Imagine walking into a meeting with a specialist who promised they could explain why your neurodivergent teen or young adult behaved in specific ways. For some parents and teachers, that might feel like winning the lottery.
When the specialist begins, they state simply, “All human behavior, including your child’s, can be described by one of the four functions of behavior.” Really? Just four things? There’s no way it could be that easy.
It can seem like an oversimplification, and yet specialists (including behavior analysts) do describe human behavior in terms of four primary functions. Those four give you a starting framework for why a teen or young adult does something, whether it is to avoid something, gain attention, get access to something they want, or because it feels good and helps them self-regulate.
Knowing the four categories is the easy half. Working out which one is driving the behavior in front of you, with a person old enough to give you their own account of it, is the half that changes what you do next week.
TL;DR
If you already know the four functions and still can’t tell which one you’re looking at, that gap is what this article is about:
- What do the four functions of behavior actually describe, and what do they leave out?
- How do you work out which function is driving one specific behavior?
- What does escape look like at 15 or 40, rather than at 5?
- How do you decide whether a behavior needs changing at all?
- What do you do when you realize you read the function wrong?
This article explains a framework behavior professionals use, so you can form a better hypothesis about what is going on. It is not a substitute for a formal functional behavior assessment, and Life Skills Advocate offers executive function coaching rather than behavioral or medical services.
Two Things to Know About Behavior
Before we begin to tease apart the functions, let’s first level set on two specific items that are foundational to understanding the four functions of behavior.
First, behavior is observable and measurable. The functions of behavior aren’t particularly helpful in addressing concepts like “feeling depressed,” “laziness,” or “negative thinking” that can’t be observed. We can observe and measure behaviors associated with these concepts though, like little or no appetite, excessive sleeping, or watching television instead of completing math problems.
Second, behavior doesn’t happen randomly. It tends to be motivated by a specific purpose and to follow recognizable patterns, often influenced by antecedents and consequences. If we can’t agree that there are patterns in behavior, and instead all behavior happens out of random chance, there’s little usefulness in really any type of education or intervention.
Once we agree on those two assumptions, the four functions themselves are quick to lay out.
What Are the Four Functions of Behavior?
An easy way we like to describe the four functions of behavior is the acronym SEAT:
- S is for sensory stimulation
- E is for escape
- A is for attention
- T is for tangibles
Those four labels are the whole model. Everything after this is about telling them apart in a real person, and knowing where the model stops being reliable.
S: Sensory (Automatic)
The first function of behavior we’ll discuss are behaviors maintained by sensory stimulation. Behaviors that function to obtain sensory stimulation occur because they feel good, relieve stress, or meet some sensory need that an individual has. These behaviors are automatically reinforcing to the individual.
This type of behavior is often referred to as automatic reinforcement, because the behavior itself provides the reinforcement without any external input.
Sensory Behavior in Everyday Life
- Twirling hair on your finger while driving
- Rocking, pacing, or tensing up muscles in the face or hands
- Seeking out textures, sounds, or specific strong smells
- “Rough-housing,” crashing into things, or bumping into others
- Repeating actions, like spinning in a chair or tapping a pencil
This is just a small list of the many thousands of ways we see teens and young adults engage in sensory or automatically reinforced behaviors. These behaviors occur in all environments and, while they are generally not primarily socially-driven, they can still be influenced by social context in some cases.
The form changes with age while the function stays put. At 5 it might be spinning in a desk chair. At 15 it is more likely to be a leg that never stops bouncing, a hoodie worn indoors year-round, or music in one ear through every homework session. At 40 it can look like pacing the length of the kitchen through every phone call.
Why Sensory Behavior Is Rarely the Problem
Behaviors maintained by sensory stimulation are a common topic for children and adults with various forms of neurodivergence, including autism, ADHD, and sensory processing differences. Some individuals engage in higher rates of self-stimulatory behaviors, or “stimming,” than others, which can in some cases impact their learning in other areas.
