Creating a democratic classroom at the early childhood level

What is going on with education when preschool aged children are being expelled? To me, that signals that something is not going right with the education system in play in the school. Often times instructors focus on this idea that "challenging" students need to be punished for being "bad" without considering their life circumstances and the stress that they are under.
This was the focus of the talk radio shows that I listened to from NAEYC the national association for the education of young children.
The first segment that I listened to was about challenging students in the classroom and how to build relationships with them. The man who called in wanted to make it clear that children are not "challenging" and that we need to consider that they may be coming from unstable homes and stressful situations and coming into a classroom creates a great amount of stress especially when their emotional and social needs are not met at home. Instead of focusing on this discipline and punish model of education that is in play with the teacher as the discipliner, we as educators need to build relationships with the students and allow for them to come to us with problems and work through them because those problems are the reason that they are acting out in the classroom. We need to be trained as educators to understand and see signs of stress in children and allow them to develop socially in the classroom and understand how to act instead of expulsion and sending them to special education classrooms. All children deserve the opportunity to learn from a supportive teacher who creates a relationship and helps them develop emotionally and socially and to deal with their daily stresses of life at such an early age.
The second segment was on emotional literacy in students in early childhood. We as educators should be teaching emotional literacy so that students can deal with stress better and understand their emotions as natural. This type of education can help students feel supported and understood by their teachers so that they can learn properly as one can not learn well when they are not emotionally literate. Emotional illiteracy can make school hard to understand and can take focus away from education at an early stage in life. teachers need to be trained to teach this type of learning side by side with academics so that children can learn best, and that no child feels like they are not given an appropriate chance in education.