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Behaviour can have a huge impact on early years settings and your enjoyment of your role. While positive behaviour helps children to have better outcomes and improved wellbeing (as well as going hand-in-hand with personal, social, and emotional development), negative behaviour can do the opposite. As a result, it’s important to set realistic expectations for the children in your care, and to be familiar with behaviour management strategies, including strategies for tantrums, biting and hitting, and refusal to cooperate.
In this article, we will look at all of the above, tying it into ways you can make effective provisions for personal, social, and emotional development, as you are required to do if you are Ofsted-registered.
How to Promote Positive Behaviour in Nursery
The EYFS framework describes ‘positive behaviour’ to consist of:
- Emotional Intelligence: Managing feelings and behaviour (self-regulation), being able to express your emotions effectively, and being empathic towards others.
- Social Skills: Being able to form positive, respectful relationships.
- Cognitive Skills: Having self-confidence and self-awareness, and the ability to understand different feelings.
Before children go to school, they learn essential skills like the above through play, interaction, and discussion. Nursery plays a key role in facilitating these opportunities for learning and development.
Some broad strategies that you can use to help children develop the ability to behave in a positive way include:
Making use of activities, structured and explorative play, and games that encourage curiosity – this develops children’s reasoning and problem-solving (i.e. cognitive skills). They learn best by playing, listening, watching, asking questions, and doing, so set this in motion – for example, try setting them a challenge, such as building a bridge or tower.
Using structured group play to encourage positive and respectful relationships (i.e. social development). For example, you could play games where children learn to share, such as circle games or board games where they have to take turns to roll a dice. Additionally, make sure you and other adults have a trusting relationship with the children – you can be a role model for good relationships. Strong relationships also link to emotional development, making children feel more able to share their feelings with you.
Recognising their emotional needs and acknowledging them by articulating them, to aid children’s emotional intelligence. For example, you could say: “I understand it’s hard for you to stop playing on the bike, but it’s someone else’s turn now.” This does three things.
- Aids the development of empathy.
- Helps children to connect the dots between how they’re feeling and what they’re doing – spotting where emotions come from can help children develop self-awareness.
- Triggers a soothing biochemical reaction. When a child feels understood, their neural pathway linked to emotional intelligence grows, and in time, children will learn to soothe themselves by accepting their emotions.
Other methods of developing emotional intelligence include accepting and listening to expressions of emotion, rather than shushing them, telling them to stop crying, or scolding them. Everyone should be allowed to express how they are feeling and know that it is valid. You might think that children often overreact, but this is because their brains are developing so quickly that they can be easily overwhelmed with emotion. In other words, this is natural, and should be accepted and accounted for in your setting.
Positive behaviour is critical to have a realistic expectation for the kids in your care and to be knowledgeable about behavior management techniques, such as how to handle tantrums, physical aggression, and refusal to comply.
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