Your Child Is Acting Out At School. Now What?

Looking Beyond the Misbehavior

A child acting out at school often signals that they are struggling emotionally, socially, or academically. Do you dole out tough love? Should you focus on positive reinforcement? Or is it something deeper-rooted that requires attention?

There are two aspects to the issue for a parent:

• Ameliorating the behavior short-term
• Finding and resolving the source of the behavior in the long term.

Let’s explore a child acting out in school in two parts: ways to manage and cope with the behavior today, and then longer-term solutions.

Managing the Acting Out At School

First, understand that most children struggle with their behavior at some point. Here are some thoughts on addressing the situation constructively:

Work with the School

• Set Up a Meeting: Meet with teachers, school counselors, or administrators to discuss concerns and possible interventions.
• Get Advice: Teachers may have insights into behavioral triggers. Is your child stressed, tired, etc.?
• is it possible your child feels pressured from home academically and is pushing back around tests, etc.?
• Develop a Plan: Collaborate to establish consistent expectations and consequences at school and at home.

Address Emotional and Behavioral Needs

Often, acting out is your child testing boundaries. In this case, establishing those limits with an appropriate response could do the trick, and you’ll never look back. Other thoughts:

• Is there a diet issue – for instance, sugar and learning are connected
• Is your child sleeping properly?
• Help your child identify and express emotions through words instead of acting out.
• Role-play scenarios to help them handle similar situations better in the future.
• Praise and reward positive behaviors to encourage repetition.

Consistency is Key

• Align expectations between school and home, and keep them consistent and predictable.
• Set clear boundaries and consequences for inappropriate behavior.

If, by working with the school, you can find what triggers your child to act out in school, you are making progress. But until you get to the source of the learning or emotional difficulty your child is carrying, the issue is likely not resolved.

Understand the Root Cause

A child acting out at school is the classic sign of a deeper-rooted learning issue.  It’s avoidance behavior, or a sign that she is struggling emotionally to deal with the learning struggles she is facing.

It’s self-preservation aimed at preventing the humiliation of having to read out loud, answer a teacher’s question, or react badly to a comment by a peer that calls out the truth your child understands, i.e., that she is struggling to keep up.

And so the first item of business is to look for patterns in the triggers of the acting out.  If the episodes occur in learning settings, e.g., in class, over homework, or while reading.

Learning delays are most often the culprit, as they frustrate and hold children back from what they see as their primary job in life: learning. Your investigation could include:

• Talking to your child. Create a safe, open space to ask how they feel about school. Avoid judgment and listen actively.
• Speak with Teachers or Counselors: Get insights from their perspective. Ask about specific behaviors, triggers, and patterns.
• Assess Changes: Reflect on any recent changes in their life (e.g., family issues, social struggles, academic pressures) that could be affecting them.

While there is professional support – therapists who can work on underlying emotional or behavioral concerns, or behavior specialists who can suggest tailored strategies for specific issues – the deeper answer here almost always is a learning glitch of some sort.

If the acting out is around homework, here are some thoughts on procrastination.

Finding a Learning Delay

Diagnosing a learning issue or behavioral problem is challenging because every child is a unique package of character traits, intelligence, natural skills, environments, and much more. Note that twice-exceptional children can be particularly prone to acting out in school. Our reading programs for gifted children with dyslexia are designed to manage these sensitivities.

Start by checking out our symptom lists. The most under-diagnosed learning issue is auditory processing delays – symptoms of APD here. Another place to look is deep-seated anxiety over reading – warning signs of reading delays here, and a checklist of dyslexia symptoms here.

For signs of the cognitive skill gaps that cause reading and learning difficulties, here is a list of clues associated with dyslexia outside the classroom.

Failing that, going to a behavioral psychologist or clinician is likely your best course of action. Not only can they provide assessments, but they can also give you a long list of reasons your child is acting out.

Treating Learning Delays

Many learning delays are caused by cognitive skill gaps, such as language processing, that can be exercised and improved.

Gemm Learning provides learning interventions at home with oversight to treat a range of deep-seated learning delays. We use neuroscience-based Fast ForWord software for ages 5 and older.

Gemm Learning uses Fast ForWord software at home to build essential language processing and pre-reading skills, and then reading comprehension.