At a Glance
| What does understanding behaviour mean? | Looking beyond what a child does to consider what the behaviour may communicate about development, emotion, relationships, past experience, unmet need and current circumstances. |
| Why does it matter? | Behaviour that is misunderstood is more likely to attract responses that increase shame, fear, disconnection or escalation rather than address what is driving it. |
| What do the contributors agree on? | Behaviour makes more sense when adults remain curious about what is happening for the child rather than responding only to what the behaviour looks like from the outside. |
| What is unique about this Atlas page? | It brings together perspectives on pain-based behaviour, trauma, attachment, neurodevelopment, shame, containment, therapeutic parenting, residential child care, education and lived experience. |
Atlas Navigation
You are here: Therapeutic Practice → Understanding Behaviour
| Related Concepts | Related Atlas Domains |
|---|---|
| Pain-Based Behaviour | Human Development |
| Developmental Trauma | Relationships |
| Attachment | Therapeutic Practice |
| Co-regulation | Organisations |
| Containment | Systems |
| Mentalisation | Lived Experience |
| Shame | Research and Evidence |
| Emotional Regulation | |
| Neurodevelopment | |
| Therapeutic Relationships | |
| Reflective Practice | |
| Therapeutic Parenting |
Quick Facts
| Atlas Domain | Therapeutic Practice |
| Related Domains | Human Development · Relationships · Organisations · Systems · Lived Experience |
| Status | Core Atlas Concept |
| Primary Contributors | 10 |
| Contributing Voices | 20+ and growing |
| Podcast Episodes | Linked through contributor profiles |
| Key Quotations | Growing |
| Books Referenced | Growing |
| Research Base | Developmental Psychology · Trauma Theory · Attachment Theory · Neurodevelopment · Psychodynamic Theory · Behavioural Science |
| First Published | August 2026 |
| Last Updated | Automatically updated |
Looking Beneath Behaviour to Understand Experience
Definition
Understanding behaviour means moving beyond a description of what a child or young person is doing and becoming curious about what may be happening within the child, around the child and between the child and other people.
Behaviour is observable.
Its meaning is not.
The same behaviour can arise for very different reasons.
A child who refuses to enter a classroom may be frightened, ashamed, overwhelmed, uncertain about what will happen, avoiding failure, protecting themselves from peers, struggling with sensory overload or attempting to remain close to a trusted adult.
A young person who becomes aggressive may be experiencing threat, humiliation, grief, panic, frustration, pain, difficulty communicating, impaired impulse control or an expectation that adults will hurt or reject them.
A child who appears indifferent may be protecting themselves from disappointment.
A child who continually seeks attention may be seeking connection.
A child who controls ordinary routines may have learned that unpredictability is dangerous.
A child who says “I don’t care” may care very deeply.
Understanding behaviour therefore requires adults to resist the temptation to treat observable behaviour as a complete explanation.
Rather than asking only:
What did the child do?
therapeutic practice also asks:
What might be happening for the child?
What function might this behaviour be serving?
What is the child expecting from us?
What developmental capacity might be missing or overwhelmed?
What happened immediately before this?
What relational experience is unfolding here?
Understanding behaviour does not remove responsibility or boundaries. It makes our response more thoughtful, proportionate and more likely to address what is actually happening.
Atlas Summary
Understanding behaviour is one of the central organising ideas within the Secure Start Atlas.
Across conversations on The Secure Start Podcast, contributors repeatedly challenge interpretations that reduce difficult behaviour to defiance, manipulation, attention-seeking, lack of motivation or deliberate non-compliance.
Instead, behaviour is understood as emerging from the interaction between:
- development
- attachment
- trauma
- neurodevelopment
- arousal
- relationships
- shame
- emotional regulation
- previous learning
- current circumstances
- unmet needs
- environmental demands
This does not mean that every behaviour has one hidden meaning waiting to be discovered.
Nor does it mean that adults can know with certainty why a child behaved in a particular way.
The Atlas therefore combines understanding with curiosity.
The aim is not to replace one simplistic explanation with another.
It is to think more carefully.
Why Understanding Behaviour Matters
How adults interpret behaviour strongly influences how they respond.
If a child is understood as deliberately disrespectful, adults may become punitive.
If the same behaviour is understood as a response to shame or threat, adults may respond with greater emotional regulation while still maintaining a boundary.
If withdrawal is interpreted as laziness, demands may increase.
