All Behavior is Communication!
I want to tell you the story of where I was before I discovered my love for working with kids who have challenging behavior. I am a former preschool teacher of seven years. I started working with kids who have autism in a preschool for a couple of years. Then I worked at a home center, a university center, another university center, and a hospital center. So I was all over the place in my preschool teaching resume, if you will. And I loved it.
I really, really loved it. I played the guitar, we did musicals. It was so much fun. I wanted to do one in my own home and then the plan kind of changed because I got involved in this challenging behavior stuff and it took me a different direction. But this one year I had a really hard class and I cried and I do not cry in front of people, which is not necessarily healthy and I'll talk about that in another episode. But the point is I don't cry at work and I was crying at work. It just was not a normal amount of hard. It was extremely hard.
I had been doing preschool teaching with very difficult kids for several years with far less experience. But now at this moment as a preschool teacher in this classroom, I was hitting rock bottom and I started to get threats from parents that I loved and I was getting zero support from my boss and I was getting comments like, if this kid does it again and doesn't get kicked out, we're going to sue.
My expectation was to "control" this kid while I'm getting threats from other parents, zero support from my boss and I didn't really have a lot of training in challenging behavior at this point.
I am going to tell you what was happening. He was stabbing people with pencils. He was not engaging in small groups or large groups. He did not have any relationship with any of the other children. He wanted to be around an adult all the time, but if an adult wasn't paying attention to him, he was hurting somebody else. He wasn't randomly pushing people online. He couldn't control his body. He was a genius. He was an engineer. He had the most beautiful mind and he was so sweet.
But in the times where he wasn't being sweet, it was very serious. If you're a parent and you get a call from your kids' preschool teacher, so your three-year-old or your four-year-old and say,
"Oh, Hey Donna your child's got stabbed with a pencil today, but Oh, they're fine. They just cried for an hour, but they're fine."
"Hey, do you remember that kid that threw a rock at your kid? Well, the kid actually took a rope this time and put it in around your child's neck and started pulling. Your kid's fine. We intervened before anything happened, but we want you to let you know that your child is safe and we've got this under control."
No!!! No, you can't just say that to parents! It was out of control. We tried to get a shadow in there to watch him every second and it just, it wasn't working.
These behaviors-- they were like psychopath behaviors. I was talking with a parent who was his child. Her child was actually a victim of a lot of these attacks. And I was like, this is the behavior that happened today. We did this to prevent it. It still happened. I don't know what we're doing.
That parent was like looking up on her computer. She's like, this is psychopath behavior. This is serious. We need to get this checked out. I'm was stressed, like I was talking to parents on the phone at night, like, I don't know what to do. How can I make you feel better? We'll get these kids separated. But then if I separate these kids, he's just going to do it to somebody else.
Okay. I'm going to give you some facts, cause at this point you're probably like, okay, if this kid's doing this to other kids in the classroom, he needs to go, right?
The Facts
Expulsion rates in preschool settings are higher than K through 12 expulsion rates by 300 to 400%. Also in a sample of 5,000 suspended preschoolers, 50% of that sample, so 2,500 of that sample were suspended a second time. Children who have challenging behavior and are given up in preschool, it leads to serious, serious negative implications in their life.
Giving up on this kid was not an option for me. Challenging behavior increases negative interactions within the family, at least the parents’ stress. Parents who seek support for challenging behavior often go through multiple sources multiple times and parents sometimes wait an average of 16 months before they get the help that they need to support their children. I'm not going to go into the background of this child's situation, but his home situation, he had amazing parents, amazing parents, but due to a medical emergency with one of his family members, his home situation was rocky.
His school was rocky. There were so many unknowns in this little boy's life that giving up on him was not an option. So what the heck was I going to do about it?
Kids in this situation are given up on all the time and these same kids are likely to have social and emotional disorders drop out of high school, get into drugs. I just couldn't leave him behind, but I also couldn't afford to let anything else happen. He was isolated from his peers, stuck with his own personal observer. I was drowning. He was drowning, everyone's parents were drowning.
