Kids these days.

They’re getting more disrespectful, abusive, defiant and prone to tantrums. A few are even getting kicked out of school, getting pulled from the classroom by frustrated parents or being asked to cut back on their classroom hours until they shape up. And they’re only 4. “In the past five years, I’ve seen it become more difficult to deal with children,” said Judy Sharkey, director of Sheridan Day Care Center in the Town of Tonawanda.

She’s far from alone. Administrators at many of the area’s preschools agree the number of children they see with serious behavioral problems is steadily growing, though overall numbers remain small. “It’s more common that kids need more behavioral support and emotional support than they used to,” said Mary Lavin, principal of Windermere Early Childhood Education Center in Amherst. “We used to have an environment where children came in with stronger skills. “In rare instances, misbehaving children pay a heavy price. They’re thrown out. According to a Yale University study, 12 percent of pre-kindergarten teachers in New York reported expelling at least one child in the last year.

Expulsion rates

The overall number of preschoolers expelled is still low, with a statewide rate of one expulsion for every 110 preschoolers, according to the study. But New York’s pre-K rate is higher than the national average and 18 times higher than the state’s expulsion rate for students in kindergarten through high school.

“I’ve talked to a lot of my colleagues, and they’re constantly dropping kids from their program,” said Paul Lowman, a behavior specialist for the Buffalo-based Bethel Head Start Program.

Pre-K experts don’t pin behavior issues in children to any one cause. Some link the problem to a lack of parenting skills, inconsistent discipline in the home and poor socialization among peers.

But they also find that children with more aggressive behaviors often mimic serious problems occurring at home, including abuse and child molestation. In other cases, behavior may be linked to mental disabilities a child has had since birth.

“There isn’t one particular thing we can attribute this rise to, that I know of,” said Kathy Doody, a Buffalo State College professor specializing in behavior management from birth to age 5.

Lowman said drug use among parents may also be a culprit.

“With the growing drug and substance abuse, a lot of our children are being exposed prenatally,” he said, “which affects their development.”

When children start exhibiting problem behaviors in preschool as a result, pre-K teachers may not necessarily feel the same educational obligation to keep a child in the program as teachers in other grades do.

Research suggests pre-K administrators are more likely to release a child from their program even though the purpose of preschool is to teach children the behavioral and social skills they need to succeed in elementary school.

Local pre-kindergarten providers say that roughly 10 percent of the children they serve routinely exhibit some serious behavioral problem. These problems are typically worse when children first start school in September and often subside as the school year progresses.

Some are behaviors any parent of a young child might recognize: children falling to the floor, throwing tantrums, refusing to share, refusing to stay still for any activity and generally being defiant and disruptive.

“Sometimes, they just scream,” said Ruth Cleary, executive director of the Ripen With Us Pre-kindergarten in North Buffalo.

Aggressive signs

But what troubles some pre-K providers is the increase in children who actually show signs of aggressiveness – hitting, kicking and spitting on other children, acting out in self-destructive manners and, in rare cases, even mimicking sexual behaviors

“If a child becomes threatening towards others, or seriously hurts another child, that child has to be removed,” said Darlene White, a Buffalo schools social worker who has dealt solely with pre-K children the past five years. “I’ve had one child like that.”

That case is several years old. Many administrators similarly state that they haven’t forced a child to leave their pre-kindergarten program in years, if ever.

Instead, they say, they make every effort to keep a child in school, even if it means bringing a third adult into a classroom, having the child evaluated by a behavioral specialist, providing counseling or referring the child for special-education services.

Such assistance is critically important when you’re working with children from underprivileged families with a disproportionately higher number of troubled children, said L. Nathan Hare, executive director of the Community Action Organization, which has been running Head Start programs since 1965. The CAO serves roughly 2,100 preschoolers at any given time.

“It requires an incredible amount of patience,” Hare said, “but that’s what Head Start was created for.”

In-house specialists

Because Head Start is federally funded, it has in-house education specialists and a detailed program for dealing with children with behavioral problems.

Not all pre-kindergarten programs have access to similar resources, though most say they do partner with community agencies or local school districts.

In addition, while pre-K administrators rarely expel children, they are more likely to run into instances where a child’s behavior is so troublesome that they cut back on a child’s pre-K schedule or encourage a parent to withdraw the child voluntarily.

“We will let the parent know, You know, it’s not good for him, and it’s not good for us, ” Sharkey, of Sheridan Day Care Center, said.

There are also many cases in which a parent pulls a child from a preschool program because of worries that the child might be “labeled” as having special needs.

Cleary, of Ripen With Us, said she had two instances last year where she insisted that a child be evaluated by the school district before returning to her program. The parents chose to pull their kids instead.

Lowman has seen that as well at Bethel Head Start. Parents refuse evaluations and additional services for their child and are offended at the suggestion that their child might possibly need special-education services.

“It just happened today,” he said.

The child in question was running into walls, diving over furniture, refusing to stay still and required nonstop one-on-one attention, he said. Had the parent agreed to work with Head Start, Lowman said, a more supportive classroom environment would have been found for him, and he would still be in preschool.

The importance of sending a child to preschool can’t be underestimated, experts say.

“When children go to a high-quality preschool program, they do much better when they get into school,” Yale Child Study Center researcher Walter S. Gilliam said, “and when they do better in school, they do better in life.”

– Sandra Tan