This chart is depicting the “meltdown cycle” — or, in other words, how youth misbehavior can escalate over time when placed under stress, and if adults aren’t successful in helping youth cool down and return to their baseline behavior, youth can eventually get agitated, aggressive, or even violent.

When talking about youth behavior, this is the standard model and chart that youth workers are all taught. We need to de-escalate kids and help them return to baseline, or else things may get violent and dangerous. And while this is true in some situations and circumstances, we believe it’s way too narrow of an approach to youth behavior.

Because when it comes to youth behavior, we’re not just talking about aggression and violence. Those situations get the most focus and attention, because youth safety is so important, but this same meltdown cycle can be applied to other emotions and reactions too! For example:

• Sadness: If youth are left feeling sad over long periods of time, this behavior can escalate into depression or even suicidal ideation.

• Fear: Feelings of fear can escalate into panic attacks, chronic anxiety, and phobias.

• Frustration: This can escalate into aggression, but it can also lead to tears, social self-isolation, and a loss of self-worth and efficacy.

• Anxious: If youth are worried about something, their anxiety can manifest itself as attention-seeking behavior or potentially panic attacks.

So when we talk about behavior, we have to get away from the mindset of thinking of it as simply related to controlling aggression or anger. There are many emotions, and by focusing too closely on anger and aggression, we can miss so many other youth that need our help and support.

Simply put, youth display behavior all the time (as do we all!). Behavior is how we respond to the situations we are placed in and the emotions we feel. So when we talk about supporting positive behavior in youth, we want to support and encourage youth to have healthy coping tools and support systems to allow them to handle a wide range of stressful life situations without escalating.

Behavior is Communication

Another way to think about behavior is to realize that all behavior is communication. Whether a child is being a class clown, bullying others, or crying and withdrawing themselves, the key thing to remember is that in all these situations, these youth are trying to communicate something to others.

Behavior in youth, particularly youth with disabilities, is often caused by a few key things:

• The inability to communicate needs properly

• A desire for attention

• The need to remove themselves from a situation that they do not think they can handle

If youth don’t have the words for what they’re feeling or going through–or the experience to understand what it is they’re feeling and going through–they aren’t going to be able to express themselves in words and seek out help from the adults in their life. Instead, they communicate their needs through behavior. They act out. Take it out on others. Withdraw themselves. The best way they know how to communicate their feelings is through their actions, so that’s what they do.

Again, behavior is communication. This is an incredibly important concept and is foundational to everything else we are going to cover in this course. Because once we understand this idea, it naturally leads us to an important realization: if we want to support positive behavior and reduce negative behavior, we have to first understand what it is that young person is trying to communicate.

We, as youth workers, have to learn to become behavior detectives. To seek out the root causes of behavior. And realize that just because someone acts up doesn’t make them a bad kid or troublemaker. Instead, it just means they have a lot lurking underneath the surface –- feelings and/or needs –- that we need to uncover and help them meet.

To most of you reading this, this likely sounds like common sense. Of course we have to find the root cause of the behavior. Of course we can’t ascribe bad intent to a young person just because they’re acting up. But in practice, it can be tough to do! It’s difficult to always catch our own mental biases, and it’s far too easy to assume you understand someone’s behavior without actually fully comprehending where they’re coming from. We need to be careful of our own biases, and make sure we’re always questioning if there’s anything we’re missing.

Example: Rough morning at camp

One summer, one of our staff members (let’s call them Mark) was volunteering at a summer camp for kids with serious illnesses or disabilities. Towards the end of the week, they noticed that one of their campers was having a really tough morning. That camper was normally very upbeat and engaged, but at breakfast, he was sullen, kept to himself, and didn’t want to eat. This was such a departure from his baseline, Mark had to go investigate some.

When he sat down with the camper and asked what was going on, the first thing Mark heard from the camper was, “I hate this Camp.” This wasn’t very helpful and was rather vague, so Mark kept digging.

