Power in Behaviour Support: Who Decides What “Appropriate” Looks Like?

I have been thinking a lot recently about the word appropriate, partly because it appears so frequently in behaviour support that I am not sure we always stop to think about what we actually mean when we use it. We talk about appropriate language, appropriate tone of voice, appropriate ways of expressing frustration, appropriate behaviour in the classroom and appropriate social interaction. Most of these expectations sound perfectly reasonable, and often they are. Children need to learn that different environments come with different expectations, just as adults gradually learn that how we behave with friends around a dinner table may not be how we behave in a professional meeting.

But as a behaviour analyst, I have become increasingly interested in the question sitting underneath that word. When we decide that a behaviour is appropriate or inappropriate, who has actually decided what appropriate looks like?

Behaviour support can appear remarkably neutral when written down. We identify behaviour that is causing concern, gather information about the circumstances in which it occurs, consider its possible function, identify behaviours we would like to strengthen, introduce intervention and monitor whether meaningful change follows. There is nothing inherently problematic about that process. In fact, it is one of the things I value about behaviour analysis: rather than assuming that a child is difficult, naughty or deliberately disruptive, we have a framework that encourages us to look at behaviour in context and ask what might be maintaining it.

Good behaviour support can make an enormous difference to a child's life. It can give somebody a way to communicate when previously their behaviour was doing the communicating for them. It can help a child tolerate experiences that once felt impossible, develop independence, participate more fully in education, build relationships and access parts of life that had gradually become unavailable to them.

But there are people making decisions at every stage of that process. Somebody decides which behaviour requires intervention. Somebody decides what should increase and what should decrease. Somebody decides what alternative behaviour will be taught and what success will eventually look like. Usually, those somebodies are adults, and very often they are people like me.

That does not make those decisions wrong, but it does give us power.

I think we should be willing to talk about that.

When “Appropriate” Really Means “Comfortable for Adults”

I have been part of conversations where goals have been suggested around sitting still, reducing particular vocalisations, maintaining eye contact, using a certain tone of voice or responding to an adult instruction within a particular amount of time. Sometimes there is a perfectly good reason for those goals. A behaviour may genuinely be limiting learning, communication, relationships, safety or the child's ability to participate in something that matters to them.

Sometimes, however, the reasoning becomes less convincing when we keep asking why.

Why does this child need to sit completely still while listening if they are able to listen while moving? Why does eye contact matter in this particular interaction? Why does this vocalisation need to disappear? What opportunity is the child currently missing because of this behaviour? What becomes possible for them if it changes? And perhaps the simplest question of all: what would actually happen if we did nothing?

Those questions matter because sometimes the answer is safety, participation, independence or access to learning. At other times, if we are sufficiently reflective, the answer is that the behaviour is unusual, distracting or makes the adults around the child uncomfortable.

I am not convinced that adult discomfort, by itself, is a sufficient reason to change a child.

This becomes particularly important when working with neurodivergent children because many behaviours that attract adult attention are not necessarily harmful. Movement may support regulation. Looking away may actually make listening easier. Repetitive behaviour may be enjoyable or calming. A child may express excitement, frustration or distress differently from the way adults expect them to. If we are not careful about what we select for intervention, we can become very effective at teaching a child how to look regulated without ever asking whether they actually feel regulated.

Those are very different outcomes.

The Child Who Is “Refusing”

Imagine a child is given a piece of work and immediately pushes it away. One adult might describe the child as refusing to engage. Another might call the behaviour non-compliance. Somebody else might suggest the child is trying to escape a demand. Another person might spend longer observing and discover that the child cannot read half of the words on the page and has spent the previous twenty minutes watching everybody around them begin work they do not understand.

The behaviour has not changed. Our understanding of it has.

As a behaviour analyst, this is where I think our own science gives us a particularly useful way of slowing the conversation down. Behaviour does not occur in isolation, and it certainly does not arrive with its meaning conveniently attached to it. If we are going to describe a child as refusing, avoiding or being non-compliant, then we should be equally interested in what happened before that behaviour, what changed afterwards, what the environment was asking of the child and why that response might make sense in that particular context.

A child shouting “no” may well be trying to escape something difficult, and there will absolutely be situations where continually removing a demand following distress makes future avoidance more likely. Negative reinforcement matters. Avoidance can become increasingly restrictive, and helping a child gradually tolerate difficult but necessary experiences can be an important part of effective support.

But identifying escape as a function does not tell us, by itself, what we should do next.

That distinction matters to me.

Perhaps the child needs support tolerating a difficult but reasonable demand. Perhaps the task needs adapting because it is currently beyond their skill level. Perhaps we need to teach a more effective way of asking for help or requesting a break. Perhaps the environment needs to change. Perhaps the child needs to learn that they can complete something difficult and survive the discomfort that comes with it.