My Breaking Point
There had to be a way to understand and support this challenging behavior and this, this is where my story changed. I was at my breaking point and one night I went home and I sent an email, which I'm going to paraphrase some of it to you right now to my boss, my boss's boss.
So I was not getting support from my direct boss, so I sent an email to the head honcho of my situation.
"This boy took a string from the art center and tied up a girl from behind around the neck. His body moves from one place to the next. Within seconds he seems like he's going to play along. Then he does something to present the shock, shock factor. Another teacher was there to stop the disaster before it left a mark or worse, but in the last few weeks, this girl has been brutally injured by this child. Several times. The mother has already expressed concern. We've added a shadow in part to address her concern, which never happened and now this happened and I just got an email that she wants to meet tomorrow. I look completely incompetent and I'm stressed because I can't do it. All parents are upset more than three and I've asked for help and none has come."
"I'm not looking forward to another meeting of excuses and empty promises with my boss and I'm not ready to be embarrassed in front of the family that I respect so much."
Okay, so this is where I was at — in the worst headspace of my life. I'm so stressed. Obviously I've gotten to that point. I drilled that into your head, right?
My boss's boss came downstairs and she changed my life. She brought a piece of paper and it says, this is the function of behavior.
So I'm like, what the heck is function of behavior?
Understanding Behavior
So the function of the behavior is the reason why they're behaving the way they are. So instead of seeing behavior and being like, oh, this behavior where he's stabbing pencils, choking kids out, this has gotta be psychopathic behavior cause it looks like this. So, it's gotta be this.
No. Instead you look at what happens before the behavior happens. You look at what happens after the behavior happens.
BEFORE: He wasn't getting attention. He didn't know how to play.
BEHAVIOR: So he'd go up and he'd stab the kid with pencil and
AFTER: Then all of a sudden he'd get all the attention in the world. He'd have kids interacting with him. He'd have teachers interacting with him.
Sometimes he'd just want to break in a different room and so he would stab someone because he knew that we would take him out to a different room. His behavior was not psychopathic behavior. His behavior was communicating his needs and his desires.
Understanding that all behavior is communication changed my entire life.
It did. It changed my entire life.
All behavior is communication, so it's our job to figure out what our kids are communicating.
Example 1
FUNCTION: One of the functions of his behavior was he did not know how to appropriately enter play. And so instead of writing it off, because it looks like psychopath behavior as psychopath behavior and giving up on him, we looked at it differently. We said, okay, his behavior is showing us that he does not have the skills that he needs to appropriately enter play. So instead of punishing him or bringing him out of the classroom, we need to proactively teach him the skills that he needs in order to appropriately enter play. And we cannot teach that at the escalation point.
PREVENTION & TEACH NEW SKILLS: I put five minutes into my day for me to play blocks with him and then I helped support him learn how to enter play. So I say, Hey, but here are some ways you can enter play. You can ask him to play. You can say, do you wanna play with me? Let's try one. And then he would try one, we'd role play it, and then he would try it with a friend that's teaching proactively because he struggled so much with this scale. We did it three times every morning, three times every afternoon.
We made sure that we did it every single day, three times in proactive moments and pretty soon he had friends and it was the same friends that he was beating up before. Oh my gosh. It was insane. And then I think the biggest thing is he realized that we weren't giving upon him. We stopped taking him out and isolating him.
RESPONSE: We started to just help him at that moment, calm down, and then learn the skills that he needed to interact appropriately and his behavior was night and day different.
Example 2
FUNCTION: Another thing that was hard for him is every time we were in a transition, he was a lot more aggressive.
So when we looked at this behavior, we didn't just say, okay, he needs new skills to know how to transition. No, we looked at it and said, okay, transitions are hard for him. What can we do to prevent some of these challenges that happen? And some of them were super, super, super simple. Life-changing, seriously. Life-changing.
