Ben Springer - Happy Kids Don′t Punch You in the Face: A Guide to Eliminating Aggressive Behavior in School

• Ben Springer, PhD, NCSP

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Early on, there were a few years when I attributed my success with kids to intangibles or some sort of knack. Fortunately, working with difficult kids has a way of knocking some sense into you (bad pun totally intended)! As much as I would have liked to believe I was endowed with a gift for helping kids stop punching people in the facethis was not the case. I have no delusion now that my ability to help kids decrease their aggression and increase their joy comes from anywhere but real, methodical, reproducible steps. Over the past decade, I have shared these steps with educators and parents through hundreds of training seminars, workshops, and in-services. The response to these endeavors has been overwhelmingly positive and has culminated in a comprehensive training procedure for which this book serves as source material. If anything, I have been successful in threading the needle of the pioneering work of Gerald Patterson, George Sugai, Robert Horner, Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and V. Mark Durand in an accessible way for educators. I could not imagine any book, approach, or strategy involving the well-being of children that didnt acknowledge the monuments of thought mentioned here.

Reading their work has not only shaped my own understanding of how to help children, but it has shaped my life as a teacher, father, psychologist, administrator, brother, son, husband, and so on. I am not a talented enough writer to detail the breadth and scope of their work here, but I feel quite comfortable providing you with their respective scholarly highlight reels:

• Gerald Patterson has essentially explained and identified the why and how of kids transforming into terrifying fire-breathing tyrants hell-bent on getting their wayand how to stop it from happening again! Patterson forged this theory at a critical time when several theories in the field existed, but none with a solid empirical base. It is safe to say that studying aggression in children and trying to make the world a better place was his lifes work. I believe he succeeded on both counts.
• I have never felt comfortable referencing Sugai without Horner. It just seems like they go better together. (At one point in their respective and impressive careers, they were even codirectors for the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports at the University of Oregon.) In 2015, this dynamic duo provided an extensive retrospective on the societal impact of positive behavior supports and shared lessons learned in their adventures: (1) Emphasize core features and evidence-based strategies, (2) implement systems that support and sustain effective practices, (3) collect and use data for decision making, and (4) respect the implementation and adoption as a process. On that note, I consider the contributions of Sugai and Horner to be kind of like an Oreo cookie (made of separate but delicious parts) and school systems to be a glass of milk. When you dunk their school-wide positive behavior supports into schools, the result is pure bliss.
• Speaking of pure bliss, we can thank Martin Seligman for actually understanding how important bliss is to mental health. Seligman has been credited for articulating and expanding the field of Positive Psychology in the new millennium. His work has shifted the emphasis of mental health from what is broken to what is actually working. In 2002 he wrote, Positive Psychology takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose.
• Fun fact about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: You pronounce his name chick-sent-me-high. Another fun fact: His work has resulted in what must be the most specific, concrete path to happiness the world has ever known. In other words, before Csikszentmihalyis work, happiness was thought to be a secret path known only to few. Now theres a paved highway, and hes provided the street signs.
• Delving into the power of optimism in our roles as parents, educators, and school-based practitioners has led V. Mark Durand to some astounding findings: Attitude, it seems, really is everything. This is not some new-age mind-over-matter gimmick. Durand has found through rigorous research that our level of optimism may be the deciding factor in whether or not our behavioral strategies succeed or fail.

Finally, while I plan to infuse the work of the aforementioned authors and researchers, I will also be including detailed episodes and stories from my time spent working directly with children. I consider these episodes quasi-sacred. Many of these episodes have been the most rewarding of my life. Some of these episodes have been downright awful. I will obviously not be sharing any personal or identifiable information, but please note that these episodes have indeed taken place. My intent for sharing them is the direct result of feedback on hundreds of evaluations from trainings I have conducted. Clearly, the real-life stories of children, their teachers, and their parents resonate with people. There are many reasons why I believe this to be the case, and I will touch on them throughout the book. For now, suffice it to state that the stories, at the very least, are memorable. I believe that stories are what actually stay with peoplenot the facts. So I have decided to explicitly use the tools of authentic narratives from my practice to help the reader conceptualize the facts. What are these facts? Consistency trumps randomness, love trumps aggression, and kids thrive on meaningful relationshipsjust like the rest of us.