Ebony Holliday, PhD, assistant director of Community Programs at Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism Services, Science and Innovation (CASSI), talks about how, especially for autistic students, behavior equals communication. Once adults — educators, specialists, parents — understand the reason for a challenging behavior, they can work to establish replacement strategies that will help the child better communicate about or deal with those behaviors.
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Transcript
One of the co-occurring behaviors sometimes that we can find with autistic children and many children overall are behavioral challenges or those difficulties with emotional regulation. So it’s really important and we find it definitely powerful to be able to work with not only the child, but also those adults that might be directly in their environment. So looking at teachers and educators, maybe related service providers, and certainly of course, families, parents and caregivers. And so that might be looking at different types of behavioral strategies. One of the things that we always want to keep in mind is that challenging behaviors are typically always communication. So it’s a form of communication. So the individual, the child, the adolescent is telling us something in their behavior. So whether it is something like disruption, whether it’s aggression, they’re telling us something with that. So one of those first steps that we want to do, especially when we’re training and when we’re coaching, is to really talk about how do we find out what the reason for that is?
What’s the reason for this challenging behavior? If we know that information, we’re then able to better put together an intervention that’s going to help us target what that problem might be. And so it might be something like a child might want to avoid something or getting out of doing a task that might be undesirable. So maybe what we’re going to do is work with the adult. We might work with the parent, or we might work with the teacher and identifying a way for that child to communicate. I might need a break or that child to communicate, can I do this later instead of right now? So again, we want to figure out what is the reason for the behavior. There’s always typically a reason. Once we figure out that reason, we want to make sure that we put in some strategies. So we’re teaching replacement behaviors.
We always want to make sure that we give the child an alternate way to kind of express what they’re feeling. So I don’t want to do this task right now. I can appropriately ask for a break, and then I’m also able to kind of get out of that in another way. So we want to do those appropriate replacement behaviors. We always want to teach that. We want to reinforce that behavior that we solve, so that desired behavior, whether it’s asking for a break, whether it’s maybe asking for attention, we then want to make sure that we’re reinforcing that so we can see that again.