If withdrawal is understood as overwhelm, adults may first help restore safety and regulation.
If constant reassurance-seeking is interpreted as manipulation, adults may withdraw attention.
If it is understood as uncertainty about relational availability, the response may become more predictable and reassuring without reinforcing unnecessary dependence.
Interpretation therefore matters.
Children recovering from adversity frequently behave in ways that made sense within earlier environments.
Vigilance may once have been protective.
Control may have reduced uncertainty.
Aggression may have prevented vulnerability.
Emotional withdrawal may have reduced disappointment.
Caring for adults may have helped maintain family stability.
Extreme independence may have developed because dependable help was unavailable.
When circumstances change, these adaptations can remain.
The behaviour may now appear problematic even though the strategy originally served an important purpose.
Therapeutic care asks:
What did this behaviour help the child survive, obtain, avoid or communicate?
and then:
What can we provide now so that the child gradually needs this strategy less?
Common Misconceptions
Understanding behaviour is sometimes misinterpreted as excusing behaviour or avoiding accountability.
It is neither.
Understanding is not excusing
A behaviour can be understandable and still be unsafe, harmful or unacceptable.
Knowing why a young person assaulted someone does not mean accepting assault. Understanding should improve the quality of the response, including protection, accountability and repair.
All behaviour is not necessarily caused by trauma
Trauma is one important influence, but behaviour can also reflect:
- typical development
- disability
- neurodevelopmental difference
- sensory needs
- physical illness
- temperament
- learning history
- social context
- substance use
- peer influence
- ordinary frustration
Trauma should not become a universal explanation.
Behaviour is communication, but not always deliberate communication
When we say behaviour communicates, we do not necessarily mean that the child consciously intends to send a message.
Behaviour can reveal internal states that the child themselves cannot yet identify or explain.
“Attention-seeking” does not explain behaviour
Attention is a relational resource.
If a child repeatedly seeks adult attention, the more useful question is often why attention has become so important, uncertain or difficult to obtain.
Consequences do not automatically teach the missing skill
A consequence may communicate a limit, but it cannot by itself create emotional regulation, trust, executive functioning, communication skills or developmental capacity.
Empathy does not mean removing boundaries
Therapeutic adults can understand distress while still preventing harm, saying no and maintaining expectations.
Behaviour alone cannot tell us the diagnosis
Similar behaviours can arise from very different developmental and clinical pathways. Behaviour requires context and, where needed, careful assessment.
Adults are not neutral observers
Children’s behaviour evokes emotional responses in adults. Fear, anger, helplessness, urgency or rejection can influence interpretation. Reflective practice helps adults notice this before acting.
Understanding behaviour therefore asks adults to combine compassion with responsibility, and curiosity with clear thinking.
Atlas Principles
Across contributors to The Secure Start Podcast, several recurring principles emerge.
Behaviour makes sense in context
Behaviour should be understood in relation to the child’s development, history, relationships and current environment rather than judged in isolation.
Behaviour may express pain
What appears oppositional, destructive or provocative may be connected to emotional pain that the child cannot yet communicate or regulate in another way.
Behaviour may represent adaptation
Children develop strategies that help them manage the environments in which they grow. Strategies that were once protective can later create difficulties.
Behaviour can communicate unmet need
Behaviour may represent attempts to obtain safety, connection, control, stimulation, predictability, recognition, belonging or relief.
Regulation affects behaviour
Children are less able to think, communicate, plan and inhibit impulses when highly aroused. Regulation often needs to precede reasoning.
Development shapes capacity
Adults should distinguish between will not and cannot yet. Expectations should reflect developmental and neurodevelopmental capacity rather than chronological age alone.
Relationships influence behaviour
Children behave differently depending on how safe, understood and connected they feel within a relationship.
Shame can intensify behaviour
Responses that humiliate or define the child as bad can deepen the emotional states that contribute to harmful behaviour.
Curiosity should precede certainty
Adults rarely know immediately why behaviour occurred. Thoughtful practice keeps several possible explanations open.
Understanding should lead to response
The purpose of formulation is not merely to explain behaviour. Understanding should help adults decide what relational, developmental, environmental or therapeutic response is required.
