Understanding Challenging Behaviour: Causes, Functions, and Support Strategies
Learn how to look beyond challenging behaviour, understand its function, identify contributing factors, and develop proactive, skill-building support strategies.
When someone engages in behaviour that is disruptive, distressing, or difficult to understand, our first instinct is often to focus on the behaviour itself. “How do we stop it?”
But what if we started with a different question? “What is this behaviour telling us?” Behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum, out of the blue. It occurs within an environment, in response to circumstances, and often serves a purpose for the person engaging in it.
Now, looking beyond the behaviour doesn’t’ mean ignoring it. It means becoming curious about what is happening underneath the behaviour. This shift can change the way parents, educators, caregivers, healthcare providers, and support teams respond to behaviours that challenge.
What do we mean by “challenging behaviour”?
“Challenging behaviour” is often used to describe behaviour that creates significant difficulty for the individual themselves, or the people around them.
Challenging behaviour may include:
physical or verbal aggression
property destruction
elopement
repeated disruptive behaviour
severe emotional outbursts or tantrums
self-injurious behaviour
behaviours that interfere with learning, relationships, healthcare, or community participation
The label itself doesn’t tell us why a behaviour is occurring. Two people can engage i the same behaviour for completely different reasons. For example, for one person, leaving a room might be a way of escaping an overwhelming situation, while for another, it might reliably result in access to a preferred activity or person. And yet for someone else, it might be connected to communication difficulties, sensory factors, uncertainty or a lack of an effective way to indicate a need. Despite the behaviour looking similar, the underlying variables may be very different.
Behaviour is communication, but not always in the way we think
You may have heard the phrase, “all behaviour is communication”. Behaviour can communicate needs, preferences, discomfort, distress. It can access escape, attention, or something desirable, or any number of other things. Sometimes a person has clear alternative ways to communicate, but sometimes they don’t. Imagine if someone didn’t have an effective way to say any of the following:
“This is too difficult.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I need a break.”
“I don’t want to do this right now.”
“Something hurts.”
“I need your attention.”
Individuals will use available behaviours to effectively communicate as needed. If we only focus on suppressing the behaviour without teaching an effective alternative, we may remove an important form of communication without addressing the underlying need.
Ask what happens before the behaviour
One of the most useful ways to understand behaviour to examine what happens before it occurs. This events are called antecedents. For example, consider a child who frequently becomes distressed when asked to complete homework. Instead of immediately concluding “they don’t want to do their work”, we could ask:
is the work too difficult?
are the instruction unclear?
is there a skill deficit?
does the child know how and who to ask for help?
is the task too long?
is the timing appropriate?
what happens when they refuse?
does refusal reliably result in the task being removed?
The goal is to understand the conditions under which the behaviour is more likely to occur.
Look at what happens after the behaviour
The events that follow behaviour matter too. These are called consequences. For example, a child engages in disruptive behaviour and receives attention from an adult, or a person leaves the environment, removing the demand to engage.
If a consequence consistently makes a behaviour more effective or valuable for the person, the behaviour may become more likely in the future when experiencing similar circumstances. This does not mean deliberate manipulation, but that behaviour is influenced by its consequences. This is a fundamental principle of learning.
Understanding function
In behaviour analysis, the function of behaviour refers to the effect or outcome that maintains the behaviour. Typically functions are hypothesized based on assessments, are:
Attention: the behaviour may result in interactions, conversation, reassurance, or attention from someone else..
Escape or avoidance: the behaviour may help someone delay, avoid, or end something they find difficult, uncomfortable, confusing or otherwise aversive.
Access: the behaviour may result in access to an activity, object, person, food, preferred experience, or other desired outcome.
Automatic or sensory: behaviour maintained by consequences of the behaviour itself, rather than a response from another individual.
The same behaviour can have different functions
This is one of the most important concepts for understanding challenging behaviour. Imagine two people who both refuse a task. Person A, refuses because the task is extremely difficult and they don’t know how to ask for help. Person B refuses because consistently refusing results in task removal. The observable behaviour is the same, but the appropriate intervention is likely to be different. For Person A, we might teach the missing skill, modify the task, change the instruction modality. For Person B, we might teach others in the environment to respond differently to refusal.
Look for the skill deficit
Sometimes challenging behaviour occurs because the person hasn’t yet learned an alternative skill. Ask, “what would we like this person to do instead?” Perhaps, learning to ask for help, or to request a break, to say ‘no", or ask for more time.
