What are we doing- labeling a behavior or branding a person?
From your genuine self, ask this question. When you see a child throwing tantrums, being aggressive, or showing any challenging conduct, do you label this scenario as “look at that difficult child” or “why is the child doing that?”
We tend to merge the challenging situation with the person or by going a bit technical; the stimulus equivalence relationship transforms the problematic behavior into the difficult child!
But, at that moment, we created a massive downfall for that child, personally, socially, or, if I say, affecting every aspect where they could have made or had the tendency to make a healthysocial relationship with others. This branding as a ‘tough/difficult child’ takes away the uncountable moments that could have led to friendships, playing together, attending birthdayparties, having play dates, or simply a stroll with their peers. And not to forget, it adds to the already build up stress level in the parents and also among people who are daily working with that child or have to report those exaggerated incidents at the end of the day, leading to eternal debates.
As a mother and professional behavior analyst to the community, I have a request. I know it is tough not to be getting affected. We all are human beings with similar emotions. But, how about let’s put a conscious effort not to take it to “your heart!!”. At the moments of problem behaviors, those individuals are just showing abnormal expressions of very normal or, can we say, typical feelings. During those challenging behaviors, when the child is looking for something from you and cannot appropriately tell you their wants/needs, please take a deep breath. Rather than being embroiled in the moment of heat, look at the child as a third person, keep the person and the behavior separate and then work on the behavior. Our aim should be to support the child in learning functional communication or, say, communicating in ways that would help him integrate successfully into this beautiful social circle of life. I happened to hear one of the presentations of Dr. Stephen Shore’, a prominent advocate for autism awareness, where he said, “ignore the behavior, but not the person.”
We should be much more careful when using those words while talking about challenging behaviors. Those words stay with that child, those words heard by the peers stay with that peer, those words travel to their families and communities, and later we look at the child and say, “yeah, we have seen that child mostly alone!”.
That child has too much to offer to this world, be a motivating part of that journey.