Executive Functioning Development-Impulse Control Practice

Impulse control has nothing to do with knowing the rules nor the recognition of the consequences for breaking them. Many children with challenging behaviors can tell you all about the rules and why their behavior was inappropriate.

The knowledge doesn’t help them.  Children with impulse control issues have not developed the skills to tolerate frustration, inhibit action, or adapt behavior to the environment to the extent needed in more open and less controlled environments.  

"In the hurly-burly of classroom give-and-take, children often go on automatic pilot and act impulsively. They do what they’ve always done, and if they’ve behaved aggressively in the past, then aggressive behavior just reappears." (Slaby, 1995).

Impulsivity for young children, according to Ronald G. Slaby and his colleagues (1995), occurs for several reasons:

• They have trouble regulating their emotions and often allow emotions to dictate actions.
• They don’t listen carefully and don't pick up on non-verbal communication signals.
• If they have verbal skills that could help them to stop and think, they may not use them.
• It doesn’t occur to them to consider what else they could do or what will happen if they respond aggressively. To them, passive or aggressive solutions seem perfectly all right.

Feelings, encountered in the heat of the moment,  initiate a response to action for children with impulse issues and it's the recognition of these feelings that is the cornerstone for addressing impulse control issues.

Learning the relationship between feelings and actions is one of the keys to developing impulse control. When a child learns to recognize that he’s feeling angry or frustrated, he can also learn that having that feeling is a signal to stop and think — not a signal to act.

To help a child recognize and process feelings an adult must intervene when signs of anger, frustration, or agitation arise. Interventions can range from removal of the child from the environment and discuss what the child is feeling to the provision of a trigger word or phrase such as "red light" to initiate the process of stop, look, and listen before acting.

“Self-speak” or verbal mediation is another activity that can help initiate a "controlled" response. The child thinks out loud to guide his own behavior.

Several social skills programs teach children to remind themselves aloud to “stop, look, and listen” when they realize they’re becoming angry, frustrated, or experiencing other feelings that initiate an immediate and uncontrolled response. Adults can help by modeling this method, making the usually hidden process of reasoning more apparent to all the children.

Practice these techniques with children when they’re composed and in control, and rehearse them in closed, one-to-one settings before trying them in real life. Provide lots of cues, prompts, and reinforcement when children are using them with their peers.

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