Prof. Kristen Bottema-Beutel and team (2024) consider the challenges of trying to intervene with ‘problem behaviour’ when there is no agreed definition of what this is. They found that only about 4 out of every 10 studies on ‘problem behaviour’ made an attempt to explain what ‘problem behaviour’ might be. There were some 67 different alleged ‘problem behaviours’ from autistic young people in the research papers studied, but most of these were stereotypical behaviours (often known as ‘stimming’) such as flapping of hands or rocking. As stimming is usually used by the person for regulation, and generally improves quality of life for them, it is usually not a ‘problem behaviour’. Fewer than half of the studies tried to work out why a person was behaving in a particular way. If we are describing allegedly evidence-based approaches to reducing ‘problem behaviour’, it is far from clear that enough evidence from research is meaningful. Again, deep reflection may be needed, along with genuine curiosity, caring and collaboration with the individuals concerned.
Autism Research—What’s New in March — Neurodiverse Connection
In a previous study, we looked at research done on strategies to support autistic people who were between 14 and 22 years old. For this study, we looked at all of the studies in our previous study that tried to decrease or stop autistic people from doing certain things—many researchers call these things “problem behavior.” There were 48 studies that tried to reduce problem behavior, and most of them used strategies like prompting and reinforcement to try get autistic people to change their behavior. We found many things wrong with these studies. Most of them did not define the group of behaviors they were trying to stop autistic people from doing. None of the studies looked at whether any side effects happened when they tried the strategy they were studying. Also, most of the studies tried to stop autistic people from doing behaviors that probably were not harmful, like stereotypic behavior. Most of the studies did not say how they decided that the behaviors they tried to stop were a problem for the autistic people in the study, and most studies did not try to figure out why the autistic people in the study did the behaviors the researchers were trying to stop them from doing.
Problems with “problem behavior”: A secondary systematic review of intervention research on transition-age autistic youth – Kristen Bottema-Beutel, Rachael McKinnon, Sarah Mohiuddin, Shannon Crowley LaPoint, So Yoon Kim, 2024
We are marginalized canaries in a social coalmine and Rawlsian barometers of society’s morality. It is deeply subversive to live proudly despite being living embodiments of our culture’s long standing ethical failings.
THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: ON HANS ASPERGER, THE NAZIS, AND AUTISM: A CONVERSATION ACROSS NEUROLOGIES
Our non-compliance is not intended to be rebellious. We simply do not comply with things that harm us. But since a great number of things that harm us are not harmful to most neurotypicals, we are viewed as untamed and in need of straightening up.
Troublemakers Are the Caged Canaries
The classic example of an animal sentinel is the domestic canary, used in the early twentieth century to alert miners of deadly carbon monoxide in the coal mines. The miners brought these caged canaries with them into the mines. Because the birds are small and have particularly sensitive respiratory systems, the poison kills them more quickly than it would a human being, leaving the coal miners enough time to save themselves. I remember learning about the miners’ canary, shaken by the images of these starkly bright yellow birds, tiny, fragile, beautiful—caged in the dirt and the lightlessness of those mines.
Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
I think of the children who make trouble at school as miners’ canaries. I want us to imagine their behaviors—which are admittedly disruptive, hypervisible, and problematic—as both the loud sound of their suffering and a signal cry to the rest of us that there is poison in our shared air.
Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
That is, when a child is singing loudly—and sometimes more and more loudly, despite our requests for silence—we might hear that song as a signal that someone is refusing to hear her voice. And we might learn to listen, heeding her warning and searching our air for the toxin triggering her suffering, the harm that simultaneously silences her and forces her to scream out.
The troublemakers are the caged canaries, children who are more sensitive than their peers to the toxic environment of the classroom that limits their freedom, clips their wings, and mutes their voices. The canaries’ songs warn us of the dangers—dangers to children’s learning and development, to their self-worth, to their physical health and emotional well-being—as the misbehaving children struggle for visibility and voice in an institution that works to ensure their invisibility; as they work to be embraced by their classroom communities but behave in such a way that will ensure their exclusion; as they seek interdependence in a setting where the norms of independence prevail; as they raise their voices louder and louder hoping to be heard, but know they will be silenced.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education Harvard University in Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
Toxic Environments
Meltdowns are alarm systems to protect our brains.
The Protective Gift of Meltdowns — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Without meltdowns, we autistics would have nothing to protect our neurology from the very real damage that it can accumulate.
I don’t melt down because I’m Autistic.
I melt down because something in my environment is intolerable, and I am having a normal reaction of pain and/or anxiety.
