How Do You Define Challenging Behavior?

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"Challenging behavior" has become such a ubiquitous term. If you Google "challenging behavior" you get hundreds of results. Each of us has a unique way of looking at it. Each of us comes to work, and throughout our day, we all have personal and professional boundaries. We all draw the line at different places. Everyone has different button-pushers and levels of tolerance. What might be acceptable for one teacher may be considered totally inappropriate by another teacher. Behaviors that are unacceptable at school may be acceptable at home, or they have become so routine that parents no longer even see them or recognize them as problem behaviors. 

In 1998, when we first started our work with challenging behavior, my co-author and I developed this definition that has been used by many. It's not about children who occasionally behave inappropriately; it's about children who come to rely on inappropriate behavior to meet their needs and are heading down a very slippery path. It is important to note that in addition to aggressive and disruptive behavior, timid and withdrawn behaviors also qualify as challenging.

Challenging behavior:

• Interferes with children's learning, development, and success at play, affecting not only the disruptive child but also the other children.
• Is harmful to and threatens the safety of the child, the other children, and even the adults.
• Interferes with teachers' ability to teach and all of the children's opportunities to learn.
• Puts children at high risk for later social problems or school failure.

The majority of children who engage in extremely aggressive behavior at the age of five do not graduate from high school. You might ask, "Why would aggressive behavior mean that children don't graduate from high school?" If you stop and look at it, as children with challenging and/or aggressive behavior get older and enter school, the teacher doesn't have time to deal with them. There are 25 or more children in the classroom. If you can't sit and listen, you can go into the hall or to the principal's office. That student falls further and further behind and they start to feel that they don't belong and that they're not wanted. When they do return to class, they might not know how to read as well as their peers. As they get older, they don't know how to solve those math problems because they never learned that particular way of doing things. These children learn at an early age that the best way for them to save face is to behave inappropriately so the teacher asks them to leave again. That way, no one has to know that they have fallen so far behind in school. As a result, by the time they're in grade nine or ten, they often drop out.

It's important to remember that "challenging behavior" is not a diagnostic term. Most of us are not in a position to be diagnosticians. As such, when talking about the child with the staff and the family, we need to be careful not to make a diagnosis or label the child. Although this behavior is challenging to a child's teacher and to their family, I believe that the person to whom it is most challenging is the child themselves. I honestly do not believe the children wake up in the morning thinking, "How can I ruin everyone's day? How can I be sure that Barbara and everyone else have a horrible, miserable day?" They wake up looking forward to something, but for some children, as the day progresses, things start to fall apart. It might happen when they're four years old. If Dad put out the green T-shirt and they wanted to wear the blue T-shirt, that can be enough to trigger some children. Maybe cereal fell on the floor and if Mom is late for her job one more time she'll be fired, so there's no breakfast. Maybe there was a huge traffic jam, and now families are worried they're going to be late for school and work. There's a lot of tension, even before the child arrives. 

This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Supporting Teachers in Addressing Challenging Behavior: A Team Approach, by Barbara Kaiser, MA.