Primary Contributors
These contributors provide important foundations for the Atlas’s understanding of behaviour.
| Contributor | Principal Contribution | Atlas Profile | Podcast Episode |
|---|---|---|---|
| James Anglin | Pain-Based Behaviour and looking beyond behaviour to underlying pain | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Peter Wilson | Curiosity, uncertainty and understanding before intervention | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Paul van Heeswijk | Behaviour as a search for missing relational experiences | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Vicki McKeown | Behaviour as protection, adaptation and the expression of hurt | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Alan Jenkins | Curiosity before judgement; understanding harmful behaviour through shame, ethics and disconnection | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Richard Rose | Behaviour understood through life experience, self-blame and unresolved meaning | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Gareth K. Thomas | Therapeutic parenting and reading behaviour as communication | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| William Curran | Neurodevelopmental impairment and the risk of misinterpreting inability as wilful behaviour | 🔗 | 🎙 |
| Laura Steckley | Containment, arousal and restoring the capacity to think | 🔗 | 🎙 & 🎙 |
| Martha Holden | Developmentally informed everyday care and moving beyond crisis-driven responses | 🔗 | 🎙 |
(The links above will become active as contributor profiles are added to the Atlas.)
Representative Quotations
The Atlas will continue to build a library of quotations illustrating different ways of understanding behaviour.
“Look past the behaviour into the pain.”
James Anglin
🔗 Atlas Profile 🎙 Podcast Episode
“The children’s behaviour was a way of asking for something they really needed.”
Paul van Heeswijk
🔗 Atlas Profile 🎙 Podcast Episode
“It’s the difficulties we have in understanding children’s sexual behaviour… that keep these problems going.”
Alan Jenkins
🔗 Atlas Profile 🎙 Podcast Episode
“We’re so focused on correcting… and managing behaviour that we don’t actually look at what it’s communicating underneath.”
Vicki McKeown
🔗 Atlas Profile 🎙 Podcast Episode
Areas of Convergence
Despite considerable differences in theoretical background, contributors repeatedly converge on the idea that behaviour should be understood before it is managed.
This does not mean delaying action where safety is threatened. It means that effective intervention requires more than suppressing observable behaviour.
Across the Atlas, contributors emphasise that:
- behaviour has context
- behaviour can express pain
- behaviour may represent adaptation
- behaviour can communicate unmet relational or developmental needs
- arousal influences the capacity for thinking and self-control
- shame can intensify behavioural difficulties
- developmental and neurodevelopmental capacity matter
- relationships influence how behaviour is expressed
- adults’ emotional reactions provide important information
- curiosity improves formulation
- punishment may stop behaviour temporarily without addressing what drives it
- regulation, connection and understanding frequently need to precede learning
- behaviour should not become identity
- children should not be defined by their most difficult moments
- intervention should address underlying need as well as immediate safety
A particularly strong point of convergence is the rejection of moralised descriptions of children.
Contributors may disagree about theory or terminology, but they consistently resist reducing children to labels such as manipulative, difficult, attention-seeking or bad.
The question becomes less:
“What is wrong with this child?”
and more:
“What is happening for this child, and what do they need from us now?”
Distinctive Perspectives
James Anglin: Pain-Based Behaviour
James Anglin provides one of the Atlas’s most important conceptual reframings through Pain-Based Behaviour.
Rather than conceptualising difficult behaviour primarily as misconduct requiring control, Anglin asks practitioners to look beyond observable behaviour towards the emotional pain it may express.
The significance of this shift is not merely semantic.
Language changes how adults think.
A “problem behaviour” invites correction.
A “pain-based behaviour” invites curiosity.
Anglin does not suggest abandoning boundaries. Instead, he argues that effective therapeutic care requires adults to respond simultaneously to the behaviour and the underlying pain.
His wider theory of the Struggle for Congruence extends this responsibility beyond individual workers. Organisations must respond coherently if children are to experience care as genuinely therapeutic.
Peter Wilson: The Discipline of Not Knowing
Peter Wilson brings an important caution to attempts to understand behaviour.
Adults can become too certain.
A theory may quickly become an explanation:
“He is doing this because of attachment.”
“She is testing us.”
“He wants attention.”
“She is traumatised.”
Peter’s emphasis on the therapeutic importance of “I don’t know” protects practice from premature interpretation.
Understanding behaviour requires curiosity rather than confident mind-reading.
The practitioner remains interested in the child’s internal experience while recognising that the child’s mind can never be completely known from the outside.
This creates room for observation, dialogue, reflection and revision.
Paul van Heeswijk: Behaviour as a Search for Missing Experience
Paul van Heeswijk draws on Winnicottian thinking to suggest that difficult behaviour may represent a child’s attempt to obtain something that was previously missing.
