Putting It All Together: What behaviour function Really Teaches Us

Lari Kharkongor
May 14
5 min read

Blog #15 | When Behaviour Speaks Louder Than Words Series

Empty primary school classroom with colourful chairs in teal, yellow, red and blue arranged around white tables, a whiteboard on a sage-green wall, and natural light

This is the fifth and final post in the series When Behaviour Speaks Louder Than Words – a five-part exploration of the functions of behaviour for educators and parents of children with autism

TL;DR

The SEAT framework gives us four ways to understand behaviour: Sensory, Escape, Attention, Tangible. But real behaviour is often driven by more than one function at once. What the framework teaches is that more than any single category, it is the habit of asking what is this behaviour doing? before asking how do I stop it? That shift in thinking changes everything. And the honest truth: not every case resolves neatly. Some behaviours remain partially unsolved. That doesn't mean we stop asking the question or stop trying.

When I started this series, I wanted you, the reader — whether a parent, an educator, a student teacher, a college student, or simply a curious mind — to walk away with not a checklist, not a clinical flowchart, but a way of seeing. A way of pausing before reacting. A way of asking, even in the middle of a classroom meltdown or a supermarket standoff: what is this behaviour trying to do?

Because if I’m honest, it’s really easy to label it as a character flaw. Convenient, even.

But there is always more to it than meets the eye.

Four posts later, we've talked about sensory behaviour and what it looks like when a nervous system is overwhelmed or under-stimulated. We've talked about escape and avoidance, and how running away from a task isn't defiance, it's often desperation. We've talked about attention-maintained behaviour, and about tangible function, and about how quickly a single treat or a single iPad can become the centre of a child's entire day.

Now it's time to sit with all of it.

The Framework Is a Starting Point, Not a Destination

SEAT (Sensory, Escape, Attention, Tangible) framework gives us four categories. Four lenses. And those lenses are genuinely useful. Having a framework means that when a child bolts from the table - you have a starting point. You can ask: is this about what they're running from, or what they're running to? Is it random or predictable? And what am I doing before and after?

However, despite a framework and understanding behaviour functions, Here's what I want to be honest about, behaviour rarely arrives in a single, clean category.

A child who has learned that throwing things, screaming or even hitting a peer gets her removed from a loud classroom has blended escape and sensory into something that looks like aggression.
A student who craves adult attention might also be seeking sensory input through physical touch and separating those two threads can be challenging.
A child who wants the iPad may also be escaping a task that overwhelms him, and by the time you're on day three of the first-work-then-iPad cycle, you're managing both the escape and the overwhelm simultaneously.

Multiple functions are the rule, not the exception. The framework doesn't fail you when that happens, it just asks you to consider more than one question at a time.

What Actually Changes When You Use This Framework

Behaviour is usually described primarily in terms of what it looks like: he's aggressive, she's manipulative, he refuses to cooperate. I can understand why, when you're managing a room of twenty children and one of them is in a full escalation cycle, nuance is hard to access.

But describing behaviour by its form tells you almost nothing about the underlying issues and how to address it.

Knowing that Jamie's aggression is escape-maintained tells you not to remove him from the task every time he pushes because if removal is what he's after, removal is the reward.

Knowing that Riya's constant requests for attention are attention-maintained tells you to restructure how attention is distributed across the day, not just to respond more firmly when she calls out.

The function tells you the mechanism. The mechanism tells you the intervention.

That shift, from what does it look like to what is it doing, is what I hope this series has achieved. You don't need to run a formal functional behaviour assessment every time. You need to carry the habit of asking and also identifying patterns.

The Honest Part

I want to close this series with something I haven't said yet, because I think it matters.

Not every behaviour I've worked with had a clear function. Not every case I took on was resolved neatly.

There are students I still think about. Children whose behaviour shifted and improved, and then plateaued. No matter what I tried, I just couldn't push them past. Cases where I ran out of ideas and had to be honest with a family about that. Situations where the variables were too complex - the home environment, the co-occurring diagnoses, the staff turnover, the sheer weight of everything a child was carrying, for a framework to be enough.

I'm not sharing this to undermine anything we've covered in this series. The framework is real and it works and I have seen it change children's lives in concrete, measurable ways. I'm sharing it because I think the professionals and parents who are doing this work deserve honesty more than a tidy ending.

You will not always figure it out. Neither will I. That doesn't mean we stop asking and trying.

Where to Go From Here

If you've read all five posts, you now have a working understanding of how to think about behaviour functionally. Here's what I'd suggest doing with it.

Start with observation, not intervention. Before you change anything, spend a week just tracking. When does the behaviour happen? What came just before it? What happened immediately after? You don't need a formal data sheet, a notebook works. You're looking for a pattern.

Ask the function question out loud. In team meetings, in parent consultations, when you're problem-solving with a colleague: get into the habit of saying what do we think this behaviour is doing for this child? It changes the conversation.

Go back to the posts that feel most relevant. This series is designed to work as reference material. If you're in the middle of an escape situation, post two is there. If a student's sensory behaviour has been confusing you, post three.

And if you want to go deeper into Behaviour Intervention Plans, into the team dynamics that make or break implementation, into the complexity of multi-function behaviour across settings I'll be writing about all of it here, and I'd love for you to come along.

One Last Takeaway

The goal of functional behaviour assessment is not to label a child. It is not to explain them away or reduce them to a category. It's to understand them well enough to support them better.

Every behaviour is communication. Some of it is loud, some of it is subtle, some of it is hard to hear. But it's always saying something.

Your job and mine is to stay curious long enough to hear it.

Thank you for reading this series. If these posts have been useful to you, I'd love to know. You can find me at silverlining-consulting.com, and I'll see you back here next Thursday.

Sources & Further Reading

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.
O'Neill, R. E., Albin, R. W., Storey, K., Horner, R. H., & Sprague, J. R. (2015). Functional assessment and program development for problem behavior: A practical handbook (3rd ed.). Cengage Learning.
Carr, E. G. (1994). Emerging themes in the functional analysis of problem behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 27(2), 393–399. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1994.27-393
Bambara, L. M., & Kern, L. (Eds.). (2005). Individualized supports for students with problem behaviors: Designing positive behavior plans. Guilford Press.