For parents and teachers who want a longer-form reframe of behavior-as-communication rather than behavior-as-pathology, Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism by Barry Prizant is one of the autism-acceptance texts most often recommended in neurodiversity-affirming parent and professional circles.
E: Escape Maintained Behaviors
The “E” in our acronym SEAT stands for escape. The second function of behaviors are those known as escape- or avoidance-maintained behaviors. Exactly as the word describes, these behaviors help us escape, delay, or avoid an undesirable thing from occurring in the environment. When someone engages in escape behaviors, they are actively trying to get away from a situation they experience as unpleasant.
These behaviors also tend to have a social component, usually occurring in response to a specific person, event, or a request to perform an activity. A person learns avoidance behaviors through repeated experiences where escaping a task provides relief or a more desirable outcome.
What Escape Looks Like From 15 to 40
Parents and teachers may be all too familiar with escape maintained behaviors, as they are commonly the most challenging to address with teens and young adults.
- Leaving the classroom when asked to work on an assignment
- Arguing about completing chores
- Stall tactics (organizing, making a snack, sharpening a pencil) instead of starting homework
- Whining about eating vegetables
- Leaving the room to end a difficult conversation
Escape is the function that changes shape most dramatically with age. At 4 it is walking away from a table task. At 17 it is one specific class that never quite gets attended, while five other classes are fine. At 30 it is an inbox with 40 unopened messages, 38 of which are harmless.
Note that not all escape maintained behaviors are inherently “bad” or “wrong.” Putting on sunglasses to escape the brightness when we step outside. Taking a shower after the gym to avoid smelling badly. There are thousands of different behaviors we engage in to escape or avoid things that help us adhere to social norms.
Why Avoidance Gets Misread as Defiance
Understanding the function of escape is especially important for neurodivergent individuals, because outsiders may label avoidance behaviors as “defiance” or “laziness” rather than examining the learning history that contributes to the behavior. Tasks that may appear straightforward to some, like starting homework, engaging in social interactions, or completing household chores, can feel overwhelming due to executive functioning difficulties, sensory sensitivities, or anxiety.
When parents and teachers recognize that escape behaviors can be a way of communicating distress, they can respond with support rather than adding more aversives. Sustained escape under sensory or social load can also tip into autistic meltdowns, which are a different event with a different response.
By addressing the root cause of escape behaviors, neurodivergent teens and young adults can learn healthier coping mechanisms, build resilience, and gain confidence in managing challenges.
A: Attention Maintained Behaviors
Next let’s talk about the “A” in SEAT, otherwise known as attention-maintained. Whether it’s saying “hello” when you greet another person or telling a joke to a group of friends, behaviors maintained by attention happen because of the social response or attention provided by others.
In classroom settings, a student might engage in disruptive behavior to gain peer attention, such as making jokes to get classmates to laugh. Understanding the role of peers in shaping behavior helps when you’re working out how to teach more workable social interactions.
Everyday Attention Behaviors
- Interrupting conversations to draw focus back
- Telling a joke loudly in the classroom to get classmates to laugh
- Repeating a behavior, even after being told to stop, to keep someone engaged
- Exaggerating stories to hold other’s attention
- Filming dangerous stunts, pranks or impulsive behaviors to post for others on social media
Past childhood, the attention function tends to get quieter and harder to spot. A 16-year-old checking whether a message was read. A 25-year-old whose group chat participation spikes on the days they feel worst. The tell is usually who is in the room, not what the behavior looks like.
“Attention-Seeking” Is the Wrong Phrase
For neurodivergent individuals, attention-maintained behaviors are highly person-specific. They’re sometimes called “attention-seeking” behaviors, and that label is worth dropping, because it lands as an accusation rather than a description.
What the function describes is a need for connection, and it shows up most when difficulties with communication or executive functioning have made the ordinary routes to connection harder to use. Someone who could reliably get a response by asking would generally just ask.