Next he heard: “Well, I really hate Ian [another camper in their cabin]. He’s so annoying.”

More digging: “I hate Ian because he’s always getting in my face and way when I don’t want him to.”

And then: “Well, his wheelchair is so big, it gets in the way so much and I hate it.”

And finally: “His wheelchair is the worst. It’s so big and heavy and bulky, while my wheelchair is light, small, and easy to use. But my wheelchair is also older than his, so when Ian runs into me with his wheelchair, I worry that he’s going to hurt or break my chair!”

It took a long time to get there, but after lots of questions and paraphrasing, Mark was able to uncover what was going on: this camper was worried about his wheelchair being damaged (in fact, he was specifically worried it might have been damaged that morning), so he reacted by withdrawing himself and taking out his anxiety on the camp and the fellow camper in his cabin.

If you don’t uncover the reason behind the behavior — the feels or needs not being met — you’ll never be able to help kids with their behavior. If Mark had seen that camper looking sad and withdrawing himself, he could have simply tried cracking extra jokes, engaging him in games, or otherwise trying to cheer him up. But none of it would have worked, because Mark wouldn’t have been addressing the root cause of the behavior. Instead, he first had to be that behavior detective before he could help make things better.

Again, this sounds so easy and obvious to do when reading about it, but it can be much more difficult to do in practice every time. Practice helps, as does constantly checking yourself and your assumptions.

(In case you’re curious, after some brief wheelchair diagnostics, cleaning the seat of the camper’s wheelchair, and making a plan so that Ian wouldn’t bump into the camper as often, everything turned out fine!)

If they could, they would

So if we accept that behavior is communication and that we have to understand the root causes of behavior, that leaves us with a few final takeaways that should inform our intervention approaches:

1. All behavior is goal directed.
When they act out, youth are trying to accomplish something. They are trying to communicate, and trying to express that they need help processing an emotion or coping with a situation. There are feelings and needs of theirs that aren’t being addressed.

2. If they could, they would.
Every youth has some capacity to make positive behavioral choices in their lives — when provided with the proper support. They are not causing a problem just to cause a problem, or because they enjoy being a pest! Their behavior is an indication that they don’t have enough coping skills to handle their current emotions or situation, or they have a poor game plan and need to learn a better way to cope. It’s the job of the adults in their lives to help teach them how to do better.

3. Young people learn by pissing us off.
Youth are growing and learning, constantly. They have fewer coping skills than adults do, and have dealt with fewer life situations than adults. They are naturally going to need support to learn how to best handle new feelings and needs, and it’s important that they learn and grow in this way. So when you look at it that way, it’s their job to piss off the adults in their lives by displaying annoying, distressing, tiresome, pick-your-adjective behaviors. If they don’t act out, they aren’t going to learn!

Taken all together, these points reinforce that central tenant: if they could, they would. Youth need to learn and grow, and they learn by pushing against boundaries and testing the adults in their lives. We need to stop viewing behavior as something wrong that needs to be fixed and stopped as soon as possible, and instead as an opportunity for learning and growth.

Assess, Assist, Teach

Now that we have an understanding of what behavior is, how exactly can we go about addressing it? What’s the best approach to addressing challenging behavior and encourage positive behavior?

Regardless of if you’re working with youth with or without disabilities, there’s a simple framework for handling behavior: Assess, Assist, Teach.

Assess the youth’s behavior and investigate the root cause.

Assist the youth in getting back to their baseline behavior.

Teach the youth new skills that will allow them to better handle the emotion the next time they encounter it.

Let’s go through this step-by-step, starting with the first part: Assess.



Asses: Behavior detective

If you’re not a fully trained youth development expert, it may feel a bit intimidating to “assess” a child. It can conjure up images of multi-page, clinical assessment reports, listing out in great detail all the ways that a child is meeting their appropriate developmental milestones or not. But thankfully, you don’t have to worry about that for handling behavior!

