02/01/2022
Too often, we automatically address children’s behavior as intentional or willful, trying to talk and reason with kids to change their behavior when what they really need before they can do things differently is to feel .
In her book ‘Beyond Behaviors’, Mona Delahooke, Ph.D. makes a distinction between bottom-up behavior that is rooted in our senses and unmet subconscious needs, and top-down behavior that is mediated by our intentional thought processes. It is only top-down behavior that is susceptible to conversation, consequences, and logic, which is why so much of what we do with chronically challenging kids just doesn’t work. Conversation, consequences, and logic assume a level of self-regulation the child doesn’t have, and isn’t targeted at the underlying causes that are bottom-up.
Because derails the capacity to reason, it is essential to start by ensuring a child feels safe. The foundation of behavioral change is relational security. Nothing is possible without that.
In her book, Dr Delahooke shares dozens of case histories from her decades of working with challenging and their families. In all these cases, she shows how misbehavior is usually an adaptive and unconscious response to an internal reality for the . That reality is often hidden from the adults in the child’s life—masked by their own anxiety or annoyance at the behavior—until they begin to ask themselves why the child is doing what they’re doing, and how that particular behavior helps the child cope.
Using understandings and clinical experience, Delahooke explains that misbehavior is very often the body’s response to stress, and not intentional: “When we see behavior that is problematic or confusing, the first question we should ask is NOT ‘How do we get rid of this behavior?’ but rather ‘What is this telling us about the child?’”
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