T: Tangibles
The final function of behavior in our SEAT acronym is tangibles. Access to a tangible item or activity drives many human behaviors, especially when that item is of high value or in short supply. Tangible seeking behaviors occur any time we engage in a behavior because we desire something or want to continue something we enjoy.
When Access Is the Whole Point
Behaviors maintained by access to tangibles are often some of the clearest for caregivers and teachers to identify:
- Going to work in order to access a paycheck
- Asking politely to use the iPad
- Begging a parent for the car keys to go out with friends
- Arguing or shoving a caregiver’s hand away when asked to turn over their phone or game controller when time limits are enforced
Teens and young adults can have particular objects that become highly preferred, like a favorite device, snack, or hobby, and may struggle with delayed gratification or transitioning away from them. The adult version rarely disappears. It relocates. The argument that only ever happens when the console goes off at 11pm is the same function as the four-year-old at the checkout, wearing better vocabulary.
Wanting Something Is Not Entitlement
Without recognizing this function, adults might mistakenly view these behaviors as “defiance” or “entitlement” rather than a difficulty with flexibility or emotional control.
By identifying when a behavior is driven by a desire for tangibles, parents and teachers can support autonomy by setting clear expectations and encouraging negotiation and patience. That also builds decision-making skills in a way that respects the learner’s agency, and it heads off power struggles, because adults can use proactive approaches such as visual schedules, choice-making opportunities, and reinforcement systems.
How to Tell Which Function It Is
You cannot see a function. You can only watch a behavior and the things sitting on either side of it, then make your best read of which of the four functions of behavior it is serving. That read is a hypothesis rather than a verdict, and treating it as one is what makes everything after it work.
Watch What Happens Right Before and Right After
The method rests on two questions. What was happening immediately before the behavior, and what changed immediately after it? Behavior analysts call this the antecedent-behavior-consequence sequence, or ABC.
Write down three or four instances, with the time of day, who was present, and what was being asked. Patterns show up in when a behavior happens as much as in how often, which is why Touchette and colleagues introduced the scatter plot in 1985: plotting occurrences on a simple time grid can expose stimulus control that a running tally hides.
The antecedent half is the easier one to skip and usually the more informative one. Paying attention to triggers and cues often tells you more than the behavior itself does. A printable behavior log gives you the grid, the tally, and a graphing sheet in one place.
Run One Behavior Through All Four
Take a single behavior and test each function against it in turn. Say a 16-year-old shuts their laptop and leaves the room whenever a parent brings up college applications.
- Sensory? Unlikely. It only happens in that one conversation, never when they are alone.
- Attention? Possible, but the direction is wrong. They leave rather than stay, and it doesn’t escalate when someone follows them.
- Tangible? No. Nothing is gained, and the laptop was already theirs.
- Escape? This one fits. The conversation ends, immediately and reliably, every time.
Escape is now the working hypothesis, and it earns a test. Make the conversation smaller: five minutes, one question, or a written note instead of a face-to-face ask. Then watch whether the laptop stays open.
Which Function Is This?
These are rules of thumb rather than tests. They’re the patterns worth checking first when you’re sorting one behavior into one of the four functions of behavior.
| Function | What it gets the person | The tell in a teen or adult | What usually helps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensory | A physical state they want, or relief from one | Happens alone as readily as in company. No audience needed. | Meet the sensory need directly. Often nothing needs changing. |
| Escape | Distance from a demand | Clusters around one class, task, or inbox, not everywhere | Shrink the demand, or teach a way to ask for a break |
| Attention | A response from someone | Changes shape depending on who is in the room | Front-load connection instead of rationing it |
| Tangible | Access to a thing or activity | Follows a “no,” or the end of a preferred activity | Make the route to it predictable |
Support It or Change It?
Sorting a behavior into one of the four functions of behavior tells you what that behavior is doing for someone. It does not tell you whether the behavior needs to change, and the model is silent on that question by design. Three questions usually settle it:
- Is it harmful? To the person or to someone else. Not uncomfortable to watch, genuinely harmful.
