Bad behaviour? Don’t blame the parents
The concern about the behaviour of some young people in our schools does not go away. This is despite the Behaviour in Scottish Schools report showing that the majority of teachers report positive behaviour from most (or all) of the pupils most of the time. There is a lot of effort that goes into thinking about how best to respond to indiscipline in our schools, but how well do we understand the causes of this kind of behaviour?
When we make judgements about what causes young people to present with behaviour in schools that we find challenging (by which I mean frightening, worrying, threatening, sad, frustrating, exhausting and more), this in turn shapes how we respond to them. Our actions to solve a problem are shaped by what we understand that problem to be. If we have misdiagnosed the cause, we are unlikely to find a solution that works.
I want to look, in very broad-brush terms, at some of the explanations that are found in the research literature, and examine how they might differ from practitioner accounts. Undoubtedly, things look different from a comfortable desk in an office surrounded by books than they do from inside a classroom. What we “know” about behaviour differs depending on who we are and where we’re looking from, and it is right that these different claims to knowledge are evaluated on their own terms.
While practice develops “knowing how” - a craft knowledge that is deeply contextualised and nuanced - academic knowledge tends to be more concerned with “knowing that”. But what academic knowledge lacks in terms of contextual specificity is at least partly compensated for by the bird’s-eye view across a number of cases that it can offer.
So what kinds of explanations do we tend towards when confronted with a noncompliant pupil? And what information are we drawing on when we reach these judgements? Let me introduce “Connor” - an amalgam of various young people.
Connor is 13 and small for his age. He appears to exist within a kind of force field that causes a time lag in instructions reaching him - he is always the last to comply with any requests, although oddly, he’s the first to move when the bell goes. It is difficult to know how tall he is as he is never seen standing or sitting upright. He sits at such a distance from his desk that the chances of his being able to do any work at it are remote. There are never more than two legs of his chair on the floor and this creates the feeling that some kind of (loud and hugely disruptive) accident is imminent.
This sense of foreboding doesn’t just come from his physical presence. Connor occupies the central position in a web of interactions that covers the whole class, but from which his teacher is somehow excluded. The effect he has on his peers is tangible, and adults are both slightly nervous and envious of the power that he holds over other pupils.
A familiar enough picture, and one that we know from research causes most teachers more headaches than the (much less common) more serious incidents. So how can we “read” this? What explanations might there be for Connor’s behaviour?
The importance of importing
There are many possible ways of trying to make sense of what’s going on. Education is an “importing discipline” - in other words, within education there are academics who have a primary discipline that shapes their approach to thinking. As well as providing a home for philosophers, linguists, historians, economists and others, education attracts sociologists who are interested in how individuals interact with institutions, and how such interactions link to other elements of the social system, such as social stratification.
Another major discipline from which education imports is psychology, in which the focus is on individuals, their thoughts and beliefs and the working of their minds.
A sociological reading of Connor’s story might suggest a social-class analysis, of which there are various types. Taking a conflict theory account, disruptive behaviour can be understood as either conscious or unconscious resistance to cultural and social reproduction. This might, for example, lead to a rejection of a curriculum that is not seen as relevant (see Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Willis, 1977).
A slightly different but still class-based theory examines the “cultural conflict” between home and school, and explains behaviour that causes problems in school as a result of school and home having different concerns. Miller (1958) suggested that in working-class culture, the kinds of things that are valued are toughness, excitement and smartness (although it’s important to note that all these theories have been critiqued, this one for resting on stereotypes).
Alternatively, we might think (drawing on Merton’s cultural adaptation theory) that Connor is struggling to get approval through the formal channels available at school and so he has resorted to other means to achieve status. Yet another sociological reading would be that he belongs to a status-deprived group, which, as a result, has formed a deviant subculture that actively resists the values of school. Or perhaps Connor has prior experience of being identified as a troublemaker and figures that he is going to get the blame anyway, so he might as well have some fun while it happens.
‘Poor parenting’
Taking a different approach, a psychologist may explore Connor’s early childhood experiences and his attachment to a primary care-giver. They might want to investigate whether there is an undiagnosed cognitive impairment to which Connor is adapting. For example, are there some executive function deficits that are making it difficult for him to pay attention to relevant stimuli and to tune out of those that are irrelevant?
