Many parents and behavior analysts have experienced the behavioral Whac-a-mole effect. Specifically, you work really hard and you solve a problem: Wow, she sits at the table for dinner! It’s amazing that the lawn mower doesn’t bother him anymore. He doesn’t get upset sharing with his brother! Everyone is celebrating, but… then you get the Whac-a-mole effect.
Specifically, as fast as you solve problems and produce important changes, new problems are starting to crop up. As soon as you successfully treated falling to the floor, all of a sudden you are dealing with throwing, which wasn’t a problem before.
Why? What causes this problem? Over the last few years, I’ve learned the cause from Greg Hanley. Greg very convincingly argues from recent research why this occurs.
Specifically, Greg argues that for any particular child, problem behavior occurs for multiple reasons, and those reasons are similar regardless of the variety of ways the child actually behaves. For example, sometimes he might just whine. But sometimes he yells, falls to the floor, hits, bites, punches, kicks, or knocks over furniture. If those behaviors occur together, there are probably occurring for the same reason.
So the Whac-a-Mole problem turns out to be fairly simple. If you only treat yelling when the child engages in a whole range of other behaviors for the same reason, we would naturally expect those other behaviors to increase. Almost as if the child is thinking “huh, yelling doesn’t work anymore? How about this?” This is still controversial at the time of this writing. But I think Greg is correct. The only long-term solution is a skill building approach, where the behavior meets a natural contingency.