Functions of Behavior

As part of healthy development, all children may engage in some type of problematic behavior as they grow and learn how to navigate their environment. For many children, these troubling behaviors may persist past the point of age-appropriateness, or they may be more frequent or intense than the behaviors of other children of the same age. Their parents often wonder, “What can I do to stop this behavior?” In order to answer this question, behavior analysts encourage parents to begin by asking the question, “Why does my child engage in this behavior?”

One of the foundational principles of Applied Behavior Analysis directly addresses this question – we closely examine why a person engages in a behavior, which we call the function of their behavior. A behavior that may look identical in four different children (or even one child at four different times) may be happening for four entirely different reasons, and each would be treated differently in intervention.

Let’s use an example of a child having a tantrum in the grocery store and look at some common reasons they may be engaging in this behavior.

1. They tantrum because they want their mother’s attention, but their mother is focused on shopping.
2. They tantrum because they like the way their screams sound when carried across the store.
3. They tantrum because their father is in the produce section, but they want to go down the candy aisle and pick out some candy to eat.
4. They tantrum because they dislike grocery shopping – they want to leave the store and go home.

Generally, behaviors fall into one of four broad categories:

1. Attention from others
2. Sensory (the sensation of the behavior is rewarding, or helps the person mitigate an unpleasant sensation)
3. Access to items and activities
4. Escape (getting away from something that the person does not like)

Each instance of tantrum behavior above may look identical, but each occurs for very different purposes. One tantrum occurs to gain a mother’s attention, one appears purely sensory, one occurs to gain access to candy, and one occurs to gain escape from shopping.

A person’s behavior is strongly connected to his or her environment and how the behavior has been rewarded in the past. If your child is receiving ABA intervention, their treatment team can assist you in identifying the function of their problematic behavior(s) and developing a plan of action to teach your child new patterns of behavior.

Learning to identify the function of your child’s behavior, or the “why” behind the behavior, is a strong step in the right direction toward creating long-term behavior change. Once the function has been determined, your child’s treatment team can work with you to create an individualized intervention plan that teaches your child how to get their needs met in a safer, more appropriate way, while reducing their motivation to engage in problematic behaviors.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020