Introduction

When children or young people develop difficult or dangerous behaviours, particularly if these behaviours put others at risk of injury, it can quickly become very frightening for anyone close by. Immediate action is often required to keep everyone safe, but often the adults who are responsible for taking this action feel out of their depth and very frightened too. The reasons why children and young people develop these sorts of extreme behaviours are often very poorly understood, which makes it even harder for those who are trying to de-escalate these behaviours.

This has been written to help anyone in this situation, however, it may be particularly helpful for staff working across education, health, and social care.

1. Children and young people with difficult or dangerous behaviour are very often not choosing this behaviour, it’s generally beyond their conscious control. Nearly always, it’s driven by anxiety. In that moment, the child feels so threatened that their autonomous nervous system has triggered their survival instinct, and they are in a state of fight and flight which means they are desperately trying to protect themselves from what they see in that moment as terrifying and threatening. It’s generally self-protective behaviour, it’s not that the child is intentionally being aggressive towards other people or property, more that they are trying to keep themselves safe.

2. Anxiety in children and young people – Anxiety is a difficult word to really understand, especially when used to refer to how children and young people feel. I think that “Fear” is a better word to use, and when we substitute “Fear” for “Anxiety” it’s easier to empathise with the extreme levels of distress, fear, confusion, and the sense of feeling threatened that children and young people with heightened anxiety levels can experience.

3. Help children and young people to feel safe – if “feeling threatened” is how anxiety is experienced, then “feeling safe” is the opposite, and what a child needs help to feel whenever they become overwhelmed with anxiety. Instead of thinking in terms of “How can I make this child behave?”, you are more likely to achieve better outcomes if you think in terms of “How can I help this child to feel safe and happy?”

4. Controlling behaviour – is a very common sign of severe anxiety in children and young people, and in adults too. When the world seems uncertain, scary, and unpredictable, we all try to take control of whatever we can to enable us to feel safer, and to minimise any unexpected surprises.

5. Demand Avoidance – This is a very common sign of severe anxiety too. Virtually every child who becomes so anxious that they become difficult and dangerous will have some level of demand avoidant behaviour. It’s also one of the most noticeable forms of anxiety-related behaviours in a group setting such as a family or a classroom, and it can seem to cause the most disruption and upset in themselves and others who are with them at the time. Virtually every child who is prone to anxiety will become demand avoidant sometimes, and it’s a very clear indicator that the child isn’t coping well and is feeling extremely anxious. If a child presents with demand-avoidant behaviour it does not mean that they would meet the diagnostic criteria for Pathological Demand Avoidance, or PDA as it’s more commonly known. Demand avoidance is a very common response to anxiety, PDA would only be diagnosed in a tiny handful of these children and young people.

6. All behaviour is a form of communication. If a child behaves in a difficult or dangerous way, what are they trying to tell you? Keep trying to think about what could be going on below the surface, where you can’t see. In most children and young people, it’s when their behaviour is at its most extreme, they feel frightened, threatened, confused and distressed and need help to feel safe again. Getting cross or imposing sanctions is likely to escalate their sense of fear and of being in danger themselves, which in turn is likely to escalate the difficult and dangerous behaviour as well.

7. Stay Curious. Be Kind. When we stay curious, we keep asking the “why” questions, and that helps to keep our minds and our hearts open to finding the reasons and trying to help. When this happens, when we stay properly curious, it’s almost impossible to become judgemental.

8. Major causes of anxiety-led behaviour in SEND children and young people – nearly always, any difficult or dangerous behaviour is due to one of three things –

1. Sensory processing differences – when a child or young person experiences sensory input differently.
2. Change/Transitions – many children and young people find it difficult to move from one activity to another.
3. Communication – there are several ways that a child or young person’s communication skills may be impaired, and they are sometimes so subtle that they get missed.

When a child or young person’s needs in these three areas are not identified and addressed, it can cause them acute distress and confusion, and is likely to impact on their ability to learn and to take on board information. This can lead to extreme anxiety which can then cause an escalation in difficult and dangerous behaviours.  Newbold Hope offers training in how to identify all three of these areas of difficulty. Our training also shares dozens of easy-to-implement tips and strategies which can help this group of children and young people to overcome these difficulties, so that they are happier and calmer, and less likely to become overwhelmed with anxiety or to have an extreme episode of behaviour.

9. Masking – For many highly anxious children and young people, their immediate environment and the people in it feels so frightening and unsafe that they work really hard to hold it all together and to bottle everything up so that it doesn’t show. This is called “masking”, and it’s a very common coping mechanism that children and young people use to get through the whole day at school. They may present as being calm, well-behaved and compliant, but inside they are working so hard at hiding their anxiety that they are unlikely to have the capacity to learn very much of what is being taught. When they get home, all those intense feelings that have been squashed and buried all day can come gushing out in a torrent of aggressive behaviour which can be expressed physically or verbally. Family members can get injured, houses can get trashed, and offensive language used can be very hurtful. This group of children, young people, and their families are particularly poorly served and are often subjected to potentially damaging misunderstandings and wrongful assumptions. When a child seems quiet and well-behaved at school and then behaves in extreme ways at home, it’s easy to take things at face value and assume that the child is happy at school but that there is something wrong with the home environment. In reality, the complete opposite is true. This group of children and young people generally feel unsafe to be themselves in a school environment, but they feel so safe at home that they are able to be themselves and to release all the emotions that they’ve had to hold onto all day. Masking all day long every day can have a significant and long-term impact on the child’s mental and emotional wellbeing, Children and young people who seem “fine in school” may actually be anything but fine, and the signs will be there if they are observed closely enough. This is particularly important if parents are reporting that the child is behaving very differently at home.

10. Traditional disciplinary methods simply won’t work with the vast majority of children and young people who are behaving in difficult and dangerous ways due to their high levels of anxiety. All they are likely to do is to increase the child’s anxiety levels and make them feel even more frightened, distressed and confused, which is then likely to escalate any behaviours. This is particularly true of any disciplinary method which uses shame in an attempt to redirect behaviours.

11. Shame is a very powerful emotion that can eat away at a child or young person’s self-esteem and self-confidence and can cause self-loathing. This quote from Brene Brown’s book “Daring Greatly” says it all: “Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.” Shame is isolating, lonely and can have devastating consequences in children and young people, if they carry too much of it for too long. Shame causes children and young people to withdraw from their peers, to become depressed, to develop self-harming behaviours and suicidal ideation or even suicidal attempts and can lead to addictive behaviour in later life which can involve alcohol, drug misuse or gambling. Children and young people who are prone to difficult and dangerous behaviour are often living with significant levels of shame, which will be impacting on so many other aspects of their life. Making children and young people feel ashamed of their actions has long been a key part of the traditional disciplinary approaches used throughout society, by families and by schools, yet it can be damaging and lead to much poorer outcomes throughout their lives.

12. Newbold Hope delivers training, support and other resources to families and to professional staff who work with this group of families. Our training All our training is designed to enable the adults around the child or young person to develop the knowledge, the skills and the confidence to support children and young people to significantly reduce their difficult and dangerous behaviour episodes in terms of frequency, intensity and duration. Through our work, many children and young people have moved beyond these behaviours altogether, and are happier, calmer and are able to look forward to a much more promising future.

Please contact Yvonne Newbold on yvonne@yvonnenewbold.com to find out more.

You may also find Yvonne’s TED Talk helpful too - https://www.ted.com/talks/yvonne_newbold_how_to_meet_your_child_s_difficult_behavior_with_compassion 

Yvonne Newbold MBE

Founder, Newbold Hope

March 2023

©Yvonne Newbold 2023