Understanding the ABCs of Behavior in Positive Behavior Support

Ask a parent what happens at bath time and you’ll sometimes get a long sigh before you get an answer.

In one case study written up by Meadan, Ayvazo and Ostrosky for Young Exceptional Children in 2014, the answer was screaming. A two-and-a-half-year-old called Ethan would cry and scream every night as soon as bath time came up, and his parents, worn out, often let the bath slide so everyone could get some peace. They’d tried nearly everything they could think of. None of it stuck.

From Ethan’s side, though, the system was working fine. He screamed, and the bath went away.

We see versions of this all the time in positive behaviour support, with kids and with adults, at home and at school and in group homes. A behaviour that keeps coming back is usually getting the person something, or getting them out of something. Work that out and the whole picture changes. The ABC model is a pretty humble tool, but it’s often where that work starts.

A, B and C, minus the jargon

A is the antecedent, meaning whatever came right before. B is the behaviour itself. C is the consequence, or what happened next.

The idea goes back to behaviourism and B.F. Skinner’s research on how the results of an action shape whether we repeat it, and it has been used in classrooms and clinics for decades. What changes in positive behaviour support is the attitude you bring to it. We’re not trying to stamp a behaviour out by force. 

We’re treating it as communication, usually from someone whose needs aren’t being met in a way they can easily put into words, and ABC is a fairly disciplined way of paying attention to what they’re telling us.

Antecedents: look at what came before

A trigger can be very ordinary. Someone says “bath time”. A favourite show gets switched off. The noise in the classroom is due to lunchtime, or a stranger entering the room, or the child’s sibling picking up the wrong toy.

According to Synapse, an Australian organization that deals with brain injuries and disabilities, other factors such as the individual’s emotional state and the environment itself form part of the antecedents, which parents often ignore.

When the trigger happened this morning

Setting events, which are also known as motivating operations, are the terms behavior analysts use to refer to events that occurred in the distant past. Imagine having had a bad night’s sleep, missing breakfast, taking a new medicine dosage, being away from home because of work, or getting an untrained substitute teacher.

All of these factors did not occur while bathing, but all of these factors could affect the process of bathing negatively. If there is a problem with making a certain request on a certain day, it would be worth thinking about other factors before blaming the request.

Behaviour: what did you actually see?

Recording the behaviour sounds simple. In practice it is the column that most often gets filled with opinions instead of observations.

“Acted out” doesn’t help much. Nor does “difficult” or “attention-seeking”, and those labels can quietly shape how everyone treats the person afterwards. Something like “screamed and lay on the floor for roughly two minutes” is far more useful, because a teacher, a grandparent and a therapist reading it later will all picture the same thing.

There’s a subtler point here too. What a behaviour looks like (its topography) isn’t the same as what it does for the person (its function). In Ethan’s case, crying and screaming turned out to have at least four separate functions: avoiding the bath, getting a toy from his older brother, getting his mum’s attention while she was busy, and getting out of tooth brushing. Same noise every time; four quite different reasons behind it.

Consequences, or why it keeps happening

What follows a behaviour has a big say in whether it happens again. When the outcome makes a repeat more likely, behaviour analysts call that reinforcement, and it doesn’t need anyone to have planned it.

Most of the time a person is either getting something they want, such as attention, a toy or a particular sensation, or escaping something they’d rather avoid, like a demand or a noisy room.

That’s why kind, reasonable reactions can end up feeding the pattern. Ethan’s brother hands over the toy to stop the noise. His dad says they’ll do the bath later. Both choices make complete sense when you’re tired and the screaming is getting louder, and both teach Ethan that screaming pays off.

We’d never frame that as the family’s fault, and positive behaviour support doesn’t either. The ABC model just puts the pattern on paper so the adults around the person can choose their response on purpose rather than in the heat of the moment.

Turning ABC notes into a functional behaviour assessment

A single ABC entry is one afternoon. After a few weeks of entries you can usually start to see repeats, whether that’s the time of day, the type of request or the response that seems to settle things.

That’s often when a behaviour support practitioner gets involved, and in positive behaviour support the next step is usually a functional behaviour assessment. The practitioner pulls together the ABC records, interviews with the people who know the person well, direct observation at home, at school or out in the community, and their own analysis of the data, then forms a hypothesis about what the behaviour is achieving and under what conditions. It is a hypothesis that can be tested and revised

Families matter enormously in this. Nobody knows the person’s routines, history and quirks better than the people who live with them, and the research supports involving families in assessment and planning rather than treating them as observers.

What happens next in a positive behaviour support plan

Once the team has a reasonable idea of what a behaviour is for, they can work on the before, the during and the after. On the “before” side, small adjustments can go a long way. For Ethan that might be a picture schedule for the evening routine, with story time placed after the bath so there’s something to look forward to, or letting him pick between a bath and a shower.

Synapse describes a girl who was overwhelmed by supermarkets; her mother began with half a minute standing outside the store and stretched the visits out gradually from there. The part that gets skipped most often is teaching a replacement skill, which means giving the person another way to get the same need met. If screaming is how Ethan gets the toy, he needs an easier way to get it, perhaps saying “my turn” or tapping his brother’s elbow. 

If crying gets him out of tooth brushing, he could learn to raise a hand and ask for a short break. The new skill has to work at least as reliably as the old behaviour, otherwise there’s no reason for him to use it.

Then there’s how everyone responds afterwards. Mostly that means noticing the new skill quickly and responding warmly when it shows up, and making sure parents, teachers and support workers all respond the same way, because mixed responses can undo a lot of good work.

Where the model has limits

ABC does not provide you with the answer in itself. The identification of patterns may take weeks, and an initial hypothesis about the function of behavior may be incorrect, which is precisely why plans are reviewed.

It also is not always the most appropriate starting point for everybody.

A person who has experienced trauma will likely require being safe and regulated much before attempting to change any behaviors. This is why positive behavior support is very person-centered and concentrates on quality of life and relationships, rather than just frequency of occurrences, and uses restrictive measures only as a last resort.

If you want to start now

Take a notebook and write three columns labeled “before,” “behaviour” and “after.” In the next two weeks, record whatever you observe each time the behaviour you want to address occurs, adding a comment on your sleep, eating or any other unusual activity for the day. Try to confine yourself to observing what is happening and avoid making any assumptions.

You might notice a pattern right away, or there may be none whatsoever – and both situations are okay. In either case, having the notebook will allow a qualified practitioner of behaviour support to have some basis for discussion during your joint analysis of the meaning of the particular behaviour.