- Is it getting in the way of something the person wants? Not something you want for them. Something they would name themselves.
- Or does it only look unusual? If the answer is that it bothers an observer and costs the person nothing, there is no behavior problem to solve.
Only the first two are worth acting on. A hand flap that makes a stranger look twice, a hoodie worn in June, a teenager who paces while thinking: these have a function, and the function is fine.
This is not a fringe position within behavior analysis itself. In a 2024 article in Behavior Analysis in Practice, three behavior analysts write that the goal is to optimize an autistic person’s life without sacrificing their autistic self, and that sometimes this means the person does not need any intervention at all.
They also ask practitioners to check whether a given goal serves the client or the comfort of the people around them. That question belongs to parents and teachers just as much as it belongs to professionals.
Where a behavior genuinely is getting in someone’s way, the useful move is usually skill-building rather than removal. Teaching executive function skills that make the underlying task workable tends to outlast any plan aimed at the behavior itself.
When It’s Not Clear Cut
The four functions of behavior are cleaner on paper than they are in a real week. As we learn more about neurodivergent individuals, behavior analysts and learning theorists better understand that there’s often a synthesized function, or multiple variables that play into a teen or young adult’s behaviors.
Dr. Gregory Hanley, a professor and behavior analyst, makes the point this way: there are very few situations in which someone escapes a mundane demand like academic instruction and then sits motionless, satisfied with the relief alone. Most of the young people he works with, “as well as most of us,” escape toward something as much as away from something.
While the four functions are informative in helping us create systems to support behavior change, there’s nuance to consider. Here is how they commonly combine:
- Avoiding homework to gain screen time (escape and tangible). A teen delays starting their homework by arguing with their parents. Eventually, they “need a break” to calm down and end up watching YouTube or playing video games instead. The behavior allows them to escape work and access a preferred activity.
- Skipping class to hang out with friends (escape and attention). A student frequently asks to go to the nurse’s office during a difficult class but instead meets up with friends in the hallway. They’re escaping an unpleasant situation while also gaining social interaction.
- Arguing about bedtime to stay up and play video games (escape, tangible, and attention). A young adult resists a healthy bedtime by complaining, negotiating, or having an emotional outburst. Their parents engage in a lengthy discussion (providing attention), and they ultimately get extra time on their device (tangible) while avoiding sleep (escape).
Where the Four-Function Model Runs Out
The four functions get presented almost everywhere as settled fact. Among the people who use them professionally, they are treated as something looser than that, and the reason is in the original paper.
The framework traces back to a study by Iwata and colleagues on self-injury in nine people with developmental disabilities. The researchers ran each participant through a series of analogue conditions that varied three things: whether play materials were present, whether demands were high or low, and whether social attention was absent, noncontingent, or contingent.
The four functions are essentially the categories those test conditions produced. They were a study design before they were a model of behavior.
That paper is worth knowing for its result as well as its method. A clear single maintaining condition emerged for six of the nine participants. In the study that established the whole approach, roughly a third of cases did not sort cleanly into one function. That was nine people and one behavior type, so it is not a general failure rate, but it is a useful corrective to the idea that every behavior has one findable answer.
Practitioners still argue about the count. Some hold that there are effectively two categories, some four, some that the number is unlimited because every person’s environment differs. “Control” is the most commonly proposed fifth, though others argue it collapses back into escape or tangible and can’t be observed on its own.
It is also worth naming where this framework usually shows up. Functional assessment is a core tool in applied behavior analysis, and ABA carries sustained criticism from autistic adults. You don’t have to settle that argument to use the four functions well. Understanding why a behavior happens and deciding to eliminate it are two different acts, and the criticism is mostly about the second one.
None of this makes the model useless. It makes it shorthand: a fast, mostly reliable way to sort a behavior into a category so you can do something sensible next. Treat it as a starting point rather than a settled account of motive and it holds up well.
