Kids Taught Self-Control Behave Better at School

Kids Taught Self-Control Behave Better at School | LiveScience

While there are many different ways to reduce classroom problems, it appears that giving children the skills they need to problem-solve might be the best solution.

Children taught skills to monitor and control their anger and other emotions improved their classroom behavior and had significantly fewer school disciplinary referrals and suspensions, according to new research.

Children in a school-based mentoring program were about half as likely to have any discipline incident over the three-month period of the study. They also had a 43 percent decrease in mean suspensions and 46 percent less mean office disciplinary referrals as compared to the control group, which did not receive mentoring of the self-control skills.

In the four-month interval after the intervention began, 1.8 percent of children in the mentored group were suspended compared to 6.1 percent of the control group.