Many young children engage in oppositional, aggressive, and highly active behavior patterns during the course of normal development.  They may also exhibit signs of anxiety and react emotionally to common, everyday situations.  For children whose behavior and developmental problems fall within normal limits of individual variability, most of the problem that occur during the preschool years will be outgrown as the child passes through difficult developmental phases.

For some children, however, these behavior problems occur across caregivers and with extreme frequency or intensity and are indicative of serious and persistent behavior problems.  For these children, specialized intervention during the preschool years is critical.  Untreated problems displayed by preschoolers tend to get worse over time, interfering with their development of self-help skills, socialization, and early academic skills.

To distinguish between normal developmental problems and significant mental health issues, we must understand the typical developmental hurdles that face each child.  During the first year of life, it is important for infants to have their needs met in a timely and consistent manner.  It is not surprising that many children from age one to two try to maintain this type of relationship with their caregivers.  This is the point at which conflict usually starts--when parents and caregivers begin the process of socialization and of helping the child to understand that they share their home with other family members and their classrooms with other children.  This means that children will occasionally have to wait longer than they'd like, stop before they want to stop, take turns, and, sometimes, not be able to do what they want to do at all.  Tantrums often result to let adults know they are unhappy with this change in expectations.  At the age of two to four, young children begin seeking independence and autonomy.  As they work on these developmental skills, they are likely to be noncompliant with parents and to have temper tantrums when they are not allowed to do things for themselves.  At the ages of four to five, young children are expected to begin learning to play cooperatively with other children, and normative behavior problems include aggression and difficulty with sharing and taking turns.  Aggression toward other children declines as preschoolers learn more sophisticated means of solving problems through verbal negotiation and begin to learn to regulate their own emotions.  These critical preschool experiences in learning how to interact effectively with peers set the stage for social adjustment in kindergarten and early elementary school.

It is important to understand these developmental stages and the corresponding needs of children in order to know how to shift teaching strategies to help children along in their socialization process.  If children are not able to progress through developmental stages with only transient behavior problems, it means that caregivers are not facilitating and teaching appropriately, or that the child may have a significant developmental and/or mental health issue that needs to be addressed.  If this is the case, specialized intervention by mental health professionals to diagnose and treat problems during the preschool years is critical--and more effective than waiting until the child is older.

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