How to Tell You Read It Wrong
Escape and attention get mistaken for each other constantly, and the mix-up is easy to miss because both produce a change in what the other person does.
The tell is simple. You put a support in place based on your read, and nothing changes, or it gets worse. A break offered to a behavior that was really about connection can land as a dismissal. Extra check-ins offered to a behavior that was really about escape add one more demand to the pile.
The cheapest next move is not to start over. Change one variable, keep watching, and see whether the behavior moves. If offering a break did nothing, try front-loading attention before the request instead of after the behavior.
You’re not looking for certainty here. You’re looking for the read that makes next week easier than last week.
Using This on Yourself
Nothing about the four functions of behavior requires the person being observed to be someone else. If you’ve read this far thinking about your own inbox, your own pacing, or your own habit of reorganizing a desk instead of using it, the same questions work.
Watch what happens right before. Watch what changes right after. Ask which of the four the change belongs to.
Self-observation has a real advantage and a real weakness. The advantage is access: you know what the task felt like from the inside, which no observer can see. The weakness is that self-report drifts. People tend to answer in the direction that reads better, and they rate themselves against whatever they treat as normal, which moves depending on who they’ve been around lately.
So the strongest read usually combines both. What you notice about yourself, plus what someone who knows you well notices about you, will beat either one alone. If a partner has been saying for two years that you get short specifically on days with meetings, that is data, whether or not it matches your own account.
The payoff is the same as it is for anyone else. Once you can name a behavior as escape, the question changes from “why won’t I start this” to “what about this specific demand is worth avoiding,” and the second question has answers.
Practical Function-Based Strategies for Parents and Teachers
So now that you know about SEAT and the four primary functions of behavior, you might be wondering “why is this so important?” or “why do behavior analysts care so much about function?”
Understanding the four functions of behavior is only the first step. What changes things day to day is knowing how to respond. When parents and teachers recognize why their neurodivergent learner is engaging in a certain behavior, they can provide better support and guidance, applied consistently across settings.
Identify the Function
Before addressing a behavior, work out why it’s happening. Does your teen avoid homework because it’s too difficult (escape)? Do they interrupt conversations to gain attention?
Functional Behavior Assessments (FBA) are commonly used to determine the underlying function of a behavior, gathering data on when, where, and why a behavior occurs.
Open communication with the teen matters just as much. Instead of assuming motives, just ask. Questions like “What’s making this task hard for you?” or “What would make this easier?” or “Tell me what happens when you ____,” can be highly informative. Creating a nonjudgmental space for conversation can provide deeper insight into their experiences.
For a free set of data sheets that can be used for observing and charting behaviors (and helping you to identify the function of behavior), check out our .pdf download here:
Provide Alternatives
Once the function is clear, the next step is teaching and modeling alternative behaviors that serve the same purpose in a more workable way.
If a teen frequently escapes difficult tasks by chatting with others, help them break work into smaller steps or offer scheduled social breaks. If they seek attention through disruptions, encourage them to use a signal (like raising a hand or texting a parent) to ask for interaction in a respectful way.
For tangible-seeking behaviors, consider setting up clear guidelines around access. Instead of giving into demands, implement a structured system where they can have access at specific time intervals regardless of behavior, or where they can earn preferred activities or items through appropriate actions. The key is to replace the problem behavior with a functional and acceptable alternative that still meets their needs.
Reinforce Positive Behavior
Acknowledging and celebrating small wins can significantly impact a teen’s willingness to adopt new behaviors. Instead of focusing only on what they did wrong, highlight what they did right. A simple “I noticed you took a break instead of shutting down!” can reinforce their efforts and build confidence.
Reinforcement doesn’t have to be material rewards. It can include verbal praise, extra free time, or taking a chore or two off the to-do list for the day. The goal is to make positive behaviors feel just as rewarding, if not more so, than the challenging behaviors they replace.
