Changing Challenging Behavior

Understanding and Changing Challenging Behaviors and Teaching Language Skills During Daily Activities to Children with Autism

This workshop is designed to teach parents and educators how to effectively manage problem behaviors that are often exhibited by children with autism or other developmental delays. Behaviors such as noncompliance with instructions or routines, whining/crying, tantrums, physically aggressive or self-injurious behaviors, obsessive routines, toileting and sleeping related problems are often concerns for parents and educators. This workshop specifically addresses practical issues and will provide methods for analyzing problem situations and developing strategies to solve those concerns.

Parents often have questions and want to learn how to encourage their child to behave in an appropriate manner. Attempts to get a child with language delays to “go along with us,” are complicated by the fact that the child often doesn’t understand what we are trying to get them to do or not to do. Another critical factor is the fact that many of these children are not motivated by the typical praise and recognition that is often used to teach typically developing children. As a result, parents and instructors often find it a challenging task to get the child to do what we ask of them.

 This workshop introduces the principles, strategies, and evidence-based techniques used at Partington Behavior Analysts and the STARS Clinic. It is designed primarily for parents, teachers, instructional assistants, and in-home tutors to learn practical actions they can take to increase a child’s cooperation and to reduce instances of problematic behavior that prevent the child from engaging in everyday family and school activities (e.g., sitting at the table and eating with others, participating in learning tasks while doing routine daily activities, going to the grocery store without a tantrum, toileting issues, etc.)

 Specific Objectives:

• Participants will be able to identify the basic behavioral principles used to analyze both appropriate and undesired behavior.
• Participants will learn how to increase appropriate behavior by developing positive instructional control, and teaching alternative behaviors.
• Participants will learn how to observe behavior to determine why a behavior is or isn’t occurring and its probable function(s).
• Participants will learn how to structure situations so as to encourage desired behavior and avoid unwanted behavior.
• Participants will learn how to use simple but effective data collection procedures.