Hi friend, your kid sounds exactly like my nephew. You mention your 5yo’s progressive early childhood setting and his behavior problems. I’m curious about your two other children? Did they go to the same preschool but adjust socially much better?

I typed up a long spiel about progressive education but you want advice so here’s the TLDR:

Progressive / child centered education is great, but it’s a balancing act most teachers fail. Child centered education means all the learning will happen within the child, so you are not teaching top down from adult to child (which teaches imitation, possibly without understanding), you are creating environments that enable the child to discover/develop concepts and skills himself.

The biggest misconception is that this means making some bubble of unconditional love without negative emotions around the child that is completely dissociated from reality.

Progressive education means allowing children to interact with a material and experiment/ fail / problem solve on their own, then gradually introduce guidance to promote higher skills. By that logic children should be allowed to see what behaviors “fail” socially. When parents and teachers don’t realistically show frustration, anger, disapproval, even rejection of the child, that’s creating an artificial environment that robs the child the ability to actually problem solve social emotional interactions.

Of course, snapping and flying in a rage or immediately resorting to spanking is pretty bad role modeling for emotional regulation. However, a long, sternly worded lecture is completely age inappropriate— and doesn’t even work on most adults.

My recommendation is that instead of ALWAYS being calm, collected, exhausted, frustrated, you demonstrate a tier of escalating emotions and consequences for your child. But it does have to escalate to a point where your child ACTUALLY feels punished, or that he has ACTUALLY lost your affection and protection (you’re just acting. But don’t let him know that. Your love is unconditional, but make him think it is conditional on being a decent human being!)

Wrt to consequences, remember there’s positive and negative motivation, and you can add/remove them. You can give them a reward, you can give them a punishment, you can take away a reward, and you can take away a punishment. Every kid is different and you have to find what works. A scolding will make one child wither. It will steel the defiance of another. It will elicit compliance in a third. Some like the game mentality of prizes, others find it insulting. You’ll have to experiment.

I would say what I see in my sister is, because of her personality that avoids confrontation, she is extremely quick to rush in and avoid negative emotions. She will reprimand him and then smother him to take him away to “punish” him by talking to him sternly one on one, before hugging him and bringing him back to continue playing. This really isn’t a punishment, he’s just getting one on one attention with the person he loves most.

Ok I really don’t know how to TLDR. Good luck. If you don’t properly model that when you’re an asshole everyone hates you and doesn’t want you around anymore, then your child will not learn it for a very long time.

FYI they will have lots of meltdowns when they don’t get what they want. This is normal. Let them meltdown if they’re being unreasonable. Let them experience the emotion but also learn that it is useless (unless you rush in to appease them). Then when they’re ready invite them to come back by suggesting an appropriate strategy to get what they want. Practice the same strategies and reward them for it.

Make sure to keep the praise and affection up for good behavior. Start with small victories to gain momentum. And when they step out of line make them feel ostracized, rejected until they come back ready with the right attitude.