It is very difficult to watch your child be frantically upset. But behavior intervention will keep them happy in the long run. The key to changing challenging behaviors is to understand their functions and that they serve a purpose such as for communication, reducing stress, and avoiding difficult situations. Some non-preferred behaviors are a result of skill deficits whereas some challenging behaviors are more related to the child's lack of motivation. The way in which you interpret your child's behavior will have a great impact on the success of your intervention when one is warranted.
Functional assessment is a pretreatment.
Further, a functional assessment may help reveal not only the type of contingency that is maintaining a behavior, but also the sensitivities within each different reinforcement dimension. The reinforcement schedule has to be equivalent and the delay between presentation of discriminative stimulus and the target has to be as well. It is possible that the behavior is multiply controlled. We also discussed facilitating compliance by providing opportunities by initially setting up and reinforcing high probability responses and eventually and gradually reducing preferred instructions and increase lower probability responses and maintain reinforcement for compliance.