Introduction
Challenging behavior refers to any action that interferes with an individual and their surroundings. Challenging behavior may present difficulties in the social and educational development of the victim. The difficulties interfere with the student’s acquisition of knowledge while posing a social problem when the incidents are recurrent (Martin, 1975). The objective of this paper is to examine headbanging as challenging behavior, its development, how to support a challenged student, and the involvement of the child’s family.
Discussion
Self-Injury Behavior
Definition
Self-injury refers to self-induced actions that cause harm to the doer.
Examples
Self-injury may include excessive scratching, biting of hands, or banging one’s head on solid objects (De Lissovoy, 1959).
Head Banging
The research revolves around a headbanging student. The objective is to observe the challenging behavior, find probable causes, and provide support to eradicate the harmful habit.
Behavior Development
Self-injury may be as a result of social or biological causes. The research sought to examine the physical and social surroundings of a 3rd-grade student because these are useful in determining the possible causes of headbanging behavior. Additionally, the research took into consideration the frequency and severity of the student’s headbanging.
Physical Causes
The research focused on physical causes rather than the biological/hereditary causes because the observation was the primary source of data. The research identified arousal and frustration as the possible causes of headbanging behavior.
Arousal
The student often banged his head in times of tension or anxiety to calm himself. The student would bang his head on solid objects before a speech or class representation to reduce the tension. Moreover, the student may bang his head to cope with pain or headaches.
Frustration
Frustration largely contributes to headbanging. The lack of attention, poor communication, and stressful situations frustrate the student, inducing the headbanging behavior (De Lissovoy, 1959).
Strategies
Communication
The student should have a personal tutor for individualized instruction purposes, improving communication and reducing headbanging. The students should also have a language teacher because they help improve the student’s language, communication difficulties, and self-esteem (Freeman, 1999).
Academic
The student’s teachers ought to know about the causes of the headbanging and ways to eradicate or manage it. The knowledge allows the teachers to give more attention to the student, reducing the student’s frustration and improving the student’s academic well-being (Freeman, 1999).
Self-development
The student should engage in sports and other co-curricular activities. Sports help improve the student’s mobility, confidence, and reduce cases of headbanging. Extra-curricular activities improve the student’s social life by providing an avenue for interaction with other students, reducing the headbanging behavior (Hunter, n.d).
Social
The student’s parents should seek professional help from a counselor to improve their child’s social welfare. Sharing may help unravel the causes of frustration, aiding in the development of an alternative form of stress removal. Over time, the student can overcome challenging behavior (Freeman 1999).
Family Involvement
The parents and other family members have to engage actively in the management and eradication of the student’s challenging behavior. The parents have to get the best counselor for the child to monitor progress. Additionally, the parents have to be strict in ensuring the student participates in extra-curricular activities on a daily basis. Strictness and continuity from the parents would lead to successful recovery (Freeman, 1999).
Conclusion
Headbanging is a challenging behavior that may be hard to manage. Most people do not know how to deal with this injurious habit. However, it is possible to overcome such challenges and eradicate the behavior by involving the friends, teachers, and family members of the victim.
Reference List
De Lissovoy, V. (1959). Head banging in early childhood an exploratory study of an atypical behavior pattern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
Freeman, R. (1999). Correctional organization and management: public policy challenges, behavior, and structure. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Martin, R. (1975). Legal challenges to behavior modification: trends in schools, corrections, and mental health. Champaign, Ill: Research Press.
Hunter, R. Head banging: How to prevent, how to stop, why kids do it. Web.