The child may be searching for:
- someone who remains
- someone who notices
- someone who survives anger
- someone who provides boundaries
- someone who understands
- someone who does not retaliate
- someone who can bear distress
From this perspective, behaviour is not simply an attempt to disrupt care.
It may be an attempt to discover whether a different kind of care is possible.
Paul’s emphasis on compassionate witnessing asks adults to remain emotionally present rather than rushing immediately to control, interpret or fix.
Vicki McKeown: Behaviour as Armour
Vicki McKeown’s contribution is especially important in understanding behaviour as protection.
Children who have been hurt may develop behaviours that keep vulnerability hidden.
Anger can protect fear.
Defiance can protect shame.
Control can protect uncertainty.
Rejection can protect against being rejected.
What adults encounter externally may therefore be the child’s protective armour rather than the child’s deeper emotional experience.
Therapeutic practice asks what the armour is protecting before attempting simply to remove it.
Alan Jenkins: Curiosity Before Judgement
Alan Jenkins demonstrates the importance of understanding even behaviour that is harmful to others.
His work with harmful sexual behaviour resists both condemnation and simplistic exoneration.
He asks professionals to understand:
- relational disconnection
- shame
- panic
- ethical development
- the child’s history
- the meaning of the behaviour
For Alan, judgement can deepen destructive shame and make ethical reflection less possible.
Accountability becomes stronger when children reconnect with their own values and develop greater awareness of the experience of others.
His work demonstrates that understanding behaviour and holding responsibility are not opposites.
William Curran: When Behaviour Reflects Neurodevelopment
William Curran adds an essential corrective to trauma-centred explanations.
Some children in child welfare systems have neurodevelopmental impairments, including those associated with prenatal alcohol exposure.
Difficulties involving:
- impulse control
- memory
- planning
- adaptive functioning
- cause and effect
- emotional regulation
- executive functioning
may be repeatedly interpreted as non-compliance.
A child may be punished for failing to demonstrate a capacity they do not reliably possess.
William’s work reminds the Atlas that understanding behaviour requires careful assessment of capacity, not simply motivation.
Laura Steckley: Behaviour, Emotion and Containment
Laura Steckley helps explain what happens when emotion overwhelms thinking.
When children become highly activated, the capacity to reflect, reason and act purposefully may temporarily deteriorate.
Containment helps transform unmanageable emotional experience into something that can be tolerated and thought about.
From this perspective, behavioural escalation may signal a loss of reflective capacity rather than an increase in deliberate misconduct.
The immediate therapeutic task may therefore be to help restore thinking before expecting reasoning, learning or accountability.
Understanding Behaviour in Practice
Therapeutic Parenting
Therapeutic parents look beneath behaviour while remaining responsible for safety and boundaries.
Instead of responding only to:
“What did my child do?”
they also consider:
“What might my child be experiencing?”
This can involve:
- recognising fear beneath aggression
- seeing control as a response to uncertainty
- understanding avoidance as possible protection
- interpreting repeated reassurance-seeking relationally
- supporting regulation before reasoning
- maintaining boundaries without humiliation
- repairing connection after conflict
- reflecting on the parent’s own emotional reaction
The objective is not to remove every difficult behaviour immediately.
It is to help the child gradually develop safer and more effective ways of meeting the underlying need.
Foster and Kinship Care
Children entering foster or kinship care may bring behaviours that were adaptive within previous environments.
Carers can easily experience these behaviours personally.
A child may:
- reject affection
- hoard food
- lie about apparently minor matters
- resist routines
- attempt to control adults
- destroy belongings
- sabotage enjoyable experiences
- become distressed around contact
- resist asking for help
Understanding does not make these behaviours easy.
It helps carers avoid interpreting them solely as rejection, ingratitude or deliberate provocation.
Carers need support to understand both the child’s behaviour and their own responses to it.
Residential Child Care
Residential child care provides an especially important setting for understanding behaviour because everyday life continuously reveals children’s expectations and coping strategies.
Behaviour may emerge around:
- meals
- bedtime
- transitions
- peer relationships
- school
- family contact
- staff change
- boundaries
- shared space
- celebrations
- separation
Therapeutic residential practice uses these events as opportunities for understanding rather than treating them merely as incidents.
James Anglin’s concept of Pain-Based Behaviour is particularly relevant here.
The task is not simply to stop what is happening.
