Corcenred behaviour change in my 5yr old

[Lexi234]

Hi, i have a 5 year old son who is in year 1 at school and doing really well! He's loving school and really enjoys doing writing and reading and in general happy with going there. He's a very polite and gentle boy he has a little brother (age3) who he is very careful with and in general the teachers even comment on how lovely he is. However... in the past few weeks he's started having these violent outbreaks at the school teachers are struggling to figure out why, for example he is randomly within playing goes over and pushes another child, he gets told by the teacher this is bad, he apologies and then another day/time do it again. He's even been told he will be banned from football if he keeps at it which scared him and he said he will be good. It was ok for a few days until I got told he punched a girl in the face 😥 I know this little girl and she really is sweet nothing bad about her so it just seems totally unprovoked! Teachers and myself are confused as to why he done this (teachers are being quite supportive as they know this is not like him at all) he wouldn't talk properly about it and when I sat with him and explained how what he did and how bad it is he understood and said how sorry he was (he was on the verge of tears) I asked why he did it and he said he was just playing but she got in the way.. it seems he's having these pushing/throwing things at kids quite a bit. He has lots of friends and the kids generally seem good. Just so upset that my boy could be like this, we are not violent at home in any way and have always tried to give out kids the best child hood we can, I don't know where to go from here..? Sorry this is so long but I wanted to be thorough in case someone has gone through the same thing?? Really appreciate your help here. From a very distressed mummy 😔

Dear OP, how stressful and difficult for you. I haven’t been through this myself exactly, but my DS went through a hitting phase when he was much younger (2yo) which I found very stressful.

It sounds like your DS is going through a hormonal or emotional change of some kind, and is finding it hard to deal with. Don’t worry, he hasn’t had a personality transplant and I am sure that he will go back to being your gentle boy when he has learnt to cope with this and handle his burgeoning emotions.

It is important to treat this seriously (especially when he hurts another child), but be careful not to overreact. It sounds like he’s finding this overwhelming already. Introduce a clear set of consequences (losing playtime, losing TV/iPad time, something he won’t like) and apply it immediately, calmly and consistently whenever he behaves badly. Keep talking to the school.

Good luck OP.

Forgot to say that it’s really normal for the above advice not to work immediately - as you found with the football threat. But it will work in time, when he realises there are consequences to his actions and learns how to control his behaviour.

Don’t ask him why he did something. It sounds like he doesn’t really know why! Just keep calm and say ‘that was unacceptable behaviour and you know you must not do that, so you can’t play football today’. And make sure you follow through.

Sometimes there are organic reasons for aggressive outbursts, when a child has frontal lobe damage or certain types of epilepsy. In these cases there may be no comprehensible reason for the aggressive episode, and the episode could have an explosive component.
There is also such thing as Intermittent Explosive Disorder which could have manifested through no cause of your own, and can be treated with medicine or psychotherapy.

Thank you for your help. He has drawn the girl a picture and it says sorry from him. He will give it to her on Monday. I just don't know what else to say to him about it, and feel like I can only hope he doesn't do anything bad again. We did ban the iPad from him but he just seems to get on with something else.. I hope it's just a small phase and not something permanent! What can I do/say if he does something again, I feel a bit useless as I'm quite a firm parent but I've never had to deal with something this bad and feel shouting at him isn't going to work with this sort of thing..

If he keeps repeating this behaviour would going to the doctor help? If it's a psychological problem?

Yes if it's continues, I'd see the doctor. It is just physical outbursts or verbal as well?

If it's uncharacteristic behaviour it's worth trying to find out if something is causing it at school. Could somebody else be hurting him or playing rough and scaring him? Talk to him about school generally rather than asking directly and see if anything comes up. In my experience teachers often miss other things precipitating this sort of behaviour (not a dig at teachers btw, there are just a lot of kids and a lot of things going on!)