Parents are naturally the most important advocates for their children, and their attitudes towards their child’s needs permeate the attitudes of all who are working with the child. With this in mind, it is essential that, as a parent, you understand positive behavior supports.
Positive behavior support is a set of strategies designed to change the environment in order to produce positive behaviors in the child(ren) supported in that environment.
Many meetings and interactions with teachers begin with a discussion of the child’s problems. With the idea of positive behavior supports, problems with a child should not be discussed. Since B.F. Skinner’s pivotal book The Behavior of Organisms (1938) it has become clear in study after study that behavior is a response to environment. The next time you are discussing your child with teachers or therapists, you should discuss what your child needs and the ways the environment can be changed to address those needs.
A student’s strengths should also be discussed at length. Especially with children with autism, it is very important that strengths be emphasized to help the child develop skills and interests that will hopefully one day turn into a career path. This is exactly what we do as a society for typically developing children, and it should be no different for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
The foundation for understanding any child’s behavior is as simple as A-B-C: antecedent, behavior, consequence. The antecedent is what happens directly before a behavior takes place. The behavior is how the child responds or acts in a situation. The consequence is what happens has a result of the behavior. A consequence can be good or bad.
Here are a few examples of ABC from real life:
Your child sees candy at the grocery story. She asks for it and you say no. She begins to cry. After a couple of minutes of tantruming, you put some candy in the cart.
In this example, the antecedent is you saying no to your child’s request for candy. The behavior is a tantrum. The consequence is that she received the candy. For this situation, the consequence was pretty good for the child, but also reinforced the idea that when she tantrums, she gets what she wants. This is an example of positive reinforcement, which is the presentation of a stimulus that is reinforcing (i.e. the presentation of the candy.)
You are preparing to leave the house and have told your child to put his coat on. He does not respond or move from watching television. You see the clock and realize you are late, you grab his coat, drag him out the door, and put his coat on for him in the elevator.
In this example, the antecedent is the request to the child to put his coat on. The behavior is refusal to respond or comply. The consequence is a removal of the request. Again, in this situation, the consequence was actually good for the child because it reinforced the idea that when he does not respond, a request is removed. This is an example of negative reinforcement, which is the termination of a stimulus that is reinforcing (i.e. the termination of the request to put on the coat.)
Understanding ABC will help you work with teachers and therapists to create plans for changing the environment in ways that will change a child’s behavior.
For example, you can change the environment in a couple of ways to effect the behavior of the child who sees the candy in the grocery story. As the parent, you can change the environment by not putting the candy in the cart after the child has started to tantrum.
Recently I was in a grocery store that had changed the environment by having two “Candy-free” checkout lanes. The store had changed the environment by offering parents a choice that reduced the chances of such a situation ever occurring.
You could also change the environmental factors before even entering the grocery story. You might create a specific shopping list that you put your child in charge of, explaining that you are only purchasing items on the list. As you put items in the cart, the child can cross them off. When they ask for the candy, you can direct them to the list to see if the item is present.
These are both fairly brief examples of ABC, but it is a method you can use to help you understand any behavior that your child presents. And by understanding behaviors, you can start to use positive behavior support at home, as well as with school and therapy sessions.
The OSEP Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a fantastic organization that works to provide information and assistance to people and organizations who are working to implement positive behavioral support. Their website (www.pbis.org) contains videos, resources, research data, and other forms of guidance for positive behavior support.
The National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research NIDRR) has a Positive Behavior Support Glossary at http://rrtcpbs.fmhi.usf.edu/rrtcpbsweb/glossary.htm#P. It simply defines any terms that you may come across as you begin to gain an understanding of positive behavior support.
There’s an old adage that you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself. With the help of these resources and the more widespread use of positive behavior support, I think we can change that adage to: you can only hope to change the behavior of other people, by changing yourself and the environment.
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