Reducing challenging behaviour often involves increasing useful alternative behaviours. The replacement skill, however needs to be meaning, easy and practical. If it is harder than the challenging behaviour, the person is unlikely to use it.
Make the alternative behaviour effective
Imagine that a child has learned to throw objects when they want a break. We teach them to ask for a break, but then when they use the new communication, a break doesn’t happen for another ten minutes. Meanwhile, throwing something always results in immediate escape from the activity. That challenging behaviour may continue to be more effective. Teaching an alternative isn’t simply about telling someone what the replacement behaviour, the new skill has to work.
Don’t overlook the environment
Sometimes the most important intervention isn’t changing the person, but the environment. Consider things like noise, lighting, crowds, unpredictability, long waits, lack of choice, frequent transitions or inconsistent expectations. Environmental modifications can sometimes prevent behaviour from escalating before the person needs to even use the replacement skill. For example, offering choices may increase a person’s sense of control, or providing advance notice about a transition may reduce uncertainty. These are proactive strategies because they attempt to change the condition before challenging behaviour has a chance to occur.
Consider the person’s context
Behaviour doesn’t happen independently of the person’s overall circumstances. Someone may behave differently when they are tired, ill, hungry, in pain or anxious. Or when dealing with an unfamiliar environment, or adjusting to a new routine. A responsible assessment considers relevant contextual factors rather than assuming the behaviour exists in isolation.
For significant, or sudden changes in behaviour, appropriate medical or other professional assessment may be needed.
Avoiding assuming intent
Instead of saying, “they’re being manipulative”, consider asking “what is this behaviour accomplishing for them?” Instead of saying, “they know exactly what they’re doing”, consider asking “what patterns do we see across situations?” While boundaries or expectations are needed, by avoiding assuming intention, we separate what we observe from the story we tell ourselves about why it happened. This helps to create space for better problem-solving.
Behaviour support should be proactive
When behaviour becomes challenging, it is easy to develop a plan that focuses on what to do after behaviour happens, but effective behaviour support should also ask, what can we change before the behaviour occurs?
Proactive strategies can include:
teaching communication skills
adjusting task difficulty
providing choices
establishing predictable routines
using visual supports
teaching coping or replacement skills
providing appropriate reinforcement
increasing opportunities for successful participation
preparing someone for transitions
changing environmental triggers
The goal is to create more opportunities for the person to be successful.
What about consequences?
Consequences still matter. If a behaviour is consistently followed by something that reinforces it, that pattern may contribute to the behaviour continuing. However, responding to behaviour isn’t simply about finding a punishment. A good behaviour support plan should consider what the person needs to learn and what changes can make appropriate behaviours more effective.
In many situations, the most useful consequence is simply reinforcing the alternative behaviour we want to see more often. The objective is to strengthen useful behaviours rather than simply making challenging behaviour less likely.
Data can help us see what we might otherwise miss
When behaviour is stressful, our perception of the situation can influenced. Data can provide another perspective. For example, instead of saying, “this happens all the time”, we might discover “it happens mostly during transitions”.
Data can help identify patterns, measure progress, and determine whether an intervention is actually working. It doesn’t have to mean complicated spreadsheets, depending on the situation useful information can include: frequency, duration, intensity, setting, time etc. The right measurement system depends on the behaviour and the questions you are trying to answer.
The goal isn’t simply “no behaviour”
A reduction in challenging behaviour can be important, but it shouldn’t be the only measure of success. Ask what becomes possible when the behaviour decreases, for example, can the person communicate more effectively? participate in more activities? develop relationships? complete daily routines? become more independent? These outcomes provide a richer picture of meaningful behaviour change.
Need help understanding a behaviour that challenges?
When a behaviour is happening repeatedly, it can be difficult to know where to start. You may have already tried other strategies, however a behaviour consultation with Life Shift ABA, can help you step back and look at the bigger picture.
Together, we can explore:
what happens before and after the behaviour
patterns across people, settings, and routines
potential functions of behaviour
skills that may be missing
environmental factors that may be contributing
practical replacement behaviours
proactive strategies to support success
ways to measure whether strategies are working
Our goal is to understand what is happening and build a more effective path forward.
If you’re a parent, caregiver, school, healthcare provider, or community organization looking for individualized behavioural support, a focused behaviour consultation or functional behaviour assessment may be a useful place to start.