Behavioral Process: Step by Step

Rule #1 Believe that “children do well if they can.”  If they aren’t doing well, wonder why that is - what is interfering. 

Establish realistic expectations that the child is, in reality, capable of achieving.  Expecting something more than what the child can actually achieve is highly likely to result in failure, increased behavioral difficulties, and to foster a sense of ineffectiveness, helplessness, and worthlessness.

Implementation Dip. 

• When you begin a new intervention .. expect things to get worse first.  
• It all works best if the process is entered into collaboratively -- with parent and child / teacher and child in agreement. 
• Let child know what is changing before beginning
• If you change your approach / style and they don't know why, it can make kids anxious and defensive. 

Visualize Success. 

• What will success look like?  
• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What is your purpose?
• What are your short, mid-range, and long-term objectives?
• Flip negative behaviors into their positive opposites.

Move Toward Success Slowly, Progressively, Patiently, Persistently.

• Practice patience.
• Be persistent in your effort to achieve success. 
• Gradually, thoughtfully shape behavior through successive approximations.  
• Expect set-back, ups and down; regressions happen. Behavior is not linear.  When the going gets tough, people regress.  
• Be practical -- close enough really does count. It never needs to be perfect.  We are working a practice to mastery activity.     

Analyze the Task / Situational Demands.

• What are the required steps
• Environmental factors
• Time of day factors
• Competing  factors
• Where is the breakdown?

Evaluate Skill Level.  

• What skills are fully developed
• What skills are partially developed
• What skills are not developed

Assess Developmental Stage: challenges should be matched to developmental capacities.

• Cognitive
• Emotional
• Biological
• Chronological.  Age is the least relevant in terms of developmental capacities, especially in school.  Each child follows a unique developmental trajectory moving at it's own pace.  Age does not tell us anything about ability.    

Develop Behavioral Plan Collaboratively (parents and children)

• Identify problem
• Generate potential solutions
• Choose the best solution
• Implement plan collaboratively (parents and children).
• Launch plan
• Monitor progress
• Evaluate Outcome

Reward & Celebrate Successes. 

• Partial success
• Proportional success (e.g.: minutes success v. minutes of failure, etc.)
• Tangible rewards
• Intangible rewards

Analyze & Celebrate Failure. 

→ Return to step 1, as needed.

Critical Components

• Be Optimistic
• Be Supportive and encouraging.
• Do not criticize.  
• Emphasize mastery: Practice to improve / practice to mastery / practice never makes perfect

Anger:

• Anger is normal / natural / helpful.  Anger tells us when something is wrong, when there is a problem we need to attend to.  
• Anger can inspire action. 
• Anger can lead to determined effort.
• Everyone gets angry
• Too much anger is bad - build an anger management plan

Anger management activities must be implemented prior to reaching the threshold of anger.  As anger increases people become increasingly irrational.  To intervene with anger plan, the intervention must happen before the brain dissolves into an irrational mass of goo. 

• Adult initiated 
• Child initiated

Kenneth H. Little, MA / 603-726-1006 / KenLittle-NH.com

Good Judgement: A Personal Reflection

Copyright All rights reserved by 

Ken Little - New Hampshire

“Good Judgement comes from experience, 90% of which is based on bad judgement.” (source unknown)

This wisdom was taped to the kitchen cupboard in my family's kitchen throughout my adolescent years. I’m convinced it was my mother’s survival mantra; her daily reassurance that all would be well in the future, that all of the mistakes I made were guiding me toward developing good judgment.

It worked and I did, but to be perfectly honest, my survival was not assured by any stretch of the imagination.

Things could very easily have turned out differently, very badly in fact. Things did turn out badly for many young people growing up at the same time. 

Too many of my peers during high school and in the years shortly after died, but many more were impacted by lasting and often debilitating injuries, for example: skiing dangerously, jumping off cliffs into quarries, driving dangerously, and using drugs and alcohol in a way that damaged bodies and brains. 

The harm continued to resonate into the future. (see Consequences)

An old friend died from a heart attack in his early 40s – probably the result of the damage caused by using cocaine earlier in life; his past poor judgment coming back to haunt him well after the harmful behavior had ended and he’d established a successful business and loving family. 

Another old friend, one of the most intelligent people I knew growing up, ended up permanently damaging his brain. He continues to work in a low level, low-income job. Such great potential lost permanently to youthful decision-making error.

Youthful errors can leave lasting damage.

Teens and young adults lack the judgment, experience and decision-making skills required to reliably make good decisions. 

