Behavior Challenges

What causes behavioral issues such as tantrums or aggressive behavior?

Answering this question requires an orientation to the principles of behavior. The basic principles of behavior were discovered through a series of experiments beginning in the last century and continuing as a line of research today. Reinforcement is the principle that describes why behavior occurs. Reinforcement holds that a behavior is more likely to occur again in the future when it results in reinforcers, or preferred/appetitive outcomes. It is important to realize that reinforcers are not always obvious. Sometimes a behavior is followed by something that seems like a punishment, such as yelling or timeout. However, under some circumstances, yelling or timeout can actually function as reinforcers.

Although this may seem impossible, consider the following situation: a child is talking to their parent while the parent is talking on the phone and also cooking dinner. The parent ignores the child’s conversation. The child begins to speak more loudly, and eventually, they begin screaming and kicking the kitchen cabinet. The parent hangs up the phone, turns to the child, and begins to scold them. “I told you NOT to kick and scream! I had to hang up the phone! Now you are in trouble. You should never kick the cabinets…” Although the parent is trying to explain a consequence to the child, the child is actually getting what they wanted all along: their parent’s attention.

In another situation, a child’s babysitter is prompting them to put away their toys which are scattered around the living room floor. The child walks around the room and avoids picking up any toys. The babysitter continues to give the instruction to pick up toys, and now they have started following the child around the room, pointing out items to pick up. Eventually, the child picks up a toy and throws it at the babysitter, narrowly missing them. The babysitter tells the child to put the toy on the shelf. The child picks up another toy and throws again, much harder this time. The toy hits the babysitter in the face. The babysitter sends the child to their bedroom for a timeout. Although it seems like the babysitter is applying a punishing consequence to the toy throwing behavior, in actuality, the child has successfully escaped the cleaning up task.

These two examples illustrate situations in which a challenging behavior resulted in an outcome that was preferred by the child. In each of these circumstances, challenging behavior, including future challenging behavior, could have been avoided by paying attention to both antecedents and consequences. Antecedents consist of what is happening in the environment before the behavior occurs. Consequences consist of what happens in the environment after the behavior occurs. The antecedents in the first situation were that the child was asking for their parent’s attention, and the parent was not giving them any attention. The antecedents in the second section were the messy room and the repeated instructions to clean the room, which were increasing in intensity.

How could challenging behavior have been prevented? In both of these circumstances, challenging behavior could have been prevented by recognizing the antecedents and providing access to preferred consequences before the challenging behavior occurred. Does that mean that children should get whatever they want, all the time? No, it doesn’t. Giving a child everything they want all the time doesn’t help them learn how to manage delays and disappointments. It is important to set clear expectations so that children know how to get what it is important to them as well as when they will get it.