Do you have a child that is showing signs of challenging behavior?

Or are you a teacher that is looking to do more to help the kids that seem to be acting out? Then, you may find that you need to know a lot more about challenging behavior and how parents and teachers can work together to resolve it. Let’s take a look.

Understanding Why It Happens

To start with, you’re likely to find that you need to understand why kids show these behaviors. Whether they’re screaming or crying, hurting other children or refusing to join in or do any work, it could be that they don’t understand rules or society or even that they lack the skills they need.

Encouraging Positive Behavior

Now, something that you can do to help minimize the challenging behavior is encourage positive behavior. Praising can really work, as can scheduling the right activities, adapt routines, and even spend more time communicating with them.

At the same time, it’s important to identify the triggers that set the kids off and really try to understand how and why it happens, and how you can work on turning this around.

Addressing Challenging Behavior

Then, it needs addressing and reinforcement could help here. Options like Noncontingent Reinforcement (NCR), Differential Reinforcement, and Response Cost. Reinforcing as routine, for good behavior, and removing it when behavior is bad could help address it.

For more information on how positive behavior can be developed in children under the age of twelve, just take a look at the infographic below.

Infographic Design By Regis College’s Behavioral Analysis Program