STRATEGIES FOR PREVENTION: The life-changing strategies are right here. So for him, he was overwhelmed by too much chaos. So what we did was we would tell him when it was time to clean up and we'd have him lined up first because if he's somehow in the scroll of the back of the line, it was a problem. The second thing we did was we gave, we made him a picture schedule every morning, so he had a little paper and I wrote out, it was like a map for him.
He called it a map and I wrote out a little picture, just like a stick figure picture of, okay, first we're going to go to lunch, then we're going to go play outside. Then we're going to do this. And he folded it up and he put in his pocket and every time he was done with one thing, he'd pull it back out and see what was happening next because he knew what to expect, what was coming up. He did so much better with transitions. So that was just one of the patterns that we picked up that we were able to help him with. Not by teaching them a new skill, but by giving him some prevention. Just a little bit of prevention. It goes a long way. For the ones that didn't need new skills, like entering play, we did it proactively. What does proactively mean?
Proactively means doing something ahead of time before the behavior happens, before any challenges arise. It means teaching in positive, neutral, like moments where they're ready to be engaged already.
Learn more about finding the function of behavior and teaching new skills in my XO Parenting Academy!
So he started to be friends with other kids. He was enjoyed. I'm not kidding you when I say he was probably three of my teachers- including myself, favorite student. When you're getting threatened to be sued because of a certain student, that student is usually not your favorite. Right. This kid was our absolute favorite and he was our favorite all along because we didn't judge him.
We tried to help him and it was so difficult, but we loved him the entire time and we wanted to help him. And that's some of the benefits I guess in talking to YOU parents right now is we already love our kids. We don't need to be taught how to love our kids. We're already there. And so the fact that you're here, that you're listening, that you want to try to pair it with love and learn strategies to help your kids, it's going to go so much further when you can realize they're not a demon child, they're not a bad egg. They are human beings with feelings, with challenges, with supports that they need. And our job is not to let control them or to make sure that they're like super perfect angels know our job is to help nurture them, help them develop the skills that they need to be raised in this emotionally distraught world with these healthy habits.
So this child ended up moving away and I still stay in touch with his family. A couple of months after I was done teaching, I was ready to have my baby. I was on maternity leave. I went to ice cream with him. He is a genius. He's amazing. He builds the most intricate things. I've sent him packages in the mail. I love this kid. He is so amazing and I just, I'm telling you this because there's hope. If your child is having such a hard time maybe at home, maybe in social settings, maybe just like with certain parents or grandparents or babysitters. There is hope. There's absolutely hope. We went from thinking this kid had psychopath behaviors to seeing him thrive in a preschool setting within a month of just changing our mindset. So if you are struggling with your child's challenging behavior, whether at home or at school, then here's my challenge for you today.
Look at behavior differently. Do not look at your child as a bad kid. Do not think that what they're doing is personal to you. It is not a personal attack. They are having a hard time. They're not giving you a hard time.
They are having a hard time and we need to help them learn the skills that they need to communicate their needs appropriately. But we cannot do that until we understand that all behavior is communication.
All of it, every single behavior is communication! Throw a behavior at me and I will let you know if it's not because I guarantee you a hundred percent every single behavior is communicating something. Okay?
MAIN TAKEAWAYS:
So the first thing that we learned here is all behavior is communication. We have to figure out what they're communicating by looking at the patterns, what happens before, what happens after, what's reinforcing them to do that behavior on accident, or on purpose.
Second, we have to teach the skills that they need proactively. So we can't wait until he chokes somebody with a rope or stabs someone with a pencil to try to teach them how to enter play. At that point, he's too far gone. He's in an emotionally reactive state.
And the third thing is that none of this is the child's fault. None of it. Not one time in this whole episode has I said, "This kid is so bad, we need him out of here. Like I can't control him. He needs to be gone". No, I kept trying to figure out what I needed to do to support him. It's not the child's fault. They aren't giving you a hard time. Children are having a hard time.
Challenge:
Okay, I have a challenge. If we want these bite-size parenting strategies to make an impact on her life, then we didn't implement that, right?
xo,
Lauren Pace
