aggressive, hostile, excessively domineering, either isolated, retracted, without interacting with the others at all.
During instructive activities, posture or behavioral reactions provide important clues as to their difficulties in adapting to school. The poor school situation in some situations is also due to the absence of the conjugate-conscious activity of the school environment, in 32% of the cases the pedagogues did not know any member of the minor’s family with predilectional attitudes, in 53% of the cases, the teachers and the class adopted an indifferent attitude towards the predelicvent minor, which led to its marginalization and isolation from the peers. Teachers can make life easier for these children, and this should always be done [5].
However, as other research has shown over the years, school drop-out can also have positive effects because it reduces frustration and thus reduces motivation for committing delinquent acts.
After dropping out of school, many integrate into the workplace, getting back to school, graduating from school, and even having important and well-paid professions. Stanley Hall and M. Debesse point out that adolescence is a period of imbalance that is accompanied by the emergence of an attitude of opposition to the school and family environment and, in general, to any authority, an attitude by which young people seek to manifest their independence their personality and acquire self-consciousness.
Educational strategies used within the family are validated (mostly) through school. The level of adaptation and school integration can be analyzed according to two important indicators:
a) school performance (grades, averages, results, processes, etc.)
b) student satisfaction (intrinsic motivation, interests, positive attitudes, attraction-preference for life and school activity).
There is, of course, a maximum level of integration (increased school efficiency and a high level of satisfaction) and, at the other, school inadvertence (very poor school performance and lack of satisfaction). Children who are inadequate or disfigured fall into the category of problem children adopt deviant behavior in relation to the requirements of life and school activity. Criminal behavior of many young people has been favored by school failure and dropout: Over 55% of minors have had poor and very poor results at school, and 15%, although they have completed 5-6 grades, could not write and read high weight; 37.6% were frequently absent from school.
There are, of course, other aspects of school non-integration, such as insubordination with school rules and norms, lack of interest in school requirements and obligations, absenteeism, lingering hours, repetition, aggressive behavior towards colleagues and teachers, and so on in view of these phenomena, it is shown that in more than 50% of cases, the teaching staff adopted an attitude of indifference, which is contrary to the code of professional deontology.
Required to rule on the behavior of problem children, 80% of the teachers have qualified them as “difficult children”, which means that they behave in a behavioral way: they chuckle from school – 75%; unintentional and turbulent – 58%; do not work independently, never do homework – 29%; are non-systemic –55%; shows agitated, noisy behavior, having conflicts with colleagues – 52%; aggressive trends that attracted exclusion from the group – 36%.
3. Biochemical tests required in aggressive children
3.1 Hormonal tests
It is important to perform hormonal analyzes. A disturbance at the hormonal level may be the cause of violent behavior. Men tend to be more aggressive than women. They are also more susceptible to violent crime. Male hormone, testosterone, is clearly related to aggression in all primate species, including humans. Testosterone is the main male hormone. It is mostly secreted by the testicle under the action of luteinizing hormone (LH).
LH is secreted in turn by the pituitary gland under the influence of another luteinizing hormone releasing hormone (LHRH) regulator, produced by the hypothalamus. The regulation of testosterone secretion is mainly through a negative feed-back system controlled by estrogen levels (feminine hormones) and by androgen levels.
3.2 Identification of heavy metals in the blood
Heavy metals in the blood can lead to aggressive behavior. Children up to 12 years of age are the most vulnerable to lead poisoning because it can irritate their brain. Symptoms of lead intoxication include frequent headaches, sleep disturbances, aggressive behavior and lack of concentration, and irritability, anxiety, depression, and insomnia appear in adults.
Lead is absorbed in the body in a small amount of food. However, lead poisoning often occurs when exposed to a polluted environment or stainless-steel cookware. The most common treatment for removing lead in the body is vitamin C that protects the central nervous system.
Lead is the most widely used non-ferrous metal. Lead and its compounds have many commercial and industrial applications, being present in varnishes and paints, batteries, pigments, insecticides, plastics and ceramics, medical equipment, armaments, gasoline, welding industry.
The main routes of exposure to inorganic lead are inhalation and ingestion. In adults, the exposure is especially professional, and in children by the intake of lead paints from old houses.
Exposure can also be done by practicing illegal distillation of alcohol in lead-containing containers. Lead is absorbed into the body both through the respiratory tract and the gastrointestinal tract.
Absorption is inversely proportional to the size of the particle, which makes the inhalation of lead dust the biggest impact. It is transplanted and transplacental involved in congenital intoxication, with the following possible consequences: spontaneous abortion, prematurity or low birth weight.
Early symptoms of lead intoxication are: apathy or irritability, physical asthenia, anorexia, nausea, constipation, intermittent abdominal pain, myalgia. Anemia with reticulocytosis and basophilic punctuation in the examination of peripheral blood smear are among the hematological complications of saturnism.
They may also appear: characteristic gingival lizery and lead deposits on long-bone x-rays in children. Severe gastrointestinal disorders and neurotoxicity (ataxia, muscle weakness, seizures, stupor, coma) occur in severe poisoning.
3.3 Patient analysis V.V.G
V.V.G. has 14 years of age, is a 7th grade student and has multiple assaults on classmates and schoolchildren. She lives with parents who have too little free time to spend with their son thanks to services. He is a child who is not attracted to learning from where the poor results. He has an inappropriate entourage and does not seem to be interested in his future.
The father is a tough person and punishes him, but my mother always thinks her son is the best, the best. She denies the truth by always trying to apologize. Teachers have big problems with him at school because of aggressive behavior. She does not go to the school counselor because her mother disagrees, considering she is not needed.
3.4 Hormonal tests
After performing blood tests, we found that the patient has a high level of testosterone -3.01 (0.03-0.86) which influences his behavior.
In general, men are more prone to violent aggression than women. They are also more susceptible to violent crime. Male hormone, testosterone, is clearly related to aggression in all primate species, including humans.
3.5 Analysis of heavy metals in blood
Following the analysis of heavy metals in blood, the results are as follows:
- lead, 1,327 (moderately abnormal)
- cadmium, 1,357 (moderately abnormal)
4. Conclusions
• The patient V.V.G. has lead intoxication. In this case, the increased level of aggression can be due to the presence well above the acceptable limit of lead in the body. This is a widely debated theory that can be supported by the outcome of this analysis.
• The increased level of testosterone confirms previous research, according to which the high level of testosterone leads to aggressiveness.
Aggression, in any form, affects quietness in the school environment, and students are not part of an environment conducive to proper education.
When the first signs of aggression are observed in children, action must be taken to find the cause that has led to this behavior and, at the same time, to find solutions to remedy this situation. This high aggression may also be based on medical causes.
Through detailed analyzes, certain abnormalities can be determined, resulting in this deviant behavior being triggered. If there is a coalition between school, family, and why not a doctor, the aggressivity in children will improve and perhaps disappear.
It is necessary to carry out specialized programs to solve these situations. School violence can be stopped. Teachers teaching classes with aggressive children should use those strategies to help the child control their anger.
If a child is violent, it is certainly incomprehensible. Teachers have to find at least one positive thing in these children that they have to take advantage of in order to change the aggressive behavior of the child, to value it, to make it understand that violence raises violence and certainly no one is happy.
Let’s try to be all “a salvage ramp for a better future”.
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