Picture a fortnightly behaviour support visit for a seven-year-old. The practitioner arrives, says hello, spends some time watching him play, and then sits down at the kitchen table. With his mum. Later there’s a phone call with his teacher, and a short chat with Nan, who does the Tuesday and Thursday school pickups.
Afterwards, his dad asks a question practitioners hear all the time: “When do you actually start working with him?”
It’s a completely fair question. And the honest answer is that the work has already started.
Three months later, mornings feel calmer. Pickups that used to end in tears most days now go smoothly most of the time. Nothing about who this boy is has been altered. What grew was the understanding around him: mum feels more confident in herself when he starts to become overwhelmed, Nan has a plan for the car trip home, and his teacher knows what helps in the ten minutes before the bell.
Some of the most important growth in a child’s life happens in the people who love, teach and support them. When those adults feel understood, confident and well supported, children tend to feel safer and more settled.
Why behaviour support works through the people around the child.
Positive Behaviour Support starts with a question rather than a correction: what is this behaviour achieving for this person? All behaviour is a form of communication, and it serves a purpose. Once we understand that purpose, we can build safer and easier ways for the person to get the same need met.
What surprises a lot of people is that a behaviour support practitioner can sometimes spend equal amounts of time with the participant, as well as families, carers, support workers and teachers. Everyone is part of the journey and the solution. So rather than working one-to-one with the child, our practitioners spend a lot of their time with the people who are already present, because a strategy only makes a difference if it’s used and understood by everyone in the support circle.
You can see this in how the process is built:
- Getting to know the key supports first. After referral, the practitioner contacts the people around the child to build rapport and a shared starting point.
- Gathering information together. Interviews, observation in real environments and records help everyone understand what the behaviour is communicating. Families and carers are the experts on the history.
- A plan written for the people who will use it. A Behaviour Support Plan includes practical strategies for those who spend the most time with the child, along with clear guidance for parents, carers, support workers and staff.
- Training, coaching and ongoing support. Practitioners deliver training for key supports, facilitate care team meetings and keep checking in, adjusting strategies as the child’s needs and environments evolve.
The main aim is to reduce behaviours of concern around the full support team. The real measure of behaviour support is how the people around the child feel on the days we’re not there.
What the research says.
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory places the child at the centre of a set of nested circles. The closest circle holds the people the child sees every day: family, teachers, carers. The next holds the connections between those people. Development, in this model, doesn’t happen inside the child alone. It happens in the relationships around them.
The behaviour research tells a similar story.
Stress and behaviour travel together. A US study followed 237 children from age three to nine, including 93 with developmental delay, and found a two-way relationship between parenting stress and behaviour, for mothers and fathers alike. Richard Hastings and colleagues found the same pattern in families of children with intellectual disability, with maternal distress and children’s externalising behaviour moving together over two years. This isn’t about anyone doing something wrong. It’s simply what happens when a family is carrying a lot, and it’s exactly why support for the adults matters.
Connection matters more than rules. A UK study of 516 five-year-olds with intellectual disability looked at what predicted behaviour later on. Discipline and home atmosphere didn’t. Relationship quality did: closer parent and child relationships went with fewer behaviours of concern, then and later.
Supporting the adult supports the child. Nirbhay Singh’s research group developed Mindfulness-Based Positive Behaviour Support, a programme delivered to parents rather than children. In one study with 92 mothers of adolescents with autism or intellectual disability, the mothers’ stress eased, and their teenagers showed significant reductions in aggression and disruptive behaviour. The young people never attended a session. A later trial found the benefits were still there three years on.
Hope is part of the support. V. Mark Durand’s Positive Family Intervention trial worked with 54 families of children with significant behaviours of concern, where parents were feeling pessimistic about the future. Families who received behaviour support plus help with their own outlook did better than those who received behaviour support alone. When parents feel a strategy can work, they’re far more able to give it a go.
And closer to home, a review of Stepping Stones Triple P, an Australian-developed programme for parents of children with disability, pooled 12 studies and 659 families and found moderate, reliable improvements in child behaviour alongside lower parent stress.
Across decades of research, the pattern repeats: when the adults around a child feel calmer, more confident and more connected, children tend to feel and do better too.
Parents and primary carers.
Parents spend more hours with their child than any other professional. They know their child better than anyone, and they’re often doing an enormous amount with very little rest. Any conversation about growth has to start from that respect.
For parents, growth rarely looks like learning a long list of techniques. More often it looks like this.