It’s not that they always make bad decisions.  In fact, the vast majority of decisions teens and young adults make are typically good and constructive.  It's just that the probability of making bad decisions is higher during adolescence and early adulthood. 

Teens and young adults are out in the world without adult supervision, physically grown but not fully ready to go.  Out in the world without the skills and abilities they will need to navigate the often complex and difficult predicaments life brings to them.

This is not really a fully preventable reality. Perhaps younger children might be supervised more closely, but teens and young adults do move out into the world on their own. This is both expected and necessary. 

Teens and young adults cannot develop into effective and capable adults by keeping them under close supervision at all times.

According to the CDC, 40% of the deaths between age 10 and 24 are due to unintentional injuries. This is the leading cause of death in this age group. As a society we attack this problem with laws, policy changes, systems changes, etc. We work to wrap teens in a safer world. For example, the #1 risk to a teen is driving in a car with another teen. This elevated risk is primarily due to inexperienced drivers making poor decisions. In an effort to reduce this risk, we are changing licensing laws; we have seat belts laws and air bags. These are all changes that can and should be made around teens and young adults.  They are much needed to reduce the risks. 

But what are we doing to help teens learn how to make better decisions?

For over 25 years I've been teaching children, teens, and young adults the "how to" of decision-making they need in order to make better decisions. 

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about what works and what does not work and I've developed concrete, usable decision-making systems that teens can be taught, that they can practice, that can be incorporated into their habits of thinking. 

These practiced skills will give them the decision-making advantage they will need to make better decisions, decisions that will lower the risks of navigating adolescent life.

Kenneth H. Little, MA / 135 Lee Brook Road / Thornton, NH 03285 / 603-726-1006 / Achieve-ES.com

Begin, Wherever You Are

It's never too late or too soon.

Wherever you are in your parenting journey, whether with newborn child or young adult, begin teaching problem solving skills, thinking skills, and verbal reasoning skills.

Problem Solving, Thinking, & Verbal Reasoning

There are other important skills (like, how to do laundry, dishes, math, and weak-side layups), but these are the Big Three. All are skills. All are taught, coached, encouraged, trained, and ... practiced, practiced, practiced to mastery over time.

Please keep in mind that skills are increased gradually, incrementally over time only through repetitive practice.

Practice to mastery is the only path to skill development, the only path forward.

We will work toward developing these skills (problem-solving, thinking, verbal reasoning) by practicing on a regular basis the *Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) process developed by Dr. Ross Greene. This process can and should be practiced during all routine problems and more urgent behavioral disruptions.

Patience Required

To begin this process focus first on engaging with your child in empathic, non-judgmental conversations about her perspective on various problems and concerns, working to develop a sense of trust in her that she can safely share her views with you without fear of being criticized, dismissed, or invalidated. 

Listen carefully, for deep understanding. Thank her for sharing her views. 

Tell her you will think about what she has shared and agree to come back to talk with her after you have had the opportunity to think things over. This is a great way to model and practice delayed gratification. 

Do not allow the situation to devolve into argument and hostility. Just listen carefully. If you begin to feel frustration. Say so, then take space and calm down. Promise to come back when you are feeling calmer. See post "Calm Down & Take Space".

Trust is the essential ingredient in developing the type of relationship with your child that will be open to a collaborative problem-solving process and behavior change. Mistrust leads to defensiveness and resistance to change.

Open communication built on trust is the cornerstone piece of the process. Developing and maintaining a trusting relationship will enable you to build / re-build and strengthen an empathic connection with your child.

Note: Parental Burnout

A loss of adult-to-child empathy (burnout) is a very typical problem parents (and staff) experience with behavioral children. The adults are gradually worn down, exhausted by the continuous demands and difficulties, but this decrease in empathic connection (heightened frustration, anger, discouragement) increases the likelihood of ever more severe behavioral difficulties. 

Think quicksand. 

Unless you are able to take a step back, to reconnect with your long-term vision and rebuild your capacity to see the whole child, you will get sucked deeper and deeper into the quagmire.

It is important that we move toward a “non-punitive, non-adversarial, collaborative, proactive, skill-building, relationship-enhancing” approach; reconnecting with love and empathy.


*Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) is the non-punitive, non-adversarial, trauma-informed model of care Dr. Greene originated and describes in his various books, including The Explosive Child, Lost at School, Lost & Found, and Raising Human Beings.

Kenneth H. Little, MA / 135 Lee Brook Road / Thornton, NH 03285 / 603-726-1006 / Achieve-ES.com