Why is it called “Challenging Behaviour?”

Terms used to describe these behaviours have come and gone over the years. Calling these issues ‘behaviour problems’ is no longer, used as this term characterised the behaviour from the perspective of service providers and carers rather than that of the person.  For example, a person who is aggressive when they are bored may have found a very effective solution to being ignored when other strategies have failed. The individual concerned would not see the behaviour as a problem, but as a solution. The term ‘behaviour disorder’ has also been used, but this implies a lack of organisation behind the behaviour whereas the behaviour can often be understood as achieving certain goals for a person and in this sense may not be disordered at all. Similar issues apply to terms like maladaptive, dysfunctional, aberrant, abnormal and disturbed.  The term ‘behavioural’ is also often used to describe the behaviours, but this is not really helpful as it is self-evident that anything anyone does can be seen as a behaviour. In the late 1990’s the North American Association of People with Severe Handicaps initially promoted the term ‘challenging behaviours’ and this came to be the preferred term within a disability setting. This avoids any implicit assumptions about the psychological characteristics and motivations about the nature of the behaviour. It places the problem in a context rather than in an individual and identifies the behaviours as a challenge to services and which they must find a way of managing.  More recently the term ‘behaviours of concern’ has become increasingly used, partly because individuals did not want to be seen as a challenge to be overcome and also because of the stigma that has inevitably come to be associated with the term.  However as the term ‘challenging behaviours’ is the most commonly used, this will be employed for the purposes of this module.