A new way of reading behaviour. Moving from “why is he doing this to me?” to “what is he trying to tell me?”. When a parent sees a meltdown as communication, it often becomes easier to respond in a way that helps.
Looking after their own wellbeing. Children often co-regulate from the adults around them, and it’s genuinely hard to regulate yourself when you’re exhausted. That’s human, not a failing. The Singh studies showed that when parents were supported with their own stress, their children benefited too. Caring for the carer is part of the plan.
Feeling hopeful. Durand’s work found that parents who were supported with their own outlook went on to try situations they had been avoiding, like mealtimes at the table and brushing teeth.
Setting down guilt. Many parents quietly carry a belief that they caused this, or that someone else would have worked it out by now. Neither is true, and that weight makes everything harder, including asking for help. Part of a practitioner’s job is to help put it down.
The wider family.
Most children live their lives across more adults than any plan names: Nan’s place on Tuesdays, an uncle who takes them to the footy, an older sibling or cousin who helps out after school. Grandparents in particular have long been recognised as one of the most important sources of support for families of children with disability, often while carrying their own feelings about the diagnosis and their own tiredness from long hours of care. Siblings give a great deal too, and they deserve to be seen as people in their own right: a Siblings Australia project found 84% of adult siblings recalled family stress during childhood, and recent Curtin research found siblings who felt supported by their communities reported better wellbeing.
In many CALD families, aunties, uncles and grandparents share genuine responsibility for raising children. Growth for the wider family usually looks like understanding why the child responds the way they do, feeling included rather than left out of the loop, and sharing the same simple approaches as the parents, so the child experiences the same warmth and predictability wherever they are. Every adult who spends regular time with a child is already part of their support. The question is simply whether they’ve been warmly invited in.
Teachers and school staff.
Teachers and aides are juggling whole classrooms of needs, often with limited time to read a behaviour support plan, let alone help shape it. That’s a reason to include them early, not a criticism of them.
The research shows why the relationship matters. Children with intellectual disability can find it harder to build close relationships with their teachers, and studies have found more conflict and less closeness in those relationships on average. Earlier work found that a close bond with a teacher went with fewer behaviours of concern over time.
How teachers feel matters too. A study of special educators found that lower confidence and less behavioural knowledge left staff more vulnerable to feeling stressed and upset when behaviour occurred. Teachers who feel equipped and supported respond from a calmer place, and children feel that.
Growth for teachers and school staff tends to look like this:
- Seeing a hard moment in class as information about an unmet need
- Adjusting demands, transitions and the sensory environment before a child becomes overwhelmed
- Building enough positive connection that the relationship can carry a tough day
- Using similar approaches to home, so the child experiences consistency across their week
- Feeling confident to ask for help, and having a school that backs them to get it
The same applies in kinder and childcare, where educators shape some of a child’s very first relationships outside the family, and to the education support staff who are often the adults physically closest to the child all day.
Allied health, support workers and the wider network.
Professionals are adults around the child too, and the best of them keep growing throughout their careers.
Allied health professionals. Early childhood intervention in Australia has steadily moved towards working alongside families in everyday life. The national best practice guidelines place family-centred, strengths-based practice at their core, and the recent independent review led by the University of Melbourne recommended practices that strengthen parents and are embedded in everyday settings. The coaching model described by Rush and Shelden frames the professional’s role as building a parent’s or carer’s ability to support the child in ordinary daily routines. One Australian paper gently noted that clinicians, with the best of intentions, can sometimes hold on to ownership of the work when sharing it would serve families better.
Support workers and staff teams. For older children and adults, support workers are often the people closest to the person day to day, and the work can be emotionally demanding. A well-known study found a three-day training course lifted staff confidence, but didn’t ease their emotional reactions to difficult moments. Other research linked those reactions to emotional exhaustion and burnout. Knowing what to do and feeling steady while doing it are two different things, and staff deserve support with both.
When Singh’s group offered Mindfulness-Based Positive Behaviour Support to group home caregivers, the focus was on caring for the staff. The outcomes still included less aggression, fewer physical restraints and lower staff stress. Same pattern, different setting.
Other ways of looking at it.
An idea like this deserves careful thought, so here are the most common concerns, and how we see them.
“Isn’t this just blaming parents?” It’s an understandable worry, and history earns it. For decades, mothers of autistic children were wrongly told their parenting had caused their child’s disability. The “refrigerator mother” theory was untrue and deeply hurtful, and historians have argued that blame aimed at mothers has resurfaced in subtler forms ever since. Many parents still describe feeling judged by professionals, extended family and strangers.
