Positive Behavior Support provides a process for identifying the challenging behaviors of the child, developing an understanding of their purpose or function, and developing new skills. In your child's program, the behavior support plan is implemented by all caregivers in the program, while also being implemented by the family in the home and community. The use of the support plan assists with consistent implementation of the interventions, increases the likelihood that the child's behavior will improve, and results in improved confidence of caregivers as they teach and interact with the child.

Positive Behavior Support includes traditional behavior modification approaches but also emphasizes the integration of environmental, emotional, physiological and biomedical supports. Another critical feature is the development of person-centered, sustainable, practical interventions that reflect the environment and the values, skills and resources of the individual and their family. Function based strategies are created with the care providers and are focused on helping the child gain access to new environments, have positive social interactions, develop friendships and learn new communication skills.

Positive Behavior Support will provide you with a new understanding of your child’s behavior. During the process of Positive Behavior Support, you will learn why your child engages in challenging behavior (e.g., tantrums, withdrawing, self-injury) and how those behaviors are maintained. Your early childhood education provider will work with you to develop a behavior support plan that will include strategies for preventing the occurrence of challenging behavior while teaching your child new skills. The result of Positive Behavior Support should be that your child will have less challenging behavior and new ways of interacting and communicating with others. Once you have learned this process of understanding and intervening with your child’s challenging behavior, you will be able to apply it to new situations or circumstances.

Positive Behavior Support begins by identifying the behaviors that are a concern and observing the behaviors in the situations where they occur. Your provider will interview you using a Functional Assessment Interview tool to identify the situations where challenging behavior occurs and the conditions that relate to the behavior. Your provider may also want to conduct observations and collect information by seeing the challenging behaviors actually happen. In addition, you and your provider may decide to collect some information to see if certain factors affect the likelihood that your child will have “difficulties” (e.g., lack of sleep, allergies). This process of identifying the challenging behaviors is called Functional Assessment. The goal of Functional Assessment is to gain an understanding of why your child engages in challenging behaviors. The Functional Assessment process ends with the development of a purpose statement or hypothesis statement about the challenging behavior.

The hypothesis statement will describe the conditions or events that “trigger” the challenging behavior, what the challenging behavior means, and how challenging behavior is maintained or reinforced. Your provider will work with you in developing these statements. Once the statements are identified, your provider will share ideas with you about the following:

1. How the behaviors can be prevented
2. New skills that your child can be taught
3. How to react to the behaviors when they occur

A behavior support plan will be developed that provides a guide for preventing challenging behavior, teaching new skills to replace the behavior, and responding to the behavior in new ways.

Please contact your assigned / chosen MCO (Amerigroup, Sunflower or United) to locate a facilitator near you.