Many parents and teachers often experience that inward sigh when yet another child approaches them with yet another tattle tale. A behavior that is not only disruptive and annoying, it often serves to erode the child's peer relationships and obviously must be stopped. However, before the behavior can be effectively extinguished, adults need to address the reason it is occurring.
What Tattling Is and Is Not
Essentially, tattling is a social behavior where one child seeks to get another child in trouble for an offense about which the adult does not want or need to know. This is quite different than when a child seeks to inform an adult of a safety issue or if someone has been physically hurt.
Attention Seeking Behavior
For some children, tattling is a way to receive attention. The interesting thing about attention-starved kids is that they will find a way to receive attention any way they can – be it by positive or negative actions. When adults focus their attention on the tattling child, even if it is to reprimand the tattler, it actually encourages the behavior. Adults may be better served to ignore tattling children at this moment, but lavish attention on them at a later time.
Power Issues
Sometimes children's motivation to tattle is not so different than when an adult snitches on another person. Children may be seeking revenge or attempting to manipulate others. It is a quest for power, and tattling fills that inner need. These children long to see another child punished or perhaps delight in how they have managed to control the adult's reaction. Tattling for this reason might be snuffed out by a non-reactive adult or by finding positive ways of empowering children.
Self Esteem Issues
At other times, tattling reflects children's self esteem issues. Children may lack the confidence to handle the situation independently. Further, by getting another child into trouble it makes them feel better about their own shortcomings. What these children might require is a little cheerleading from the adult. The children need to know that they are valued and have the skills to handle the situation independently.
Emerging Moral Conscious
Often for particularly young children and toddlers, tattling is an aspect of their emerging moral conscious. These children are just beginning to learn the rules. When they see a rule broken, they are driven to have the consequence appropriately follow. They are simply following the logic of the cause and effect relationships that they see in the world. These children neetd to be taught ways to cope with the behavior that elicited the tattle.
Limited Conflict Resolution Skills
A final reason for chronic tattling reveals the deeper issue of children's lack of independent conflict resolution skills. These children have no other strategies to deal with undesirable peer behaviors, and so look toward the adult to resolve the problem. Their limited skills necessitate intervention from adults, rather than relying on internal strategies to resolve peer issues. These children would benefit from peer mediation and conflict resolution training.
The bottom line is that it is very important to understand why the tattling behavior is occurring before adults can attempt to address how to stop it. Children tattle for different reasons, and that reason should elicit a different response from the adult. When adults can isolate the reason, they can successfully extinguish the behavior.
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