It is to ask what pain, need, expectation or developmental difficulty the behaviour may be expressing while maintaining safety for everyone involved.
Education
Behaviour in schools is frequently interpreted through a compliance lens.
Students may be described as:
- disruptive
- defiant
- lazy
- unmotivated
- attention-seeking
- refusing to learn
An understanding-behaviour approach asks what else may be influencing the presentation.
Possible factors include:
- fear of failure
- shame
- sensory overload
- learning difficulty
- developmental trauma
- neurodevelopmental difference
- relational insecurity
- hunger
- exhaustion
- peer conflict
- instability outside school
This does not mean teachers should diagnose children.
It means behavioural interpretation should remain curious enough to avoid unnecessary escalation and exclusion.
Child Protection
Child protection systems frequently encounter behaviour at moments of considerable stress.
Children may be assessed while:
- frightened
- separated from caregivers
- meeting unfamiliar adults
- moving placements
- uncertain about their future
- experiencing divided loyalties
- feeling blamed or ashamed
Behaviour in these circumstances should not automatically be treated as evidence of enduring personality or character.
Understanding requires context.
Professionals should also remain aware of how system behaviour—delays, unpredictability, placement moves, inconsistent communication—can itself contribute to children’s distress and behavioural responses.
Clinical Assessment
Clinical assessment should differentiate between possible contributors to behaviour.
These may include:
- trauma
- attachment
- neurodevelopment
- intellectual ability
- language
- sensory processing
- mental health
- physical health
- learning
- family relationships
- environmental stress
The goal is not to find a single explanation.
It is to develop a formulation sufficiently rich to guide helpful intervention.
Supervision
Supervision provides a space for adults to think about behaviour rather than simply react to it.
Useful questions include:
- What is this behaviour making us feel?
- Are different staff experiencing the child differently?
- What interpretation have we settled on?
- What evidence supports that interpretation?
- What alternatives have we considered?
- What does the child say is happening?
- What happened immediately beforehand?
- What need might be present?
- What capacity might be overwhelmed?
- How is the organisational context affecting the situation?
Supervision helps transform emotional reaction into reflective understanding.
Leadership and Organisations
Organisations influence how behaviour is interpreted.
A punitive culture is more likely to frame behaviour as defiance.
A fearful organisation may interpret behaviour primarily through risk.
A reflective organisation creates opportunities to ask what the behaviour may mean.
Leaders therefore shape children’s experience indirectly through:
- language
- incident review
- supervision
- training
- policy
- staffing
- support
- expectations
Organisations should examine whether their systems encourage curiosity or premature judgement.
Reflective Questions
- What exactly did I observe, and what have I inferred?
- What happened immediately before the behaviour?
- What might the child have been feeling?
- What need might the behaviour be attempting to meet?
- What might the child be trying to avoid?
- What does the child expect will happen next?
- How might previous experience make this behaviour understandable?
- What developmental capacity am I expecting?
- Could neurodevelopmental factors be relevant?
- Is the child sufficiently regulated to use reasoning right now?
- What does this behaviour evoke in me?
- Am I becoming punitive, rescuing, frightened or rejecting?
- How might my response reinforce the child’s expectations?
- Is shame influencing what is happening?
- What does the child themselves say?
- What alternative explanations have we considered?
- What needs to happen immediately for safety?
- What needs to happen over time for the behaviour to become less necessary?
- Are we trying only to stop behaviour, or are we helping the child develop?
- What might we need to change in the environment rather than asking only the child to change?
Related Concepts
- Pain-Based Behaviour
- Developmental Trauma
- Attachment
- Attachment Representations
- Co-regulation
- Emotional Regulation
- Containment
- Shame
- Mentalisation
- Neurodevelopment
- Reflective Practice
- Therapeutic Relationships
- Therapeutic Parenting
- Therapeutic Residential Child Care
- Boundaries
- Assessment and Formulation
Contributing Voices
The following contributors broaden, deepen or complement the Atlas’s understanding of behaviour through their work on development, relationships, education, care, lived experience and organisational practice.
- Adela Holmes
- Alex Rowell
- Ben Perks
- Bruce Henderson
- Carla Keyte
- Emma Higgs
- John Turberville
- John Whitwell
- Julie Taylor
- Kevin Gallagher
- Lisa Cherry
- Lisa Holmes
- Louise Allen
- Mary-Anne Hodd
- Megan Corcoran
- Nimali Kumari
- Patricia Sheridan
- Peter Blake
- Richard Rollinson
- Robbie Gilligan
- Ruth Clare
- Surja
- Tanja Abou
- Tom Ellison
(Each name will link to the contributor’s Atlas profile and podcast episode.)