A more behaviourist psychologist might point to this being learned behaviour, possibly a result of “poor parenting”, with Connor not having learned the rules of how to behave. Or perhaps he has learned that to get attention he has to misbehave, and a teacher is unwittingly reinforcing that.
Across these different disciplinary explanations, we can see different kinds of factors: outside school (most commonly parents and peers), within child, school and teacher. We know from Wang and Hall (2018) that research has consistently found that teachers are more likely to attribute behavioural problems to child or outside-school factors than to school or teacher factors.
Teacher attributions are also influenced by the gender and ethnicity of the pupil. For example, teachers are more likely to believe that behavioural problems presented by a minority-ethnic student are caused by individual student factors (such as personality) than when the pupil is from the ethnic majority.
The research is unequivocal: when confronted with behaviour that they find challenging, teachers in general are more likely to ask, “Is there something going on at home?” rather than, “Is there something going on in school?” And when, as a result, the spotlight turns on families, research suggests that professionals’ perceptions of the social-class background of parents has an impact on how parents are seen (Macleod et al, 2013).
In this study, we explored the experiences of families of young people permanently excluded from special schools and pupil-referral units and found that, where families were living in conditions of social and economic disadvantage, they felt they were treated as part of their child’s problem, rather than a potential partner in improving things for their child.
It is clear that perceptions of “poor parenting” are linked with being identified as living in poverty. There are dangers here of slipping into a moral underclass discourse (Levitas, 1998) where it is assumed that there is something wrong with the character of parents living in poverty, rather than remembering that the fundamental problem of poverty is that people don’t have enough money. Parenting is challenging enough in the relative security of the middle classes, but much more difficult when you are faced with a constant struggle to secure the basics of food, warmth and security for your family.
There is some excellent work going on in Scottish schools, supported by Child Poverty Action Group, the 1 in 5 - Raising Awareness of Child Poverty project in Edinburgh and the Poverty and Inequality Commission. This work includes helping to develop understanding about the stigma associated with poverty, increasing awareness of the hidden costs of the school day and highlighting the problem of holiday hunger.
However, while there is a link between poverty, parenting and behaviour, that link might not be so straightforward. Although the fundamental problem of poverty is economic, research tells us that it isn’t just lack of material resources that create the challenges children from these families face in school. If the problem isn’t only economic then the solution can’t be only reducing poverty, although that would be a great place to start.
In 2003, Annette Lareau published Unequal Childhoods, the findings from a longitudinal study of 88 families from diverse backgrounds. She identified two parenting styles that were sharply distributed along class divides. The working-class approach she labelled “natural growth”, and the middle-class approach “concerted cultivation”. She went on to argue that the concerted cultivation approach created children who were able to leverage all the advantages that school had to offer, because the school system valued and rewarded the same characteristics that this kind of parenting developed.
What this comes down to is that some young people have a stronger sense of belonging in school than others. Where both home and school value the same things, where the language, the kinds of relationships and the codes of behaviour are all the same, young people feel “at home” when at school.
This idea of a sense of belonging has been around in psychological literature for over 25 years; the associated idea of “membership” even longer. More recently, and perhaps as a result of the emphasis on pupil wellbeing, it has been revisited as a possible feature of some young people’s disengagement from school (see Allen and Bowles, 2012).
We know about the myth of the poverty of aspiration of poorer parents from the excellent work by social researcher and data analyst Morag Treanor. What the research suggests is not that these pupils and their families don’t buy into schooling, but that they have never felt like they were invited in the first place. If this is correct, then pupils aren’t disengaging from school - they’re responding to the feeling that school has never engaged with them.
Of course, it is much more complicated than that. For every young person who presents with challenging behaviour, there will be different reasons, and in some cases family and pupil factors will not provide the best explanations. However, we must look beyond the most familiar stories of pupils and their families as the problem - and reflect on whether our schools are places where every child has an equal chance of feeling that they belong.
Gale Macleod is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Education
This article originally appeared in the 12 July 2019 issue under the headline “Bad behaviour? We can’t just blame the parents”
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