Handling Challenging Behaviors in Preschool: A Teacher's Guide

Challenging behavior is behavior that keeps repeating, that puts a child or the people around them at risk of harm, or that shuts a child out of the learning and play the rest of the room is doing.

The label describes a situation you have to manage.

It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a verdict on the child.

The behaviors this guide covers fall into a handful of groups:

• Aggression toward people — hitting, biting, pushing, throwing things at other children or at you.
• Leaving the area — running from the room, the playground or the line, anywhere safety stops being something you can guarantee.
• Refusal and defiance — a flat "no," bolting at every transition, tearing down materials on the way.
• Escalation that takes over the room — screaming or meltdowns that repeatedly pull the whole day off track.

Two questions separate a rough stretch from a pattern that needs a plan.

How often does it happen, and does anyone get hurt?

One hard morning is classroom life.

The same behavior several days a week, or any behavior that injures someone, is what the rest of this page is for — and for where this skill sits in the job as a whole, our daycare teacher career guide covers the role end to end.

Behavior is communication.

The child who hits every day at arrival is telling you something about arrival; the child who melts down at cleanup is telling you something about cleanup.

Your first analytical job is to work out what the behavior is saying, because the right response depends on it.

These are the places experienced teachers look first:

• A skill still under construction. Impulse control, frustration tolerance and the words to ask for help develop over years of childhood. Where the skill is missing, the behavior is what fills the gap.
• Something to get, or something to escape. A behavior that reliably wins attention, a toy or a way out of a hard activity is being reinforced — whatever the child intends.
• The setup. Transitions without warning, an overstimulating room, expectations beyond a child's development, or long stretches without movement all stage the scene.
• What is happening outside your room. A new sibling, a move, a disrupted sleep — big changes surface in the classroom first.
• Development itself. Tantrums, grabbing and biting arrive before the self-regulation that replaces them, so part of the work is developmental, not personal.

Two habits make the why visible.

The first is an ABC note — antecedent, behavior, consequence: what happened right before, what the child did, what happened next.

The second is comparing notes with your co-teacher and the child's family, because the behavior may look different in another room, at home or on Mondays.

A pattern you can see is a pattern you can plan around, which is the bridge to prevention.

When a child escalates, the sequence is safety, calm, language, repair — in that order.

Each step is small, and none of them is a lecture.

1. Make the room safe. Move other children out of reach, put your body between them, and signal a co-teacher to the child who was hurt. Injury care comes before teaching.
2. Drop your body and your volume. Get below the child's eye level and go quiet. A short script said the same way every time — "I won't let you hit — hitting hurts" — beats a long explanation a flooded brain cannot use.
3. Wait out the storm. Reasons and questions land after de-escalation, not during it. Stay close, stay boring, stay predictable.
4. Go to the child who was hurt. Comfort and first aid show the whole room where attention goes when someone is hurt — which matters to the child who hit, too.
5. Return to the routine once the child is calm, and save the teaching for later: name the skill, then practice it in a calm moment — "You wanted the truck — say: can I have a turn?"
6. Write it down while it is fresh. The note you take before nap is the data you will have at staffing time.

What stays off the table matters as much as what goes on it.

Shaming, yelling, physical punishment and long exclusions are not guidance — they cost you the relationship the teaching depends on.

What a center may do about behavior is also a licensing question, not just a classroom one: your state child care licensing agency sets the rules your center operates under, and your center adds its own written policy on top.

Know both.

For everyday technique — redirection, real choices, natural consequences — our positive guidance guide owns that ground; this page stays on the harder end.

Once your ABC notes show a pattern, stop improvising and write the plan down.

A workable prevention plan fits on a page and has four parts.

• The pattern, stated plainly. When, where, with whom, right after what. "Arrival, Mondays, at drop-off separation" gives you something to work with; "he hits" gives you nothing.
• A change to the setup. Take the pattern's stage away: a warning before every transition, a job to carry through the hard part of the day, a quieter seat, a visual schedule the child can read.
• A replacement skill, taught on purpose. Every challenging behavior stands in for a skill — words for what you want, a way to ask for help, a calm-down routine. Teach it when everyone is calm, prompt it before the hard moment, and notice the first real uses of it out loud.
• One script, every adult. The plan works when you, your co-teacher and the floater respond the same way every time. Put it in writing and give your director a copy — you want it to survive your day off.

This is the same logic the Pyramid Model formalizes — a framework of evidence-based practices for promoting young children's social-emotional development.

