Sasha from The Autism Helper explains how adults unintentionally reinforce problem behaviors through their responses, expectations, and reactions. The only behavior you can control is your own, so behavior change starts with self-reflection. Environmental factors like how demands are presented and how staff react either maintain or reduce problem behaviors.
Hi, I'm Sasha from The Autism Helper, and in this episode of the mini video training series, we're going to talk about how you might actually unintentionally be causing increases in your students' problem behaviors. I know that's something we all don't want, so I probably caught your attention there because none of us are waking up on Monday morning thinking, you know what, I Work's been a little boring. I'm gonna mix things up and cause some tantrums today. No, that's absolutely not what we're doing, but the way we react and respond or maybe set up contingencies for our kids may actually be causing problem behaviors not only to continue but to even get worse. I tell this at all of my behavior trainings. My name is Sasha and I am a problem behavior causer. I've been in scenarios where the actions that I took we're reinforcing a negative behavior and cause that negative behavior to continue. In behavior trainings, I also always tell everyone, the only behavior that you have complete control of is your own. So when we look at starting the process of behavior change, it's not about jumping to like, how can we fix the student's behavior? It's about how can we fix our own behavior? We need to worry about controlling ourselves more than controlling our students. "It starts with us." And I actually think that that idea is really empowering, that we have the key, we have the solution somewhere within our environment and ourselves and our team on figuring out how we can change the way this student is responding to situations and the environment. We as educators or parents or paraprofessionals are part of our students' environment. The way that we set up the environment for them, the way we ask for things, the way we set expectations, the way we present demands is going to affect each child's behavior. The way that we respond or react or ignore or don't ignore behaviors when they happen also will cause changes to those students' behavior. So this may mean making a change in the way you or your team responds and reacts to student behaviors, and that's hard. Change is hard for everyone, and it's especially hard when you feel like you were wrong, like I was doing this wrong in the past, but you weren't. That was just how you were reacting at that time, and if you can learn from it, it can be really helpful. So don't think of it as, oh, we were doing it wrong before. It's just that that was the old way we were setting up things for this student, or that was the old way we were responding to this student's behavior. Now this is the new way. Just like we tell our students we have to learn from our mistakes, we do as well. So we want to learn from maybe missteps that are happening within the way we set up the environment. And you'll know that those missteps are happening if problem behavior is continuing and increasing and getting worse. So we can look at those things that are in our control. How can we set up contingencies for that student? How can we set up expectations and demands for that student? How can we provide them other opportunities to communicate? And then when they engage in both positive and negative behaviors, how are we as a staff or a parent responding? When it comes to behavior change, some strategies that we use might seem counterintuitive. It might not make sense to ignore a child who's tantruming or not run and pick them up. It might feel like you're letting a student get away with it if they swear at you and you don't lecture them. So really explore Explore those strategies, explore the whys of behavior before you jump in with an intervention. So if problem behavior is continuing with your child or student, I encourage you to really evaluate your role as part of the environment and think about how you can be changing your behavior and your responses to cause those positive behavior change. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of the mini video training series. Please check out our other episodes on YouTube or theautismhelper.com.