So let’s be clear: supporting adults is not the same as blaming them. Parents and carers are a source of strength, not the source of the problem. The research on stress actually shows the opposite of blame, because it shows how much families are carrying and how naturally that weight affects everyone in the household.
“Parents are already exhausted. Isn’t this more work?”
Researchers have cautioned that asking parents to take on a lot of structured delivery can add stress to the family, and some evidence suggests parents under a lot of strain do better with lighter-touch support. Growth should never mean homework. The most helpful approaches in the research started by caring for the adult’s wellbeing and outlook, not by adding tasks. A good plan should feel lighter to live with, not heavier.
“What about the child’s own needs?”
Some needs genuinely sit with the child: health and pain, communication systems, skill building, and support from the right professional for trauma. And children aren’t passive in any of this. They have their own voice and are at the center of the Behaviour Support Plan.
“Growth takes time.” It does. The staff training study above built confidence quickly, but emotional steadiness took more than a short course. A large UK trial of a teacher-delivered classroom programme, the Good Behaviour Game, found no average effect on behaviour, with many classes playing it less than intended. Adults grow best with ongoing coaching and encouragement, not a one-off information session. That’s exactly why behaviour support is a cycle rather than a single visit.
Final words.
When a child is showing increasing behaviours of concern, it’s natural to look for answers in the behaviour directly. Sometimes that’s where they are. However, the research points to the circle around them: a parent who feels less alone, a grandparent who understands, a teacher who feels equipped, an allied health team working in step, a support worker whose wellbeing is taken seriously.
For the child, it can be the difference between a world that feels unpredictable and one that finally makes sense.
If you’re wondering whether the adults around a child are being supported to grow, three gentle questions can help. Has anyone asked how the adults are going, not just what the child is doing? Do the regular adults in the child’s life, at home, at school and beyond, share a similar understanding of what helps? And is the child’s own voice still part of the conversation?
Wherever the answer is “not yet”, that’s where the next bit of support can go.
If you’d like to talk about what this could look like for a child or family you support, we’re always happy to have that conversation.
From the Insight PBS team to yours 🙂
Resources
Originally posted on the Insight PBS website here
Read the final NDIS Bill amendment document here
Read the practice guide: NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, Behaviour Support Assessment, including Functional Behaviour Assessment: Practice Guide (2026)
Refer to Insight Positive Behaviour Support
Contact us
Read more of our blog articles here
Want to work with us? Check out our careers page.
Refer to Insight Positive Behaviour Support here.
Follow us on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter (X) and TikTok!
Want to discuss or have any questions about Positive Behaviour Support ? Feel free to contact us or request a callback.
Links
🔗 Follow Insight Positive Behaviour Support
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn
Youtube
📚 Learn more:
Join our mailing list
Send us an enquiry
Read our blog
Refer to us
Want to work with us?
Key references from this article:
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
Durand, V. M., Hieneman, M., Clarke, S., Wang, M., & Rinaldi, M. L. (2013). Positive family intervention for severe challenging behavior I: A multisite randomized clinical trial. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 15(3), 133–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098300712458324
Insight PBS. (n.d.-a). NDIS Positive Behaviour Support services. https://www.insightpbs.com.au/services/positive-behaviour-support/
Insight PBS. (n.d.-b). Our process & role. https://www.insightpbs.com.au/process/
Neece, C. L., Green, S. A., & Baker, B. L. (2012). Parenting stress and child behavior problems: A transactional relationship across time. American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 117(1), 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1352/1944-7558-117.1.48
Singh, N. N., Lancioni, G. E., Karazsia, B. T., Myers, R. E., Hwang, Y.-S., & Anālayo, B. (2019). Effects of Mindfulness-Based Positive Behavior Support (MBPBS) training are equally beneficial for mothers and their children with autism spectrum disorder or with intellectual disabilities. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 385. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00385
Tellegen, C. L., & Sanders, M. R. (2013). Stepping Stones Triple P-Positive Parenting Program for children with disability: A review and meta-analysis. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 34(5), 1556–1571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2013.01.022
Totsika, V., Hastings, R. P., Vagenas, D., & Emerson, E. (2014). Parenting and the behavior problems of young children with an intellectual disability: Concurrent and longitudinal relationships in a population-based study. American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 119(5), 422–435. https://doi.org/10.1352/1944-7558-119.5.422