Is It Really a "Challenging" Behavior?

4-Minute Read

I want to bring your attention to the term “challenging behaviors”, because as a parent of an autistic child, you will unfortunately hear this term a lot.

It usually comes up in statements like, “She’s struggling with a lot of challenging behaviors,” or “We need to figure out how to extinguish his challenging behaviors.”

But here’s the problem: the word challenging automatically frames a child’s actions as negative. I encourage you to pause and ask - challenging for whom?

Just because we don’t immediately understand a behavior, does that make it bad?

Barry Prizant touches on this in his book Uniquely Human, noting that outside of “diet,” behavior may be the only word in English that people tend to use with a built-in negative meaning. But in reality, behavior itself is neutral. It’s simply the way someone acts.

And more importantly, behavior is communication. For children who don’t always use spoken words, behavior is often one of the most powerful tools they have to tell us what they need.

A child might flop on the floor, kick, scream, bite, or hit - not because they want to be “challenging,” but because they’re trying to send a message.

The behavior is a byproduct of the core issue; it’s not the root cause that needs to be addressed.

What happened before she flopped on the floor? Where was she going? Is she not feeling well? Was there too much noise around her? Did the schedule change unexpectedly? Was she in the middle of a play scheme and got interrupted before she could finish?

There are countless questions that matter more than “How do we stop this?” Because when we only treat the symptom, we miss the root cause.

The next time someone comes to you saying that your child is exhibiting “challenging behaviors” and suggests a plan to reduce them, I want you to try this - ask why.

Why are we seeing this behavior? Why at this time of the day? Why since the start of this month and not last month?

Maybe the question isn’t about fixing behaviors at all, but about hearing our children more clearly.

~Chloe