The truth is: we are always assessing one another. Human beings are social, curious, and observant creatures. We are hard-coded to always be picking up information from those around us and drawing unconscious inferences and assumptions about others. We can’t help but assess one another! The first time you meet someone, within seconds, you’re already assessing them based on their appearance, their smile, the way they respond to you, and drawing assumptions based on your assessment. We simply can’t help it.

When working with youth, the trick is to train yourself to make thoughtful, deeper assessments than the ones we naturally make when meeting others. We need to find opportunities to self-reflect and to pull our subconscious/unconscious assessments into our conscious minds, so we can evaluate them and find the gaps or holes in them.

One way you can do this is to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is this individual child’s baseline behavior? Is this typical behavior for this young person?

• Is this developmentally normal for the young person’s age?

• Is this behavior possibly related to or influenced by a disability?

• Is this a pain-based behavior related to past trauma?

• Is this behavior impacted by other aspects of that child’s identity and background? (Race, religion, culture, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.)

• What feeling is the child expressing?

• What of their needs aren’t being met?

We like to call this being a behavior detective. Youth are carrying a lot of baggage around with them — past experiences, current identities, recent experiences, and so much more — and it’s not always very well organized. We have to sift through it all to try and find the relevant pieces that are contributing to the behavior they’re displaying.

When you pause and ask yourself these questions, you may be surprised by how much your mind has already been answering them in the background! And the more we practice our assessment skills by answering these questions, the better we’ll get at seeing the real roots of the behaviors.

Supplemental Resource: Assessing Behavior Handout

Common triggers

Triggers have unfortunately become something of a political talking point in recent years, but the truth is that triggers are real and important to pay attention to. When talking about youth behavior, triggers are the events, emotions, or experiences that cause a child to start escalating up the meltdown cycle.

When assessing a child’s behavior, you should always start by trying to decide if the behavior you’re seeing is a deviation from that child’s particular baseline. If it is, then you can start asking other questions to try and pinpoint exactly what it was that triggered the youth to deviate from their baseline.

While triggers can vary widely by individual, these are a handful of common triggers that you’ll see come up again and again:

Unpredictability and transitions.
Structure is profoundly important for healthy child development and for young people to feel comfortable. This is especially true for many youth with disabilities and youth who have experienced trauma. It is also a key feature for young people on the autism spectrum. Once the child expects things to be a certain way, or occur in a specific way, sudden changes can set extremely disruptive and frightening. Their sense of safety and security is dependent on predictability. When the world matches what they expect, they are usually fine. When snags occur, their worlds can fall apart.

Loss of power or control.
With structure and predictability comes a sense of control. In young people with certain types of disabilities, fear of uncertainty and the need for predictability can create a rigid need to control everything they do and everything that occurs around them. We all like to feel in control, and it can be unsettling to be in an environment where our choices and freedom are limited or removed. Children are placed in situations like this far more often than adults, and it can be a triggering experience for many. When forced to follow the lead of someone else, they may panic.

Feelings of vulnerability or rejection.
The number and intensity of demands can overwhelm a child and create panic. Too many demands, or ones that are too challenging can trigger anxiety. In this situation, ongoing prompts and instructions which might otherwise be helpful, or thought by the adult to be supportive, can actually create more pressure. If a child feels pressed or vulnerable, they can become triggers instead of supports and you risk a meltdown. We need to let the children pace themselves, and give frequent periods of rest to rebound.

Confrontation, authority, and limit setting.
This is a pretty simple one that anyone who remembers being a kid can understand: all kids have trouble hearing the word, “No,” on occasion. For some kids, this can be a big trigger and can cause them to escalate rapidly.

Sensory overload.
Sensory stimulation (auditory, visual, tactile, intrusions into personal space) that occurs too frequently or too intensely can trigger a “flight or fight” response and panic. Developmentally, children tend to be more affected by and reactive to sensory “noise” in the environment. They haven’t developed the capacity to modulate or regulate inputs and can become overwhelmed. For children and youth with certain types of disabilities, this vulnerability to sensory overload can persist into adulthood as well.

