Behavior transformation begins with communications

We live in a world, particularly America, where out of control behavior is rampant — especially children’s. Do we have it backward addressing children’s behavior concerns?

Most don’t want to feel like bad parents or be teachers or professionals harming growth or development. What should parents or professionals do to ensure they’re part of the solution and not the problem?

The answer: Understand that most complex problems have simple solutions.

The reality is behavior is communication. The more inappropriate or maladaptive the more important the message they’re attempting to convey. If behaviors are communication, then environment is a loudspeaker broadcasting stimuli attempting to provide empirical context.

The Huffington Post reported an American mom, who moved to Sweden, initially was shocked to see 5 year olds riding bikes in streets unsupervised. Her first daycare encounter was a 3 year old high in a tree. She went to a daycare teacher until she saw another parent conversing with the tree climber like it was business as usual.

What if in the context of safe age-appropriate boundaries, children become vulnerable risk takers engaging environments in ways that meet their deepest felt needs?

Ironically, Sweden has the world’s lowest child injury rate, according to Christine Gross-Loh, author of “Parent­ing Without Borders: Sur­prising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us.”

What if, in The American Way, we childproof healthy risk taking out of safe appropriate boundaries; perpetuating out-of-control behaviors?

What if behaviors, appropriate and inappropriate, are direct responses to our environment’s ability or inability to meet intrinsic felt needs?

Reshaping and changing behaviors is about consciously providing age-appropriate en­vironments where children self-initiate expressions and engage in surroundings in a manner capable of creating ownership for their actions; simultaneously meeting emotional needs.

When my son Joshua, who has Downs syndrome, was 18 months we had a personal behavioral transformation in daycare. He started biting himself and others. We were informed next time he bit he would be banned.

My wife, with ribbon and a teether, made a necklace. She asked daycare attendants to present the teether whenever Josh bit and he’s never bit again.

Behavior is communication and environmental factors magnify communication. Josh wasn’t biting to bite. If he could talk he wouldn’t bite at all, but at the time he was nonverbal.

The environment was over stimulating, which impeded the engagement of his surroundings to meet internal needs. Biting wasn’t the problem but an indicator of deeper unresolved issues.

Healthy environments encourage children to engage their surroundings taking appropriate actions to meet underlying felt needs.

Think about it this way. If your car’s oil light is on, you search for oil to add to the motor in hopes the light will go off. You don’t waste time on the light as if it were the actual problem.

True behavior transformations having power to address serious behaviors require everyone involved to meet others where they are — at their point of need. Providing the means for children to take appropriate risk to express and meet their felt needs in safe and engaging ways.

Do you ever attempt to address oil lights that come on in your car or do you engage your vehicles inward core issue by adding oil to the motor?

What if we change our responses to childish behaviors treating them like car oil lights?

Children could explore their environment taking age-appropriate risk discovering quarts of oil to add to their emotional motors. Then behaviors such as oil lights would go off and children would learn to meet needs for themselves, building increase ownership and awareness to control their own behaviors.

Anyone can recognize problems, but it takes real courage to take a leap of faith empowering everyone to become vulnerable risk takers taking calculated chances to create solutions that actually solve problems. In behavior transformation, taking outward risk is playing it inwardly safe; therefore, creating environmental changes in behavior often is an inside out job.