Is All Behavior Really Communication of Unmet Needs?

Is all behavior really communication?

A lot of people have been repeating that line in my video on Scotland and restorative practices and how the removal of consequences is not going well there, just as it's not going well anywhere really.

This idea that all behavior is communication makes people, I guess, not want to have consequences or think that consequences are inappropriate and that instead we should meet children's needs.

Now, there's a half-truth here.

Like, what's going on with this statement?

Of course, if you have a baby who is crying, the baby's probably not crying for no reason, although babies do cry for no reason sometimes.

It is worth looking into, you know, what the possible unmet needs might be.

You know, baby might need a diaper change, might be hungry.

You know, it's kind of a short list.

Might as well run through the possibilities.

But for older kids, for adolescents, is it really true that all behavior is communication?

I think this is where we really have to think about proportion and think about the extent to which unmet needs are influencing behavior and the idea of responsibility for one's own actions, right?

If you have a student with profound disabilities, you might have a very limited expectation for how much that student can take responsibility for their behavior.

It just depends on the individual situation and the nature of the disability.

For most kids, we expect that as they get older, they take more and more responsibility for their behavior and can be held more and more accountable for their behavior.

And certainly, if a student is going through something horrible, if they haven't eaten in three days, if they haven't slept in two days, if they're unhoused at the moment and their parents are really struggling, like there are lots of things that might make us realize, okay, this child is going through some struggles.

There are lots of things like that that can help us be, you know, extra compassionate.

But none of those things should cause us to not have boundaries for safety.

And I think that's where this thinking goes wrong.

It says, oh, like, as long as we find a reason to feel sorry for a student, we should accept any behavior from them because it's just a manifestation of an unmet need.

And when you look at a student who is misbehaving and is misbehaving in an extreme way, you can probably find some unmet needs, but it would be the wrong conclusion to say that because there are unmet needs, we can't have a consequence for the behavior, right?

Like if you are hungry, you have a need that probably needs to be met at some point, you know, before too long, you should probably eat something, but that doesn't excuse any act of violence that you commit while you're hungry, right?

Like that is just not how the world works.

Even if we have some, you know, some kind of goofy cases where people did claim, you know, like the Twinkie defense or they were hungry or something.

Like for the most part, we understand as a society that we need to hold people accountable for their behavior, even if they have some unmet needs.

And I think as schools, we have to be very careful about scope creep.

We have to be very careful about the limits of what we take on as our mission and keep it educational.

Because if we don't keep it educational, we end up cutting into other areas of practice, like medical practice.

Like we're not doctors, we're not nurses, we're not healthcare providers, we're not mental healthcare providers.

We are here to educate and we need students to act safely in order for us to do that.

And if they're not safe, they can't be here.

Let me know what you think.