: Assessing behavioural difficulties in toddler How would a behavioral specialist assess behavioural traits for a stubborn 18 month old toddler who cannot speak yet ? Will the exercise even get to the root of the problem or

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Highly trained behavioral specialists do assess children as young as 18 months, e.g. that's a recommended first age to screen for autism.

Research has found that ASD can sometimes be detected at 18 months or younger. By age 2, a diagnosis by an experienced professional can be considered very reliable.

While to you, your child may look 'untestable', to a highly trained professional, he may well show classic symptoms of a particular disorder. If a condition is found, the earlier the diagnosis, the sooner treatment can begin.

I don't make any claims as to whether or not your child has a disorder. Just answering the question.

Screening and Diagnosis for Healthcare Providers

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I have a child with behavioral problems, and I know a fair number of families where a child has behavioral problems too. Based on this experience, I can say that I would be very surprised if a behavioral specialist would be willing to do an assessment on such a young child.

What I've observed is that for children less than five, the parents tend to be told to come back in a couple of years.

However, that comment is limited to my specific geographical region, and my child's particular diagnosis. Your mileage may vary.

Have you talked the situation over with your child's doctor? If not, I encourage you to start there. Ask about early intervention services.

Sign language can be very helpful in that transition period before a child is willing or able to communicate through spoken language.

I don't have any authoritative information for you. But my general impression is that if a child's ability to express his wants, needs, preferences, feelings, etc., is hampered, the child can get extremely frustrated. That can happen to anyone.

There is another possible route, and I don't know how helpful this would be at age 18 months, but you could give it a try, you could see a developmental pediatrician.

The way the system works where I live, the starting point for both of the above avenues is the child's primary care provider.

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It called "Functional Behavior Analysis" (FBA) which can easily be looked up online. The ABC (Antecedent, Behavior, and Consequence) approach is used to evaluate behavior. It will look at what happens before the behavior and after the behavior to determine if there are patterns and why the child is behaving in the manner show.

Getting to the root of the problem or seeing results would be on a case-by-case basis. Like the scientific method, a hypothesis is developed and tested, if the results are not what is expected the hypothesis is modified or replaced and tested again (all until results of some sort are achieved). The specialist would develop a Behavior Intervention Plan that describes in detail the behavior change that is desired and how to achieve that change.

The behavior specialist begins with a form (chart) that steps them and the parent(s) through the process.

The behavior must be replaced, it cannot simply be removed (in this case talking).

Some environmental issues would be examined in these processes, such as: Is there a sibling speaking for them?

Assessment

Some of the things seen:

Functional behavior assessment is based upon the following assumptions:

challenging behaviors do not occur in a vacuum; there is a reason for their occurrence
behaviors occur in response to an identifiable stimuli (event)
behaviors are governed (weakened or strengthened) by the consequences that follow them
behavior is a form of communication (i.e., educators need to figure out what a particular behavior is communicating. The displayed action might be saying, in a non-verbal fashion; "I am tired.", "I am bored.", "I'm still upset at what happened earlier", etc.)
"misbehavior" might actually be adaptive (justifiable and understandable) given the circumstances. For example, in a classroom in which the teacher is a ineffective manager of student behavior, the student of concern might engage in "inappropriate" actions designed to bond with, and offer protection from bullies.
In this particular case, the "misbehavior" could be designed to avoid victimization by other students in the presence of the non-protective teacher.

NOTE

This is a summary of information between myself (a programmer) and a special education teacher that I know.