Challenging Behaviour - Causes of Challenging Behaviour

Causes of Challenging Behaviour

Challenging behaviour may be caused by many kinds of factors, including:

• biological (pain, medication, the need for sensory stimulation)
• social (boredom, seeking social interaction, the need for an element of control, lack of knowledge of community norms, insensitivity of staff and services to the person's wishes and needs)
• environmental (physical aspects such as noise and lighting, or gaining access to preferred objects or activities)
• psychological (feeling excluded, lonely, devalued, labelled, disempowered, living up to people's negative expectations)

Challenging behaviour may also simply be a means of communication. A lot of the time, challenging behaviour is learned and brings rewards and it is very often possible to teach people new behaviours to achieve the same aims. Behaviour analysts have focused on a developmental model of challenging behaviour.

Experience and research suggests that what professionals call "challenging behaviour" is often a reaction to the challenging environments that services or others create around people with developmental disabilities, and a method of communicating dissatisfaction with the failure of services or others to listen for what kind of life makes most sense to the person, especially where services or others create lifestyles and relationships that are centred on what suits them or the service and its staff rather than what suits the person.

Challenging behaviour can often be viewed as a ‘behavioural equivalent’ of a mental health problem. However, research evidence indicates that challenging behaviors and mental health problems are relatively independent conditions.

A common principle in behaviour management is looking for the message an individual is communicating through their challenging behaviour: "All behaviour has meaning". This is a core in the functional analysis process.

Children communicate through their behaviour, especially those who have not acquired language and vocabulary skills to tell the adult what the problem is.

In adults with developmental disabilities certain types of challenging behaviour can predict contact with police and hospital admission.