The Conditions Surrounding Your Child’s Behavior
Your child is back to engaging in behaviors that you thought have finally stopped. Your child is screaming, falling to the floor in the supermarket, and even throwing items. If these are some of the experiences you found yourself encountering, it is important we evaluate the circumstances that led to the behavior occurring. There are four contingencies that we need to take into account when determining why a behavior is occurring they are setting events, antecedents, behavior, and consequences. We will discuss this today.
When evaluating why your child is engaging in a behavior it is important to see if there were any circumstances out of the ordinary that happened prior to the event (the behavior). Ask yourself a few questions, did your child get enough sleep? Were there any changes to the regular routine? Is your child hungry? These questions will help us to decide if there was an event that may increased the likelihood of your child engaging in the behavior that is in question. In applied behavior analysis we call these “Setting events.”
Setting events are physical, social, or psychological events that may increase the likelihood of a problem behavior occurring. Setting events typically occur minutes or hours before the problem behavior happens. In some cases, they can even occur weeks before. For instance, parents deciding to get a divorce, and a week later your child crying about the divorce. Setting events allow us to rule out any conditions that are out of the ordinary that impact your child.
Determining why your child’s problem behavior is occurring also requires us to look at what happened immediately before the behavior occurred. So, if you report that your child began screaming, we ask you to look at the right before. Did you say something? Was your child denied access to a preferred item? Was your child ignored? What exactly happened before your child began screaming? When looking at this, we are considering antecedents. Antecedents are whatever occurred immediately before the problem behavior. Identifying what happened before allows us to determine what strategies we can implement to prevent your child from engaging in the problem behavior.
So, your child is screaming. This is the behavior we need to change. What can we teach your child to do rather than screaming? Should we have your child practice waiting? Should we have your child request access to what he or she wants? Should we have your child learn to accept “No?” The behavior that your child is engaged in that is a problem is something we need to replace, so that it is socially acceptable. The behavior is a form of communication that needs to be adjusted to fit societal norms.
When your child engages in screaming behavior, what do you do immediately following the behavior? Your response or lack thereof is a consequence for the problem behavior that is occurring. What you do or don’t do will affect the future likelihood of the behavior occurring. It is important to understand why the behavior is happening in order to determine the appropriate consequence to deliver.
We will talk about the functions of your child’s behavior in our “Lets Take A SEAT blog. This will provide you with tips on how to successfully prevent a behavior, how to respond based on the function of the behavior, and new skills to teach to replace a behavior. In the meantime, begin to think about the conditions that surround your child’s behavior, and what you can do to change the conditions to successfully impact your child.
I look forward to discussing more about behaviors with you soon!
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