Behaviour Strategies
Behaviour Strategies for Special children in Mainstream Settings.
What is behaviour?
Behaviour is the interaction of the child with his or her environment. Behaviour is requesting a drink of milk, picking your nose, running across the street without looking, or throwing furniture.
Ask yourself
· How does John ask me for a drink?
· How do I know Jane needs a tissue?
· How do I know that Mary is looking for mummy?
and you will have the answer to what behaviour is.
Can behaviour be changed?
Some of the special needs children in crèches and playgroups have behaviour problems, big or small, that may need to be changed. It is not easy finding behavioural change strategies that work for special children in mainstream settings, but there are a few. Any behavioural change programme will be hard. Below are some guidelines that, if you stick to them, may help you in successfully implementing behavioural change programmes in your particular setting.
Before you embark on any behavioural change programme, whether for a normally developing child or a special needs child, there are some basic tenets that you must remember.
- Human behavioural change of any sort (whether it is toilet training or writing a letter) is complex. Any of you who have tried it will know that it is difficult and time consuming.
- There are no guarantees and no absolutes; you cannot simply apply what worked for one child to another. You must look at each child on an individual basis.
- Pick your battles carefully and make the punishment fit the crime. If you have been working with a child for days to improve toileting, do not take away a big promised gain for that child because of one minor accident.
- Most importantly accept responsibility! Adults are responsible for maintaining many of the behaviours that we see in children. Look as critically at your own behaviour as you do the child’s. For example, children have learned to whinge because it makes us pick them up; children shout at you in a quiet setting because you will immediately attend to them; children will throw a tantrum at the sweets counter because you bought them sweets the last time they acted that way.
- Consistency is key; everyone has to be doing the same thing all of the time. This means that if Granny minds John in the afternoon after crèche, and Dad and Mum split duties on the weekends, then there are a number of separate settings where the child must have consistent treatment.
Consistency
This brings into focus the point that many of the behaviours we see in children are maintained by adults. For example, if John consistently throws his chair when he is asked to return to the table and by doing so goes to time out, then the adult has told John that throwing the chair is a successful way of avoiding returning to the table.
Practically, you need to think about behaviour in terms of the function of the behaviour (why does the child do what he does?) and the things that maintain the behaviour in the child’s environment (what is causing the behaviour to continue in the child’s environment?) In other words you need to consider reasons for the behaviour, why the behaviour continues, and what the child is getting out of the behaviour.
Consider the following:
- You say “Find your chair”
- The child flops to the ground
- You leave him on the floor because he is too heavy or there are too many other children about to be worrying about this behaviour.
Now think about this from the child’s perspective in the terms outlined above:
- You say “Find your chair”: the child thinks “she said sit down and I don’t want to!”
- The child flops to the ground: the child thinks “I’ll fall to the floor”
- You leave him on the floor because he is too heavy or there are too many other children about. The child thinks “this is great; I don’t have to sit in my chair and do the work”.
Consequences
In the example above the consequence of the behaviour of the child is that he gets to avoid the task of sitting on the chair. When you are thinking about the consequences for behaviour, try to ask yourself “what is the child getting from this behaviour?” ,and not to focus on “what should I do to reprimand the behaviour”. In order to effectively deal with a child’s behaviour you must look at why a child is doing what he is doing. Simply put, if a child wants to avoid a task, (by shouting at you when they see you coming with teaching equipment) and you put that child in time out, you have given the child a reason to shout at you again in the future. You will in fact see an increase in the shouting as the child knows that this behaviour will get them into time out; now you are complicit in helping the child avoid the task!
Consider the following:
- Upwards of 90% of behaviour is attention or escape/ avoidance driven
- 10% is either driven by sensory need (e.g., stamping feet, head banging) or the need to express emotion or reduce stress.
So if you reward avoidance behaviour with legitimate avoiding, e.g., time out, then you will have an increase in avoiding. If you reward attention behaviours with attention, e.g., shouting, whinging, tantrums then you will see an increase in these behaviours.
To make an informed decision on the appropriate consequences for the behaviour you see, you must ask yourself “why is it happening?” For this reason another practical suggestion is that you would write down what happens immediately before and after a behaviour so that you can identify a pattern of attention or avoidance if it should it exist.
Practical example
Antecedent: you take away a favourite toy from a child
Behaviour: screaming and slapping another child
Consequence: You return the toy….
Ask yourself : Are you more likely or less likely to see the behaviour again in the future? In this event you have in fact rewarded the very behaviour that you do not want to see and you will see the behaviour again.
Reinforcement
In order to see behaviours that you want to occur again in the future it is important that you reinforce those behaviours. There are many ways that this can be done. However, with children with special needs, you must remember that you will need repeated examples (sometimes 100’s, sometimes 1000’s) before the child will start to perform the behaviour. This is not something that can be attempted for one day and abandoned with a conclusion that it didn’t work. It is also important to remember that for some children tokens, e.g., stickers, stars etc, mean nothing. If you want to use these as a method of reinforcement, you will have to make them valuable to the child by pairing them up with something valuable to start. This could be a chocolate button or a piece of fruit. Present the token and the chocolate button together and the child will begin to associate the token with something good. With repeated pairing you will be able to fade out the buttons and just give the child the token. Keep the tokens coming regularly. They are free and should be used liberally, initially to get the child to perform the behaviour you want to see.
Other possible methods of reinforcement include:
- Social/Verbal, e.g., praise, singing songs, playing pat a cake
- Tangible, e.g., sweets, popcorn, toys
- Sensory, e.g., hugs, jumping on the trampoline, going to the park
Remember to keep something useful as a reinforcer for the child (that is, something that they will continue to work for) you must not overload them with it. Why give them all of the crisps when one at a time will do? If you deprive a child of something they are more likely to work to get it.
Try to use novelty to your advantage. Go to the two euro shop and spend €10 on a variety of small toys that you can use to your advantage. Then only let the child have access to the toys on completion of a task, or after earning tokens.
Try to give the reinforcement - a token, a toy, a sweet, to the child as quickly as possible after you see the behaviour you want. Don’t wait! You have a 9 second window of opportunity before the child forgets why they are being reinforced.
Punishment
If you have to punish a behaviour there are different time out procedures that can be useful alternatives to the traditional time out.
- You might want to consider time out from positive reinforcement. This is the loss of access to toys, attention, etc. For children with special needs you need not stick to the old rule of thumb (one minute for a 1 year old, 2 minutes for a 2 year old etc). Instead decide on a short amount of time, 10- 50 seconds, and do not allow the child access to the toys or attention for this amount of time.
- You can also consider the withdrawal of a specific reinforcer: e.g., play station, television, etc. This is something that can be useful for older children.
Finally, it is essential that the behaviour you want to see is rewarded or reinforced. This is a far more powerful way to get the child to perform requested behaviours than punishment. You should be looking for a way, through reinforcement, to increase the desired behaviour rather than looking for a way, through punishment, to decrease unwanted behaviour.
Deirdre Muldoon B.Ed, MS, CCC-SLP, G.Dip.SLT, BCaBA is the Clinical Director of Early Language Intervention, Ltd. She has completed two courses in behaviour and has just embarked on her third, leading to a masters in behaviour analysis. Early Language Intervention regularly holds behaviour change and language seminars for parents and professionals seeking help in manistreaming children with language and special needs. For future dates please see the website www.eli-ireland.com, or contact ELI on (01) 202 0489.
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