Autism and Challenging Behaviour

A child with an ASD may display challenging behaviour at times. Challenging behaviour in an educational context can be described as any behaviour that interrupts the flow of a lesson, or challenges the authority of the teacher trying to teach a specific task. Challenging behaviour can range from silence when a question is asked, to repetitive tapping of a pencil. The range of challenging behaviour that a child with an ASD could exhibit is quite wide, ranging from silence to excessive talking or echolalia to sensory shut down. Other types of challenging behaviour are of a physical nature such as biting, spitting, hitting and kicking, self harm, or throwing of objects.

Neuro-typical individuals use communication to create and maintain friendships - being the opposite of challenging behaviour and an integral survival skill to reproduce and maintain the species. Autistic individuals do not desire friendships in the same way, only to meet their personal needs. Autistic individuals can have sexual drives, however with a lack of social, physical and personal understanding, they can exhibit this drive in a variety of socially inappropriate ways. Restricted communication desire, ability and skills lead to a self imposed limiting cycle. Inappropriate behavioural issues can then manifest as a result of frustration and lack of methods to express their requests.

Individuals with less severe autism,may have a much harder experience of life. They are aware that they are different because of their special interests. Some people with an ASD are aware that society can find their behaviour challenging by the way that people interact with them; however, they are unable to relate or empathise with others. Their lack of imagination restricts their ability to work out what others are feeling and communication difficulties lead them to take communication literally, as they miss intonation of voice, body language and sub text within a conversation. The ability to only mono task, allowing just one element at a time to be processed may limit them as neuro-typical people multi task as a matter of course.

Spinning and repetitive behaviours can be misinterpreted as being disruptive in individuals with an ASD. These can be the result of the individual shutting out all other sounds and thoughts, providing calm from their disorganised world. Challenging behaviour can be a result of several areas impacting on each other, limited communication can be a factor. Sensory issues involving touch, hearing, sight, taste, vestibular and proprioceptive input or smell may be uncomfortable for individuals. Auditory processing, social-emotional characteristics involving anxiety, low tolerance, fears or anger can cause challenging behaviour. A short attention span and the organisation of the environment may also cause issues that may need investigating when solving challenging behaviour problems.

The interesting part of my teaching is to reduce challenging behaviour by monitoring the above and include reviewing the specific activities and locations of the individual children, changing the duration, location, groupings of the children or change the staffing. Any of these variables can contribute to an escalation or de-escalation of the undesired behaviour. The key is to know the child. Some of the time it is possible to predict the type of behaviour that is just about to arise by “reading” the child and working out what sort of mood they are in. Changing any of these parameters will obviously have an effect on the other children so I need to bear this in mind when I am arranging classroom support assistants, myself and the children in my class.

Some behaviour can be predicted by the time of the week, as some children find Monday mornings difficult as they generally are not able to remember the weekly calendar and are shocked that the routine of the weekend has not continued into Monday, they are surprised weekly that it is a school day. The change of routine for some children can be problematic. The start of term can be difficult for some children who will have been following different routines at home where they may have been less challenged to mix and share with others.