Or perhaps, occasionally, the child has a perfectly reasonable reason for wanting the demand to stop.

Functional understanding should make us more curious about those possibilities, not less.

Who Gets to Say No?

Adults say no to children constantly. We say no because something is unsafe, because now is not the right time, because another person's needs have to be considered or simply because children need boundaries. I do not see boundaries as incompatible with compassionate or neurodiversity-affirming practice. In fact, children need adults who can hold reasonable limits calmly and predictably, particularly when the child themselves is angry, frightened or disappointed by them.

Something interesting happens, however, when the child says no to us. Their behaviour can suddenly acquire a clinical description: non-compliance, demand avoidance, refusal or defiance.

Sometimes those descriptions identify an important pattern. A child who is unable to tolerate ordinary demands may find their world becoming increasingly small, and we would not necessarily be acting in their interests if every expression of discomfort resulted in the removal of expectations. Life contains waiting, disappointment, demands, compromise and things we would simply rather not do, and part of supporting children is helping them develop the behavioural repertoires needed to navigate those experiences.

But I think we should remain interested in the imbalance.

Adults are permitted to refuse things for all sorts of reasons. We are tired. We do not understand what is being asked. We need more information. We are uncomfortable. We want five minutes before doing it. We dislike the way somebody has spoken to us. Children are often expected to comply first and explain themselves afterwards, and for children who communicate in ways other than speech, the imbalance can become greater still because behaviour may be one of the clearest ways available to them of telling us that something is wrong.

That does not mean every refusal should be honoured.

It means every refusal should tell us something.

The Behaviours We Notice

Power also influences which behaviours attract our attention in the first place. A child who sits quietly at the back of a classroom experiencing significant anxiety may receive very little intervention because they are not disrupting anybody. Another child experiencing similar distress who shouts, leaves the classroom or pushes their work onto the floor may very quickly become the subject of meetings, observations and a behaviour support plan.

The second child's behaviour is more visible, but visibility and severity are not necessarily the same thing.

This is something I think behaviour analysts in particular need to remain thoughtful about because the behaviours referred to us are rarely selected in a vacuum. Somebody has noticed them. Somebody is concerned by them. Very often the behaviour has reached professional attention precisely because it is having an impact on other people or on the functioning of an environment.

That does not invalidate the referral, but it is useful context.

If our systems become extremely good at identifying children when their distress becomes disruptive but considerably less good at identifying them when their distress becomes quiet, then we risk creating a strange distinction in which distress itself is tolerated until it begins affecting everybody else.

That should make us curious about the behaviours we are not measuring too.

The Language We Use Shapes What We Look For

Language carries some of this power as well. Terms such as challenging, non-compliant, attention-seeking and manipulative can become shortcuts for interactions that are considerably more complicated than the label suggests.

A child described as manipulative is likely to be approached differently from a child described as repeatedly seeking reassurance. A child described as attention-seeking may quickly become somebody from whom adults deliberately withdraw attention, yet wanting another person's attention is not particularly unusual behaviour.

Most adults spend enormous amounts of their lives seeking attention. We message somebody because we want a response. We tell a story because we want somebody to listen. We walk into an office and ask, “Have you got a minute?” Adults simply tend to have access to more socially accepted ways of doing it.

From a behavioural perspective, describing something as attention-maintained may be useful because it tells us something about the contingencies surrounding the behaviour. But attention-maintained and attention-seeking can begin to mean very different things once they leave an assessment and enter everyday conversation. One describes a possible functional relation. The other can very easily become a judgement about the child.

That distinction is important.

Changing terminology alone will not create ethical practice. We could replace every uncomfortable word in every behaviour support plan tomorrow and still make poor decisions. But language influences what we notice, what we expect and the hypotheses we begin forming before we have properly understood the person in front of us.

Good behaviour analysis should widen curiosity, not close it down.

Behaviour Change Is Not the Problem

I think this point is particularly important because conversations about power in behaviour support can easily drift towards the idea that attempting to change behaviour is itself somehow unethical.

I do not believe that.

I am a behaviour analyst. Helping people develop behaviours that increase communication, independence, safety, participation and access to meaningful parts of life is fundamental to my work. There are behaviours that cause genuine harm. There are patterns of avoidance that can progressively restrict a child's world. There are skills that need to be taught, behaviours that need safer alternatives and situations in which compassionate practice means asking a child to tolerate something they would prefer to escape.

Respecting autonomy does not mean creating a life without expectations, and neurodiversity-affirming practice should not mean becoming so frightened of influencing behaviour that we stop teaching skills that could meaningfully improve someone's life.

What I think we have to remain willing to question is not whether behaviour should ever change, but why we have selected this behaviour, for this child, in this environment, and who is expected to benefit when it does.

There is an enormous difference between helping a child develop a safer way of communicating anger and teaching them that anger itself must never be visible. There is a difference between helping somebody tolerate necessary change and teaching them that their discomfort will always be ignored. There is a difference between increasing independence and increasing compliance.

