In the world of behavior analysis, understanding the function, or ‘why,’ a behavior occurs is critical to how we help teens and young adults make meaningful changes and achieve BIG goals. Many times, we hear parents and teachers get caught up in myths of motivation and behavior that really don’t help their teen succeed. Over and over, we hear these ideas:
“My teenager is lazy. Unreliable. Has a bad attitude. Likes to push my buttons.”
“This student has an XYZ diagnosis, so that’s the problem.”
“I just need to reason with him more—you know—make him understand.”
These ideas that somehow your teen’s lack of motivation is tied to character flaws, a diagnostic label, or the amount of knowledge we impart as parents and teachers just don’t hold up to what the science of behavior change tells us.
That’s why today, we’re unpacking some of these myths about motivation to help you understand more about your teen’s behavior and how you can help them achieve more goals.
The Environment, The Behavior, and The Consequence
Before we unpack motivation, let’s step back and talk about one of the most fundamental behavior analysis concepts, known as the three-term contingency. As a parent, teacher, or coach, if you understand how this element of behavior change operates, you’ll be well on your way to helping your teen.
In the three-term contingency, we examine three different elements:
A – Antecedents – what’s happening in the environment immediately before behavior. Sometimes you might hear these called triggers, setting events, environmental context, or stimuli.
B – Behaviors – what our teen says or does
C – Consequences – what happens immediately after or in response to the behavior.
That’s it. Believe it or not, but all human behavior can be broken apart into these three components. Once we know and understand them, we can build a strategy to improve motivation and goal achievement.
Motivation and Consequences
Understanding why your teen engages in certain behaviors should start by first understanding the consequences. We can look at environmental variables or antecedents, but it tends to be more helpful to look at consequences first.
There are two categories of consequences your teen experiences each time they engage in a behavior. It’s either access to something desirable or escaping something undesirable.
These consequences translate into four basic functions of behavior:
Access to tangibles or activities
Your teen gains access to something they like. Examples of accessing tangibles might include free time, video games, food, or money.
Access to attention
Your teen gains the attention of another person. That might be a parent, teacher, or friend. Accessing attention often comes in the form of praise but doesn’t always have to be positive in nature.
Access to Automatic or “feel good” consequences.
Sometimes your teen might engage in the behavior because it has immediate consequences that make us feel better. Sometimes these are known as sensory consequences because they provide our physical body with some form of stimulation.
Escape or avoid a consequence
While the other three functions of behavior gain access to something, the final reason why behavior occurs is trying to avoid or escape something aversive in the environment. When your teen pushes vegetables around their plate or stalls at homework time, their behavior escapes or avoids something unpleasant.
There are thousands of different examples of how these four functions contribute to teen behavior and goal setting. Check out some of these resources if you’d like more examples or ideas of how the ABC’s and functions of behavior are related:
- What are escape-maintained behaviors?
- May Institute – Functions of Behavior
- BehaviorBabe Youtube – Functions of Behavior
Social and Non-Social Consequences
Before we talk more about motivation, it’s essential to know both access and escape consequences can be social and non-social. Social consequences are produced by the actions of others. When your teen does well on a math test, and you give them the keys to the car for the weekend, you’re delivering a socially mediated consequence.
Other times, a consequence occurs without others’ influence and happens just based on our interaction with the environment. These are known as non-social consequences or automatic reinforcers. To understand your teen’s motivation, you’ll want to evaluate if social or non-social consequences tend to be more effective at changing behavior.
Motivating Operations: Understanding Your Teen’s MO
In addition to social and non-social features, behavior analysis also allows us to evaluate different components of consequences to help them be more effective for your teen. Understanding your teen’s motivation requires understanding:
Individual Differences
Not all of us are motivated in the same ways at the same time. Our genetics, physiology, and learning histories are unique to us, and they shape how we respond to specific rewards. What you think might be motivating (praise, individual achievement, intrinsic rewards) might not be what motivates your teen. Cheesecake might be motivating for you but would definitely be aversive to someone with a dairy intolerance. The process of understanding your teen’s individual, unique reinforcers is called a ‘preference assessment’ (LINK) and can be a valuable tool in increasing motivation.
Immediacy
Is your teen likely to encounter the consequence immediately after the behavior or after a delay? Consequences delivered with immediacy tend to be more effective, especially for learners with unique needs. The longer you wait to provide a consequence (either a reinforcer or a punisher), the less effective it will be at changing your teen’s behavior.
Size of the Consequence
If you don’t think the size of your reward or punishment needs to correspond to the expectations and outcomes of your teen’s behavior, you’re missing out. Consider the ‘size’ or value of $1 to your teen. Say someone offers you $1 for touching your toes. That’s it. Bending over one time for $1. Pretty good deal, right? Now, what if the offer changes and you receive $1 after every 100 times you touch your toes. Not so exciting now, right?
If a reinforcer’s size is too small or too limited, it changes our motivation to engage in the behavior. Ensuring that significant effort behaviors are rewarded differently from low effort or routine tasks is a critical element of helping your teen succeed.
Deprivation & Satiation
When was the last time your teen encountered a particular reward? Minutes? Hours? Days? Deprivation and satiation describe the relationship between the time and amount of one specific consequence we’ve last received. Deprivation increases the value of accessing tangibles and attention. The opposite happens when we experience a lot of access; we can become satiated, and the value of the reward decreases.
Think of getting a can of soda while working on yard work. If it’s hot outside and your teen hasn’t had anything to drink all day (deprivation), that can of soda might be very rewarding. But getting a can of soda immediately after your teen’s already received 3 cans before might not be as exciting or motivating.
Contingencies
Access and escape consequences aren’t effective if they happen willy-nilly. Parents and teachers who don’t require success will never see it. Imagine if your car only started randomly each time you turned the key over. Sometimes you can drive home, and sometimes you’re left stranded. It wouldn’t take you long to find a different form of transportation! If your teen faces the same unpredictability of consequences resulting from working towards their goal, expect their behavior will become more variable.
Control
Don’t underestimate the value of control to your teen. Most teens and adults find being in control of the stimuli in the environment to be motivating. Giving your teen access to additional control or the ability to make independent choices can go a long way to change behavior.
Summing it Up
In many of our other blog posts, we talk about how using these basic principles of behavior, including ABC’s and the functions of behavior, can motivate and help your teen achieve more goals. There’s a lot we can learn about motivation and why behavior occurs just by understanding these basic principles. If you’d like more information about applying these principles to goal setting, check out our SMART Goal Setting Course.
Further Reading
- BehaviorBabe Youtube – Functions of Behavior
- Life Skills Advocate Blog – ABA Therapy Pros & Cons
- Life Skills Advocate Blog – 6 Steps To Help Your Child Develop A Strong “Why” When Goal Setting
- May Institute – Functions of Behavior
- Vanderbilt University IRIS Center – Learning Key Behavior Principles
- What are escape-maintained behaviors?