A Clever Reason For Bad Behavior

Welcome to the new format of my blog where I share short pieces of inspiration that happened in a session. I only give direct advice when I work with someone directly, and know a persons history, but there are moments where my clients have great breakthroughs and learn something wonderful that changes their lives. In that moment, I always want to share those golden nuggets with others to help them be inspired to learn something that might be important in their lives too. Of course, privacy will always be protected! This is the first of these kinds of blog entries and I look forward to sharing more.

Sometimes bad behavior can have a really good reason. I got great news today from the family of a 9 year old boy with behavior problems in school since the beginning of the year. I've seen them short term, via webcam. His behavior wasn't off the wall, but bad enough to warrant fairly constant attention. Both parents and teachers had been trying one intervention for a while without success and actually sometimes saw an increase in behavior. The main consequence was losing recess which seemed like a logical type of consequence, but they saw no change, no matter how many times he lost it.

I talked to the child first. He loved the webcam. He said it felt like we were communicating from 2 different spaceships like the movies! I laughed and agreed! Sometimes I do feel like Captain Kirk which is interesting! We talked about school. What he liked, what he didn't, What was his favorite thing to do there and what was his least favorite. Everything seemed normal to mundane. It was when I started asking about recess that I found the loose string that everyone else had seemed to overlook!

I asked him how he liked recess and he told me, he hated it. I found that odd for a 9 year old boy, so I asked more about it and found that he reported that at recess, he was being picked on by several boys and the recess monitors were not seeing it. I asked him if he had asked anyone for help. Turns out the boys had told him if he asked for help, they would hurt him physically. Definitely a situation we were going to have to address and stop, post haste-completely unacceptable, but what was immediately more interesting to me, was the fact that he told me that he knew that if he got in trouble during the school day, he didn't need to worry about the recess problem, as he could be punished and miss recess.

So, you see, getting restricted from recess was actually a reward for this child since recess felt dangerous for him, thus the increase in behavior. Without knowing this small piece of information, this intervention would never have worked since he had a far stronger reason to not go to recess.

So, we had the school handle the bully situation and put a stop to it. His behavior was resolved. He had no reason anymore to lose recess so he stopped working so hard to lose it. Happy ending!

Dr. Sherri was a Child and Family Processing and Motivation expert seeing people via webcam. She is currently a writer and consultant, updating her website and will post when done for contact purposes.