Video: Understanding challenging behavior in children

In this video from The Center for Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University, they examine and expand upon many of the principles we just covered: behavior being communication, and the importance of assessing the root causes of behavior.

While the video focuses largely on working with small children, these principles remain the same no matter the age range of the youth with whom you’re working.

Assist

Once you’ve assessed where a youth is at and have an understanding of what might be causing their behavior, at this point, you can start helping the youth try and cope better. You can do this in three key ways: managing the environment, managing their emotions, and managing your emotions.

You should always start by managing the environment. If the environment isn’t conducive to the youth de-escalating or to having a conversation together, you’re not going to be able to make any headway with any other strategies. So before you begin, you should look around and make sure that the environment you’ve established has these five key elements:

1. Structure
Youth succeed best with clear direction and routines, and this becomes even more important with youth with certain disabilities (e.g. autism, ADHD, and anxiety). Be clear about your plans, and give warnings before transitioning between activities. Displaying a visual schedule for the sequence of activities and having a calendar for contact can help provide security and reduce anxiety. Environments that lack structure will lead more youth to becoming escalated more often.

2. Safety
If youth don’t feel safe in an environment, they are going to be in a constant state of stress and pressure. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, all people need to have their basic physiological and safety needs met before they’re able to focus attention on any higher-level concerns. With youth, if their safety needs aren’t met, they’re going to have a difficult time attending to anything else going on around them, and they are going to be much more stressed and susceptible to escalating from otherwise mild triggers.

3. No triggers
Youth with disabilities generally have specific “triggers” (words, images, sounds, etc.) that disrupt their feelings of safety and security. These are specific to each child and often come from past experiences. If adults overlook these triggers, youth may escalate their behavior to a point where they completely lose control. By knowing what triggers anxiety, anger, or another negative reaction in your youth, you can try to reduce some triggers and plan ahead to handle a situation if triggered.

4. Voice and choice
Young people need to be provided with opportunities for freedom and self-expression. While structure is good, if you create an environment where young people have no control or input on what they’re doing, that lack of control could be triggering to many youth. Give them choices and opportunities to express their input.

5. Strengths-based mindset
To bring out the best in all youth, we should always be approaching them from the perspective of strengths and abilities rather than weaknesses and deficits. It’s easy to fall in the trap of focusing too much on things our youth can’t do — as that’s what we’re there for, to help them learn skills and grow! — but nobody responds well to feeling like all that anyone sees in them are deficits. We should instead create an environment that celebrates youths’ accomplishments and abilities, and seek out ways to grow and deepen those strengths.

Managing emotions

There are many tips and tricks you can use to help support youth with managing their emotions. Here are some of our favorites:

Use positive reinforcement liberally.
Positive reinforcement occurs after a behavior (sometimes referred to as reward and/or incentive) and is anything that serves to increase the behavior that just occurred. Immediacy is important. Positive reinforcement will be different for everyone and it’s important to keep in mind what is motivating for the specific young person with whom you’re working.

Giving attention to good behavior is the first and most important step in avoiding challenging behavior in youth. Positive feedback can remove the need to act out. We often skip over numerous positive behaviors and moments of success that could be rewarded, recognized, and appreciated simply because these behaviors are expected. Instead we dwell on negative behavior. This focus can unintentionally reinforce bad behavior, since we are giving youth what they want – attention – but for the wrong reasons.

Ignore unwanted behavior.
Again, do not reinforce behavior that is unwanted. Giving youth attention for negative behavior, tends to reinforce the behavior instead of discouraging it. So if a child is engaging in attention-seeking behavior, don’t reward them with a response.

Avoid power struggles at all cost.
Once you enter a power struggle with a child, you’ve already lost. We should be working alongside youth to help them with their issues, not butting heads with them.

Pick your battles.
Along those lines, sometimes it’s just not worthwhile to engage in a topic where there’s going to be a conflict. By letting some issues go, you can avoid power struggles and improve your relationship with the young person.

