In the early years of behaviour therapy, treatments were most often based on what the behaviour looked like, its form. If a child was tantruming, or hitting his head, or refusing to eat her food, treatments were developed to counter the problem behaviour. At Best Behaviour Consulting, we recommend a different approach.

Rather than just treating the form of the behaviour, we treat the function of the behaviour. The function of a behaviour is the same as knowing the purpose of the behaviour. It is the answer to the question, “Why does he/she do that?” This is very important because the same behaviour can have entirely different functions. Here is one example:

A grade 3 student, Mark, is crying in math class. The teacher sends Mark into the hallway as a consequence. If we just treat the form of Mark’s behaviour (e.g., crying with tears, making noise, etc.) we could very well make the problem behaviour worse!

We need to know why Mark is crying. Here are three common functions to crying in math class:

• Mark is crying because the math task is too hard and he wants to stop doing it (escape from a task).
• Mark is crying because the teacher is helping someone else and he wants the teacher to spend more time with him (attention from person).
• Mark is crying because Janet, another student finished her math assignment quickly and she is now playing with the classroom bunny. Mark wants to play with the bunny (wants a tangible).

Let’s look at each of these different functions to see how being sent out into the hallway might effect Mark’s crying.

• In the first example, Mark is crying because he wants to get out of doing the math assignment. By being sent out into the hallway, Mark gets to stop doing the math assignment which will very likely be pleasing (reinforcing) to him. Mark might stop crying, but the teacher might interpret sending Mark out into the hallway as an effective strategy because his crying stopped. This type of consequence will likely make Mark cry more often in the future because he is being given what we wants—escape out of math and as such the teacher is actually reinforcing Mark.
• In the second example, Mark is crying because he wants the teacher’s attention. By being sent out into the hallway, he likely won’t get the teachers attention. We might expect his crying to decrease in frequency over time if the teacher is consistent. However, merely sending Mark into the hallway doesn’t teach him a better way to communicate and without such teaching, Mark may not try another, more appropriate behaviour. The teacher could, for instance, teach Mark to raise his hand for help. This would likely be easier for Mark than using up way more energy crying and he wouldn’t have to loose out on valuable school time.
• In the third example, Mark is crying because he wants something. Again, removing Mark from the classroom might make the immediate situation easier for the teacher, but it doesn’t teach Mark a better way to communicate. It’s possible that Mark doesn’t know that he can have access to the bunny. It’s possible that if Mark was told (or even better, shown a picture of the bunny) before the math assignment began, he would be sufficiently motivated to work through the task so as to play with the bunny.

As you can see, in at least 2 of the above situations, removing Mark from the classroom wouldn’t help him and in at least one of the examples, sending Mark into the hallway would likely make his crying worse. The key is finding the function of problem behaviours.

Once we know why a child does a problem behaviour we can teach more socially appropriate ways for the child to achieve the same end and almost always without any need for punishment.

As part of our involvement with families, we teach you how to do functional assessments so that if and when new problem behaviours develop, you will have the skills to collect data, uncover the function of the behaviour and develop behaviour plans to teach alternative behaviours.