Collaborate With Your Learner
Involve your teen or young adult in the problem-solving process. Rather than dictating rules, work together to build approaches that feel fair and manageable. Ask, “What would help you stay focused during homework?” or “How can we make chores easier for you?” When learners feel heard and have a say in their own behavior plans, they’re more likely to follow through.
If you want a structured method for these conversations, The Explosive Child walks through Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, a model built around solving problems with your kid rather than imposing consequences on them.
Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model is the most structured version of the conversation step above. It gives you the actual wording for solving a problem with your teen instead of handing down a rule, which is the part that usually stalls once you know the function.
Best for: Parents and teachers who can name the function and get stuck at the conversation itself. Its examples skew younger than teens, so you will be translating some of them upward.
When you and your learner are ready to formalize a plan together, a written agreement can help make expectations and rewards clear for both of you. Our behavior contract template includes a brainstorming worksheet for defining the goal, choosing rewards and consequences, plus a signature page so both parties are invested in the plan. All of our free worksheets and exercises live in one place inside our free resource library.
Gather Support From Others
Before you begin tackling the functions of your teen’s behaviors on your own, it can also be helpful to rally support from others on your learner’s care coordination team. Find out whether the IEP team or other service providers are already targeting specific behavior functions. Some of these professionals may have already identified approaches and resources that were helpful in one setting and could be generalized to another area of your teen’s life.
Reaching out to professionals with experience in coaching can provide useful insight into behavior patterns, and schools running school-wide systems to support behavior often have some of this in place already.
Coaching and therapy are different jobs, and which one fits depends on what the behavior is doing. Coaching works on the skill underneath the behavior; therapy addresses mental health. If what you are seeing looks more like anxiety, trauma, or depression than a skills gap, finding a neurodiversity-affirming therapist is the better first call.
By identifying the function behind behaviors, providing alternatives, reinforcing positive actions, and collaborating with teens, parents and teachers can create an environment where neurodivergent individuals feel supported and genuinely involved. Instead of just managing behaviors, these approaches help build long-term skills for self-regulation, communication, and independence.
Key Research on the Four Functions of Behavior
Four findings worth quoting if you’re writing, teaching, or presenting on the four functions of behavior.
| Finding | What it means | Source |
|---|---|---|
| In the foundational functional-analysis study, a clear single maintaining condition emerged for six of the nine participants. | Even in the research that produced the four functions of behavior, roughly a third of cases did not sort cleanly into one function. | Iwata et al., Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1994 |
| Plotting when a behavior happens can expose patterns that counting how often it happens will miss. | A simple time grid often beats a tally sheet for spotting what sets a behavior off. | Touchette et al., JABA, 1985 |
| Behavior analysts have published guidance on integrating neurodiversity into practice in response to autistic advocates’ criticism. | The critique is being taken seriously inside the field, not only outside it. | Mathur, Renz and Tarbox, Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2024 |
| Functional assessment is widely misunderstood, and the obstacles to running one are practical as much as technical. | Parents and teachers can learn a useful amount of this. It is not purely a specialist activity. | Hanley, Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2012 |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the four functions of behavior?
The four functions of behavior are sensory, escape, attention, and tangible, often remembered with the acronym SEAT. Each one names what a behavior gets the person doing it: a physical state, distance from a demand, a response from someone else, or access to something they want.
What does SEAT stand for in behavior?
SEAT stands for sensory, escape, attention, and tangible. It is a memory aid rather than a technical term, so you’ll also see the same four listed as EATS, or taught in a different order, and some sources treat “automatic” and “sensory” as separate ideas rather than one category. No version of the acronym is more official than another.
Are there five functions of behavior, or seven?
You’ll find all of those numbers in use, and that reflects a real disagreement rather than someone being wrong. The four-function version is the most widely taught, and the section above on where the model runs out covers who argues for what.
The “seven” is a different thing entirely. It refers to the dimensions of applied behavior analysis set out by Baer, Wolf and Risley in 1968, which describe how the field is supposed to work rather than why a behavior happens. So a page listing seven and a page listing four are not contradicting each other. They are answering two different questions, and only the four functions of behavior are about why your teenager left the room.
