Regression

John is a 4.5 year old boy from a broken home.  His parents are bitterly divorced and he lives with his dad, step-mom, and twin toddlers from the current marriage.  John sleeps over at his mom’s house every other Wednesday and every weekend.

The dad and step-mom are very nice, but very young and very overwhelmed with so many little children.  John came to my class one year ago as a 3.5-year old, because his previous teacher couldn’t handle him.  Through a lot of tough love and positive discipline in the prepared environment, John began to settle down and find joy in the Montessori materials.  This was a long and arduous process, which took most of the year, but I could see genuine progress and maturity around the time we celebrated his fourth birthday towards the end of the school year.

I still struggled to help him find purposeful work, and he refuses to do anything related to sandpaper letters or the moveable alphabet, so he’s at least a year behind where he should be academically.  However, he was happy, understood the limits, and was always eager to help.  He even displayed strong concentration when working with metal insets and constructive triangles, and his coloring work went from dark and aggressive to colorful and well-organized.

At the beginning of this school year, he was still doing relatively well, although there was the expected rowdiness associated with the start of the school year.  A few weeks ago, however, things changed.  John began acting up: he got into physical fights, stopped following the rules, and had a strange nervous energy.  I talked to the director of the school about it, and she let me know that John’s dad and step-mom were expecting a baby.  Because John hadn’t mentioned anything, I let it be for the moment, and returned to the tough love, positive discipline, and Montessori materials that had worked so well in the past.

This time, however, they seemed to have the opposite effect.  John would settle down for a few moments, but soon he was hurting someone, mistreating a material, or being loud and abrasive in the classroom when everyone else was trying to work.  If he was working with a metal inset, he would get up from his chair at least 20 times to go interrupt others, and would react violently if I tried to guide him back to his work.

I called the dad to try to get some insight and asked him if there were any changes at home I should know about.  As is customary with him, he blamed the mom for putting negative ideas about school in John’s mind, and told me that every time John comes home after visiting his mom he is irritable and difficult to handle.  Not once did he mention that they were expecting, so I didn’t bring this up.

A week after the fruitless phone call, we celebrated another child’s birthday, and John mentioned that he would be getting a new brother and sister.  He didn’t seem upset and stated the fact very nonchalantly.  However, a few days later we were having a particularly bad day.  The children were acting up and John was leading the way.  Fed up with his behavior, I did something I have never done before to any child: I told John he was acting like a baby.

What happened next surprised me.  He grinned.  It was the biggest grin I’ve seen on a child in a long time!  He looked pleased as punch with my statement!  That’s when it hit me: he’s regressing.  He knows that his twin half-brothers got all the attention when they were born, and now he’s going to be losing his dad’s attention once again!

I really don’t know how to proceed at this point… I have a conference with John’s dad a week from now, but I don’t know how to bring up his child’s reaction to my statement, let alone the fact that the boy’s behavior is a direct result of the dad’s actions and decisions.  He can’t turn back the pregnancy, but he needs to realize how it is affecting his child.

As for John’s behavior in the classroom, I’m not quite sure what to do.  The more I treat him like a “big boy”, the more he rebels and regresses, because he wants to be the baby.  But treating him like a baby is not going to help him understand the realities of his role in life.  Maria Montessori would say that we are not psychologists, and that the only way we can lead a child to normalization is through helping him find purposeful work that he can repeat with concentration.  But how do I go about that if the child’s energy and focus are so scattered that he can’t even sit on a chair or next to a rug long enough to take a material out of its box?

Next week, it’s going to be all Practical Life, all day long for little John.  He needs a sense of purpose in his life, an anchor of stability and success in the crazy mixed-up world his adults have created for him.  I pray that he’ll find his way through scrubbing walls and washing windows.  Maybe Maria Montessori was right after all… It wouldn’t surprise me.