From the outside, those interventions may occasionally look quite similar.

The purpose matters.

Who Actually Benefits?

Perhaps the question I return to most often when thinking about behaviour targets is relatively simple: who benefits if this behaviour changes?

Ideally, the child does. Perhaps they become better able to communicate what they need. Perhaps they can participate in an environment that was previously inaccessible to them. Perhaps they develop a safer way of expressing anger, learn to tolerate uncertainty, build relationships, gain independence or become more able to advocate for themselves.

Adults may benefit too, and I do not think we need to pretend otherwise. A classroom in which children can participate and regulate is easier to teach. A family in which everybody can communicate safely is easier to live in. Staff have rights too, other children have needs, and nobody should be expected to tolerate being harmed in the name of person-centred practice.

The interests of the child and the adults around them are not always in opposition.

But when the primary outcome of an intervention is that a child becomes quieter, less noticeable, more compliant or simply easier to manage, I think we should be prepared to ask what the child themselves has gained from that change.

If we cannot answer that question, perhaps the target deserves another look.

Adults Are Part of the Environment Too

One of the easiest mistakes to make in behaviour support is to analyse the child's behaviour in extraordinary detail while treating adult behaviour as though it is simply part of the scenery.

Yet adults are behaving too.

We give instructions, repeat ourselves, negotiate, prompt, reassure, withdraw attention, change expectations and sometimes continue with something because changing course feels as though we have “given in”. We also arrive in interactions with our own learning histories. We have behaviours that make us uncomfortable, situations in which we become more directive and moments where our response is influenced by embarrassment, fatigue, urgency or the feeling that other people are watching.

A child shouting in a supermarket may produce a very different adult response when twenty strangers appear to be looking. A refusal at the end of an exhausting day may receive a different response from the same refusal first thing in the morning. A professional who feels confident, supported and curious may respond differently from somebody who feels overwhelmed or frightened.

Acknowledging that is not about blaming adults. Supporting behaviour can be extraordinarily difficult, particularly when risk is involved. It simply means applying the same curiosity to the whole interaction that we apply to the child.

If behaviour occurs in context, we are part of that context.

What Should Good Behaviour Support Actually Achieve?

Perhaps this is where my own thinking about power has developed most. I increasingly think one measure of good behaviour support should be whether the person ultimately has more meaningful control over their own life than they did before our involvement.

Can they communicate more effectively when something is wrong? Can they ask for help or request a break? Can they tolerate situations that previously felt impossible? Can they participate in more environments, relationships and activities? Can they advocate for themselves? Can they say no in ways other people understand, while also developing the ability to cope when somebody else's answer to them is no?

Those outcomes are much more interesting to me than whether somebody has simply become easier to manage.

Behaviour analysis gives us incredibly powerful tools for influencing behaviour. I do not think we should be embarrassed by that fact. Behaviour changes through interaction with environments, and much of our work involves deliberately arranging those environments so that useful skills become more likely and harmful or restrictive patterns become less so.

But powerful tools deserve careful questions.

The fact that we can change a behaviour does not automatically tell us that we should.

A Final Reflection

I do not think the answer is to become suspicious of every behaviour target, every boundary or every adult expectation. Children need adults to make decisions they are not yet able to make for themselves. Schools need expectations. Families need boundaries. Some behaviours are dangerous, some genuinely restrict a child's opportunities, and meaningful change sometimes requires supporting somebody through experiences they would much rather avoid.

But those realities make reflection on power more important, not less.

Before deciding that a behaviour is inappropriate, perhaps we should become more comfortable asking exactly what makes it inappropriate. Is somebody unsafe? Is the child unable to access something important? Are another person's rights being affected? Is this behaviour preventing the child from communicating, learning, developing relationships or becoming more independent? Or is it simply unusual, inconvenient or uncomfortable for the adults around them?

Those are not interchangeable reasons, and I think our science is at its strongest when it helps us make those distinctions rather than simply giving us increasingly sophisticated ways of changing whatever behaviour somebody has decided is undesirable.

The goal of behaviour support should not be to create children who are endlessly agreeable, quiet and easy to direct. Nor should it be to remove every expectation, discomfort or boundary in the name of autonomy. It should be to help children develop the skills they need to communicate, participate, regulate, make meaningful choices, tolerate the choices they cannot make and increasingly influence what happens in their own lives.

As behaviour analysts, we will sometimes hold considerable power in that process. We may influence what gets measured, what gets reinforced, what adults respond to, what environments change and what children are taught to do differently. Pretending that this is neutral does not make our practice more ethical. Being willing to examine it might.

Perhaps the question, then, is not whether we should use our influence.

It is whether the person has more freedom because we did.

And whether, when they eventually need us less, we can look at the power we once held and say that we used it to help them gain more of their own.