The History and Evolution of Behavioral Approaches and Positive Behavioral Interventions

Derrick Dufresne: I was talking to a mom who has a son who's now I think 17. And he doesn't speak, has some cerebral palsy, and the teachers at his school are besides themselves and I'm going to say it the way she said it. She said "Because he grabs their boobs." And they are saying that this is totally inappropriate, unacceptable, and I get that, and you get that, that we just don't do that.

What the mom knew, because she's a mom, is she knew the communicative function of that behavior. And the communicative function of that behavior had nothing to do with grabbing the woman's boob. What it had it had to do with is the women were wearing T-shirts that had lettering on them, and he was fascinated by the difference in colors between the background and the print.

Now the mom's behavioral treatment program, her intervention, her program, was to not deal with her son but to ask the staff that are working with her son to please wear solid color shirts. That's the kind of stuff that professionals get paid a lot of money to figure out. And all they needed to do, if her son couldn't say it, was to talk to the mom.

That's about what people like Herb Lovett and Anne Donnellan and John McGee have challenged us to do. What else is going on here? Don't just look at the behavior. Don't just try to categorize it and say how many times does the person do it? As Tom Nerney from the Center for Self-determination taught me 20 years ago. He has this saying that he says: "We measure how many times somebody gets out of bed in the morning and we document it, and we track it, and we catalogue it. But one of the few things we never do is ask this question: "Why get up at all? Why get up at all?" That's the communicative function of behavior.