The first time you drove a car, you probably started out in a parking lot. There, you learned what it felt like to turn the wheel properly, and how much pressure to put on the gas and brakes. Then, you started driving slowly on some streets that weren’t very busy. Finally, you learned to drive on busy city streets and highways. At some point in the learning process, you practiced driving at night or in bad weather. No one would realistically expect someone with no driving experience to be able to handle difficult driving situations on the first day.
Yet, that is often what is expected of children with disabilities who engage in problem behaviors, especially if you work in public schools. The only long-term effective treatment for problem behaviors is to teach the appropriate social skills. When you work in schools, the expectation is that once the behavior plan is written, the BCBA will provide training to all team members, and then the plan will be implemented across the whole day in every situation from the first day.
That’s the equivalent of expecting someone to drive in bad weather at night through city or highway traffic on their first day driving. It is just unrealistic to expect that it will be safe and effective.
Now, many school professionals and BCBAs will tell you that they have successfully implemented behavior plans everywhere, all the time, from the first day. It certainly can be done–sometimes. The major way that this is usually accomplished is what I call limitations or Greg Hanley calls “Behavior Mollification.” Specifically, this involves doing all sorts of things to prevent problems from occurring. Examples might include reducing the amount of academics required or not refusing requests. That’s probably appropriate as a part of treatment in some cases, especially at the beginning. But I’ve seen situations where people are using dozens of different strategies to prevent problems. Then, because the behavior has been reduced or eliminated, they think the treatment was successful.
Of course, these methods do not lead to long term success as it is not likely to generalize to different situations or last over time. Eventually, we have to teach children the skills needed for them to be successful under real world conditions. That is how you judge success, not whether the staff can mollify everything to prevent problems.