Its tiers run from universal supports for all children (nurturing, responsive relationships and high-quality environments) to targeted social-emotional supports for children who need more, up to individualized intensive interventions, all resting on a foundation of an effective workforce.

It is a framework rather than a curriculum: it works alongside a program's existing curriculum instead of replacing it.

If your center has a behavior coach, an education coordinator or a mental health consultant, a child who needs this plan is exactly who they are for — bring them in when you write the plan, not after it fails.

Documentation turns "he had a rough day" into something you, your director and the family can act on.

Keep it observational: what happened, what came right before it, what you did, what happened after, who was hurt.

Record the behavior, not a verdict — skip "aggressive," "bad" and "mean" entirely.

Consistent notes are also what let you show that a plan was tried honestly before anyone talks about bigger steps.

Family conversations go better when they start early and start positive.

Lead with something real the child does well.

Describe the behavior in the same plain words you write down, share what you are trying in the room, and ask what works at home — you are comparing notes with the people who know this child longest, not reporting them.

Leave diagnosis out of it in both directions: naming a condition is outside a teacher's role, and so is promising one is not coming.

Underneath all of it sits the question every preschool teacher eventually asks: can a program expel a child for behavior?

The federal posture is against it.

A joint policy statement from the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, issued in 2014, urges states to adopt policies across publicly and privately funded early childhood programs that eliminate or severely limit expulsion and suspension, treating them as a last resort only when safety is seriously threatened.

ACF followed with Information Memorandum CCDF-ACF-IM-2016-03, dated November 7, 2016, encouraging CCDF Lead Agencies to adopt those recommendations.

Read both for what they are: recommendations to states, not binding rules for a private center — what your state actually limits is a question for your state child care licensing agency.

The data behind that federal push explains its urgency.

Figures cited in the 2016 ACF memo, drawn from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, showed African-American boys were 19% of preschool enrollment but 45% of preschoolers suspended.

That gap is the evidence federal agencies were citing when they pressed for limits — and a reminder that removal from a program is the last door in the building, opened only after prevention, documentation and family partnership have had their turn.

Head Start is where the guidance becomes a rule.

Current Head Start Program Performance Standards prohibit expelling or unenrolling a child because of behavior, and they limit suspension to a temporary, last-resort step taken after consulting a mental health consultant (45 CFR 1302.17).

Date-stamp that: on August 7, 2026, ACF published a proposed rule that would remove Section 1302.17 entirely.

It is a proposal, not a final rule — as of October 2026, the prohibition stands.

Refer when the plan has been followed honestly and the behavior is still not moving.

That is the trigger — not a hunch, and not one terrible week.

Signals that point past classroom support:

• The behavior continues at the same intensity after weeks of a consistently applied plan.
• Someone keeps getting hurt, or the behavior escalates despite the plan.
• The same struggles show up across settings — your room, another classroom, home.
• The family raises concerns too, or you notice gaps in other areas of development alongside the behavior.

The first conversation is with your director: centers differ in what they can offer, from an internal behavior specialist to a contracted mental health consultant.

The second is with the family, sharing your documentation and asking what they see.

Screening tools give those conversations something objective to stand on.

Two examples, as their publisher describes them: ASQ-3, a parent-completed developmental screener, covers ages 1-66 months across communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving and personal-social development; ASQ:SE-2, a social-emotional screener, covers ages 1-72 months with 9 questionnaires and is meant to be used alongside ASQ-3 or another general developmental screener.

A screening result suggests where to look — it does not label a child.

If you teach in Head Start, every child already gets a developmental screening at entry: the program's standards require one to be completed or obtained within 45 calendar days of when a child first attends (30 days for programs operating 90 days or less), using research-based standardized tools.

That entry screening is not a deadline for a behavior referral, but its results belong in the conversation with your director and the family.

A pending federal proposal would rescind that section of the standards while keeping screening duties that come from statute, so your program's current procedure is the one to follow.

When the documentation and the screening both point somewhere the classroom cannot go, the referral runs through your center's process, with the family involved at every step.

Where that path leads — which system serves which ages, and who does the work — is ground our early intervention career guide covers.

One last framing thought.

Teachers who get systematic about challenging behavior — plan, document, partner, refer — become the teachers directors build schedules around.

When you next browse daycare teacher jobs, ask each program how it supports a classroom through a hard behavioral stretch; the answer tells you more about that center than any tour.

This guide is career information for early childhood educators, not licensing or legal advice. Behavior-guidance, expulsion and screening rules vary by state and setting — confirm what applies to your room with your state child care licensing agency, or, in Head Start, with your program and the Office of Head Start.