We cannot simply exclude autistic pupils for entering meltdowns. Meltdowns are part of autism for a good number of autistic young people.
Whilst mindful that of course everyone needs to be safe, the way to achieve safety is to stop hurting the autistic children. Punishing them for responding to pain is not something any of us need to do.
Ann’s Autism Blog: Autism, School, Exclusion. What’s fair?
Thinking of these troublemaking children as canaries in the mine is not my own idea. I learned it from Thomas, the father of a five-year-old boy who could not and would not comply with the behavioral expectations of his kindergarten teacher.2 Teachers, school administrators, medical doctors, and psychologists all searched for pathology in the mind and body of this child. Their assumption was that the arrangements of school were normal and good, so any child unable to tolerate those arrangements had to be abnormal and bad.
Though the child suffered from a mood disorder, a diagnosable brain illness, Thomas challenged the assumption that the disease made his son inherently broken or bad. Much like the canary’s fragile lungs, this child’s brain leaves him more susceptible to the harms of poison. He’s more sensitive to harm than the average child. Still, the problem is the poison—not the living thing struggling to survive despite breathing it. After all, in clean air, canaries breathe easily.
With this perspective, Thomas drew attention away from his son and instead toward the toxic air of life in schools—the daily harms that less susceptible children can breathe in more readily: being told what to do and exactly how to do it all day; the requirement to sit still for hours on end; the frustration of boring, disconnected, and irrelevant academic tasks; shockingly little time for free play; and few opportunities to build meaningful relationships in community with other children and loving adults. These were the daily realities his son complained about, reacted to in the extreme, and refused to tolerate. Yet they are all too common in the life of schools, invisible because of their everyday normalcy. Thomas’s son made them visible, signaling their danger with his hypersensitive reactions to the harm. He was a miner’s canary, warning us all about threats to freedom that we might not otherwise see.
Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
At one meeting I attended, one father told us how his eight-year-old son had been declared ineducable, and they had been told that he would have to spend his childhood at a psychiatric day hospital rather than at school. Another told of how his teenage son had hardly left his bedroom for two years, completely refusing to go to school, and had tried to kill himself. One mother told of how her daughter fought each morning not to go to school, scratching and biting them, for over a year.
These children are now members of the self-directed learning community, engaged in a wide range of activities. They are still the same people as before, with the same characteristics, but the pressure has been lifted and so they are able to flourish. Many of these children will have diagnoses. Home-educating parents tell similar stories – children whose behaviour at school was uncontrollable who start to behave differently when they are allowed to follow their interests and are treated with respect.
Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning
Something happens when children are in an environment in which they are valued and accepted for who they are. They see themselves as capable and as contributors to their community, and they develop and learn. That’s why the respectful and non-judgemental way that adults relate to children in self-directed environments is important. It doesn’t happen overnight. When you’ve spend years fighting a system, you can’t just forget all the strategies you learnt to survive.
These children are experiencing the shift from a system which sees their personalities as a problem, to one which genuinely accommodates difference. Because when children are really allowed to choose what they do, difference stops being such a problem.
Viewed through the lens of disorder, disruptive behaviour is a symptom. Viewed from a different perspective, it’s a sign that something isn’t right in the world around the child. It’s those children who are considered to be troublemakers, the ‘problem children’, who shine a light into corners which the rest of us might prefer to avoid.
Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning
The Louder I Will Sing
Reflecting on the school lives of these children, recognizing the refrains in their warnings, I am reminded again of the epigraph that opens this book, from Labi Siffre’s song, “Something Inside So Strong,” sung each morning by children in Freedom Schools across the country: “The more you refuse to hear my voice, the louder I will sing.” The more they were silenced and unseen, the more disruptively they insisted on being objects of attention.
Understanding disruption and transgression as one language children speak helps to reframe misbehavior as an expression of a set of demands—a strategy for being heard and seen. If adults were better at bearing their responsibility to see and hear children, the need for children to rely on disruption as a strategy for visibility might decrease.
The paradox of simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility appears in the experiences of all four of these children. Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus are all hypervisible as troublemakers whose names are regularly in the mouths of teachers and whose behaviors are often actively designed to draw attention. At the same time, they are invisible as human persons with complex identities beyond that of “troublemaker,” as their differences are systematically erased through redirection and medication.
The interplay between hypervisibility and invisibility in each child’s story reminds us, simply, of the power of and promise of visibility—of making one another fully seen and recognized, heard, valued, cherished, and protected.
Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
“Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou from Shaker, why don’t you sing?