Do the four functions of behavior apply to adults?
Yes, and the framework arguably gets more useful with age rather than less. The functions themselves don’t change. What changes is the form they take: escape at 5 is leaving a table task, escape at 30 is an unopened inbox that has nothing frightening in it.
The one real difference is that an adult can tell you what the behavior is doing for them, which is a source the model was originally built to work without. Iwata’s team developed it to infer motive in people who could not report it directly, so with a teen or an adult you have information the method never assumed you would have.
What if a behavior serves more than one function at once?
Often, and that is the normal case rather than the complicated one. Escaping a task while also landing a preferred activity is probably the most common combination there is, which is the pattern Gregory Hanley describes above: the escape tends to run toward something rather than into empty relief.
You work with a best guess. Outside a controlled setting you will rarely isolate a single clean function, and that is fine, because the goal was never a correct label. The goal is a response that helps.
If a behavior looks like escape plus tangible, addressing the escape half usually moves things more than addressing the tangible half. But you find that out by trying it and watching, not by reasoning it out in advance, and sometimes you will be wrong twice before you are right.
Do I need a behavior analyst to figure out the function?
It depends on what you’re dealing with. For behavior that is dangerous, escalating, or happening at school where a formal plan is involved, a Functional Behavior Assessment run by a qualified professional is the right call.
For the everyday version, a parent or teacher can get a long way with careful observation. Hanley’s 2012 review describes the obstacles to functional assessment as practical as much as technical, which is an argument for more people learning some of this rather than fewer.
Where the line falls between those two cases is a judgment call, and it depends as much on what help you can actually reach as on the behavior itself.
Next Steps
Whichever behavior you’ve been holding in mind while reading this is probably still unlabeled, and that is exactly the right place to start.
- Watch one behavior for a week before you change anything about it. Note the time, who was there, and what happened right after. That is the whole assignment.
- Run it through all four, using the table above, and write down the function that fits best plus your second-best guess. The second guess matters when the first one turns out wrong.
- Ask. One question, low stakes, not in the middle of the behavior. “What makes that one hard?” is usually enough.
- Consider coaching if the behavior is in the way of something they want. Executive function coaching works on the underlying skill rather than the behavior, and our free executive functioning assessment is a reasonable way to see which skills are involved.
Further Reading
- Toward a Functional Analysis of Self-Injury – Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman and Richman, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
- A Scatter Plot for Identifying Stimulus Control of Problem Behavior – Touchette, MacDonald and Langer, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
- Affirming Neurodiversity Within Applied Behavior Analysis – Mathur, Renz and Tarbox, Behavior Analysis in Practice
- Functional Assessment of Problem Behavior: Dispelling Myths, Overcoming Implementation Obstacles, and Developing New Lore – Gregory Hanley, Behavior Analysis in Practice
- Why Synthesize Contingencies in a Functional Analysis? – Gregory Hanley
- Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism – Barry Prizant
- The Explosive Child – Ross Greene
- Data Collection Worksheets – Life Skills Advocate
- Behavior Contract Template – Life Skills Advocate
- Free Executive Functioning Worksheets – Life Skills Advocate
- Free Executive Functioning Assessment – Life Skills Advocate
- Executive Function Coaching – Life Skills Advocate
- Understanding Autistic Meltdowns – Life Skills Advocate
- Executive Functioning and Challenging Behavior – Life Skills Advocate
- Paying Attention to Triggers and Cues – Life Skills Advocate
- Executive Functioning Skills 101: Flexibility – Life Skills Advocate
- Emotional Control – Life Skills Advocate
- Customizing Visual Schedules for Every Learner – Life Skills Advocate
- Executive Function and Resilience – Life Skills Advocate
- PBIS and Executive Function – Life Skills Advocate
- How to Find a Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapist – Life Skills Advocate