Word: childrened
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Given the overwhelming slate of potential harm, the aim of the study was to identify early predictors of victimization, along with behavioral interventions that may prevent it. The bulk of past research on the matter involved primary-school-age children, says Michel Boivin, a psychologist at Université Laval in Québec, Canada, and a co-author of the study; the new research tracks behavior in very young kids - as early as those in pre-preschool, when children first begin interacting with one another socially...
...research team studied data on 1,970 children - about half boys, half girls - and their families, all participants in the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development. The children were born between October 1997 and July 1998 and represented a socio-economic cross-section of Quebec society. Mothers were surveyed about their children during their earliest school years - every six months up to age 6 - in order to determine how often children complained of suffering physical violence at school, being called names or being teased by their peers. Subsequently, the study asked the same questions of teachers and the children themselves...
Those periodic interviews, Boivin said, allowed researchers to identify three "trajectories" of victimization risk that children tended to follow as they moved from preschool into kindergarten. Most kids (71%) fell into the low-trajectory camp; about a quarter fell into the moderate category. But "there was 4% - mostly boys - who are chronically, highly victimized," Boivin says...
...months, there is a lot of physical aggression among kids," Boivin notes, but most children manage to adjust socially and eventually develop the verbal skills needed to negotiate peacefully within a group. "Aggression becomes less and less of a normative way to get things done," he says. But children on the high-risk path appear unable to develop those social skills; their aggression ends up turning on them. "As children get older, in grade school, they slowly shift their aggression and tend to withdraw into shyness," Boivin said...
Boivin's study was careful to distinguish aggression from hyperactivity in children. While hyperactivity also often causes social problems and increases a child's risk of being victimized by about second grade, the authors did not find that it predicted peer victimization in young children. Rather, it was physical aggression in early childhood - behavior such as kicking, biting and bullying - that increased a child's odds of becoming a victim of that same behavior later...