Address behavior issues promptly and directly.
Youth will forget if you don’t address behavior in the moment. Sometimes this is referred to as “recency.” Even if you don’t know exactly what to say or do, address the behavior immediately. If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t worry! It’s more than likely the youth will repeat the behavior and you’ll get a second chance.

Provide explanations.
Explaining why we need to do or not do certain things accomplishes at least two important things: it sets a limit, while also communicating to the person that we respect them enough to take the time to help them to understand why that limit is necessary. It is actually empowering (although it may not seem so to the young person). Just saying “No” also sets a limit, but it is demeaning and disempowering. For these reasons, it can lead to defiance and power struggles.

Provide choices and use redirection.
Sometimes, youth may get mentally stuck on something that you have to say no to. Instead of just saying “No”, respect their efficacy and give them additional choices. “We can’t do this, but we can do this or this instead.” You do divert the attention and energy of a young person from something that is agitating them/triggering them (potentially beginning a crisis scenario) toward something that empowers them.

Interest boosting.
Make sure youth know that you recognize their interests and preferences, and use this knowledge to structure lessons around a topic of interest. Interest boosting can also help prevent or stop acting out behavior.

Prompting and hurdle help
Prompting and hurdle help are subtle supports that involve proximity to the youth—sticking close and offering help as the child attempts to overcome a specific challenge or challenges. You want to help the young person be successful and independent.

Active listening
Active listening can be many things:

-silence

-nods and eye contact

-a calm tone of voice

-encouraging responses

-open-ended questions

-reflective responses

-summarizing what the youth has said

Paradoxically, it is NOT trying to solve the problem right then and there. That’s “problem solving;” there will be time to get to that. This is about making sure the young person feels “heard” that her/his perception of the problem is valid from her/his point of view, even if it’s not correct, and to communicate that you are present for them in the moment. It is NOT about critiquing, judging or dismissing what they are saying.

Once the youth feels heard, we can go on to offering alternative perspectives, strategizing about what to do, and problem solving. But in this moment, the most important thing you can do is make the youth feel heard and listened to.

Ask questions
Open-ended questions are useful ways to collect information by exploring feelings, attitudes, and views. They are extremely helpful when dealing with young people, who often answer questions with as few words as possible or who are accustomed to not having their views and opinions taken seriously.

Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is a good way to make sure you heard correctly what someone was saying, and lets the other person know that you hear, understand, and care about their thoughts and feelings. This communication skill is particularly helpful with youth, since youth culture/language is constantly changing.

Directive statements
Directive statements are used to instruct a youth when there is immediate need or safety risk. When done correctly, it sets clear boundaries and expectations and informs them what is and isn’t acceptable. In order for it to be done properly, however, these statements need to be delivered calmly and respectfully.

Supplemental Resource: Tips for Supporting Positive Behavior

Managing yourself

One of the most important but challenging aspects of handling youth behavior is managing yourself. If you’re not in a good frame of mind or are too emotional yourself, you can torpedo any chance you have of connecting with a child and helping them with their behavior.

The video below is focused on how to handle yourself when interacting with someone with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder (FASD) who is angry and escalated. The tips he shares are useful regardless of the child you’re working with, though, disability or not. After the video, we’ll break down some of those tips in even more details:

Remain calm.
Youth will feed off the energy of the adults around them, so if you get escalated or upset, they will escalate further. Keep yourself calm and the energy in the conversation will deflate over time. If the conversation goes to a place that’s potentially triggering to you, don’t be afraid to pull yourself out of the conversation and have another staff person jump in instead of you. You won’t do that child any good if you are having a tough time coping yourself.

Use a quiet voice.
Model the behavior you want to see, and youth will subconsciously start to follow along. It’s difficult to remain upset when talking with someone else that’s calm.

Take deep breaths.
If the youth is really worked up or upset, encourage them to take some deep breaths with you. These will help keep you calm, and will help the youth you’re with calm down more themselves.

Prevent power struggles.
Never blame a child for the behavior they’re displaying.

