Archive: Around Town

Lansing Central Schools hosted Dr. James Gabarino, author and child development expert Thursday at the Middle School Auditorium. Dr. Garbarino’s presentation entitled “Aggression in Boys and Girls and What We Can Do About It” is based on his books Lost Boys (NY: Free Press, 1999) and See Jane Hit (NY: Penguin Press, 2006).

According to Dr. Garbarino, one of the important developmental starting points in understanding violence is that physical aggression is essentially universal in infants (and equally so for males and females). The keys to the socialization of early aggression are "cognitive structuring" (the ideas about aggression) and "behavioral rehearsal" (practice with aggressive behavior).

Traditionally, females have "given it up" more readily than males. One reason for this has been the cultural homogeneity of messages to girls "girls don't hit." With the culture shifting on this-- and more experiences for assertive physicality for girls opening up-- it is not surprising that physical aggression would increase generally among girls and that troubled girls would be more externalizing in their difficulties and that early trauma predicts later problems with violence. Early trauma creates risk that this early aggression will coalesce into violent behavior in adolescence. The experience of abuse sets the child up for the kind of "risky thinking" that leads to chronic patterns of aggression, bad behavior, acting out and violating the rights of others that can lead to a diagnosis of "conduct disorder."

If no intervention occurs, this pattern of childhood conduct disorder becomes the entryway into adolescent delinquent and antisocial violent behavior. The more socially toxic (and traumatic) the environment in which childhood and adolescence occur, the more likely it is that childhood conduct disorder will translate into adolescent violence. Changing patterns of aggression in girls provide a useful insight into how and why these processes take place.

Lansing Central Schools has implemented a program called CASS (Creating A Safe School) CASS is a multifaceted change process that brings together a community of caring adults (administrators, teachers, other school personnel, parents) and students to work together to change the social culture in a school or school district.

Margaret Marcoux, a Lansing School Guidance Counselor said “One of the goals of CASS is to involve the community in the mission of changing the norms for aggression and to do this we need everyone in the community to be aware and working together. We’re pleased to have Dr. Garbarino in Lansing. He is well known as an expert on aggression in youth with special emphasis on school violence.”

The Lansing PTSO, CASS and TST-BOCES sponsored Dr. Garbarino’s presentation, which was free and open to the public.

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