Less is more.
Don’t be afraid of silence. Don’t dominate the conversation, but ask questions and let the youth lead the discussion as much as possible.

Be conscious of nonverbal cues.
When a youth goes into meltdown, it’s because they have hit the limit of their coping skills and don’t know how to deal with whatever trigger is causing the issue. They will be in a very emotional state, and may not know how to put those emotions into words. Pay attention to their nonverbal communication, and help them express themselves.

Do not take behaviors personally.
And of course, the most important thing to remember: their behavior is not about you. As we’ve discussed earlier, youth misbehavior is about communication around needs not being met. It’s not about you. This can be tough to always remember in the heat of the moment, but if you keep it in mind, it will help prevent you from getting overly emotional in the moment.

Supporting Behavior Activity

In the following activity, you’ll be asked to self-reflect on you and your organization’s current practices when it comes to assisting youth that are displaying negative or unwanted behavior. Take some time to honestly think through your current strengths and areas for growth, and feel free to refer back to the previous lessons in this activity (or the provided PDF) for context.

• In what ways do you (or your organization) manage the environment to support positive behavior in youth? Any strengths? Any areas for improvement?

• In what ways do you (or your organization) manage youths’ emotions to support positive behavior and support challenging behavior? Any approaches you use frequently? Any approaches you’d like to try and use more?

• In what ways do you manage your own emotions when responding to challenging behavior in youth? Any things you do well? Any things you struggle with or could do better?

Teach: Coping skills

The final step in helping youth with behavior is to teach them how to do better next time. This is a step that’s frequently missed, as the focus is “How can we make this behavior stop ASAP?” But by focusing so much on stopping the behavior, we miss the big opportunity we have to try and prevent the behavior from happening again in the future.

As we discussed in the beginning of this training, behavior is about communication. It’s about a youth’s feelings and needs not being met, and them not knowing how else to express their need. So once we have the youth recovered and back to their baseline behavior, we should try to find ways to teach them coping skills and strategies that will help them better handle the situation the next time it arises.

If you neglect this step, that’s okay — it just means that the youth will give you another chance in the future to address it! Because until we can teach youth better ways to express their needs or cope with situations, they’re going to continue displaying that same behavior. So while it might make more work for you in the short term, if you spend some time debriefing a behavioral situation with youth, you’ll save both of you time, stress, and headache in the future.

Plan & practice

So how can you help youth learn better ways to cope with stressful experiences? Help them create a plan, and then practice the plan with them. Here’s how:

Create a plan
Once the youth’s behavior has returned to normal (/baseline), provide a quick recap of the situation and then ask them, “So the next time [you’re feeling this way / this situation happens / etc.], what could you do instead of [the recent way they handled it]?”

The goal of this is to expand the number of tools the young person has at their disposal. They may not have known what to do, so they reacted in whatever way came naturally. So instead, you’re now able to take the opportunity to reflect, listen to them, and together figure out some tools and options they can use the next time they’re feeling overwhelmed.

It’s best when the young person is able to come up with a plan on their own. They’ll have more ownership of it and will be more likely to remember and use it in the future. But if they’re having trouble coming up with ideas or with suggesting reasonable options, it’s completely fine for you to suggest a few ideas for them to consider.

Practice the plan
Once the young person has decided on a plan that they like, help them actually practice it! Rewind the current situation that just happened and role play — using the plan they just created — to get to a different outcome. You may not always have time to do this, but if you can, it’ll help reinforce the plan and make it more likely that the youth will remember to use it in the future.

To be clear, there’s no guarantee that youth will remember to use their plan the next time, even if you practice it. Especially if a youth has a developmental or intellectual disability, it may take them multiple times for the lessons to sink in and be fully absorbed. But, over time, if you continue to follow this process, you’ll find your young people are better able to handle situations on their own.

Source: https://learn.pyd.org/courses/supporting-positive-behavior-in-youth-with-disabilities/?utm_source=canva&utm_medium=iframely