Further Reading
Understanding Behaviour, Trauma and Development
Anglin, J.P. Pain, Normality, and the Struggle for Congruence: Reinterpreting Residential Care for Children and Youth. Routledge, 2003.
Holden, M.J. Children and Residential Experiences: Creating Conditions for Change. Child and Family Press, 2009.
Emond, R., Steckley, L., and Roesch-Marsh, A. A Guide to Therapeutic Child Care: What You Need to Know to Create a Healing Home. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016.
Pearce, C. A Short Introduction to Attachment and Attachment Disorder, Second Edition. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016.
Daniel, B., Wassell, S., and Gilligan, R. Child Development for Child Care and Protection Workers, Second Edition. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010.
Henderson, B.B. Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Residential Care for Children and Youth: A Good Place to Grow. Routledge, 2023.
Meaning, Behaviour and Reflective Practice
Wilson, P. The Adolescent and the Psychotherapist: Why “I Don’t Know” Matters. Routledge, 2026.
Rose, R. Life Story Therapy with Traumatized Children: A Model for Practice. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Perks, B. Trauma Proof: Healing, Attachment, and the Science of Prevention. Central Recovery Press, 2025.
Neurodevelopment
The literature concerning fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, executive functioning and neurodevelopment will be expanded as the Atlas develops, including work referenced by William Curran.
This section will continue to expand to include:
- books written by contributors
- key research papers
- developmental and neurodevelopmental research
- practice guidance
- related Atlas concept pages
Atlas Insight
Understanding behaviour sits at the centre of therapeutic care because behaviour is often the point at which the child’s internal world and the adult’s response meet.
The child experiences something.
The child acts.
The adult interprets the action.
The interpretation shapes the response.
The response then becomes another experience for the child.
This creates a relational cycle.
When adults interpret behaviour primarily as defiance, manipulation or disrespect, their response may confirm the child’s expectation that adults are punitive, rejecting or uninterested in what is happening internally.
When adults respond with unlimited tolerance, children may experience adults as unable or unwilling to provide protection and structure.
Therapeutic care requires something more difficult:
understanding alongside responsibility.
The adult seeks to understand what is happening while continuing to hold boundaries, maintain safety and support development.
Across the Atlas, behaviour is repeatedly reframed as meaningful rather than meaningless.
It may express:
- pain
- protection
- fear
- shame
- need
- adaptation
- arousal
- developmental limitation
- neurodevelopmental difference
- uncertainty
- relational expectation
Understanding does not mean that adults will always identify the correct explanation.
The more important shift is from judgement to curiosity.
Rather than asking:
“How do we make this behaviour stop?”
the Atlas encourages a broader sequence of questions:
What is happening?
What might this mean?
What does this child need?
What must we protect?
What capacity needs to develop?
What relational experience can we provide?
How will we know our response has helped?
Understanding behaviour therefore becomes not simply a therapeutic technique, but a way of thinking about children.
It asks adults to see behaviour as the beginning of inquiry rather than the end of explanation.
Knowledge Evolution
The understanding of children’s behaviour has changed substantially over time.
Early approaches frequently emphasised morality, obedience and discipline. Behaviourism later introduced systematic approaches to understanding how behaviour is influenced by consequences and reinforcement.
Developmental psychology, attachment theory, psychodynamic thinking, trauma research, neuroscience and neurodevelopmental science have subsequently expanded the field’s understanding of why behaviour occurs.
Within the Secure Start Atlas, these traditions converge around a more integrated formulation:
Behaviour is observable, but its meaning must be understood in context.
Evolution of the Concept
Moral and disciplinary models
Behaviour interpreted primarily through obedience, misconduct and punishment
↓
Behavioural approaches
Attention to learning, reinforcement and environmental consequences
↓
Attachment and developmental psychology
Behaviour understood in relation to developmental needs and relational expectations
↓
Psychodynamic thinking
Behaviour as an expression of emotional experience that may not yet be consciously understood
↓
Trauma-informed practice
Behaviour understood as adaptation to threat, adversity and overwhelming experience
↓
Pain-Based Behaviour
James Anglin’s reframing of difficult behaviour as the expression of underlying pain
↓
Containment and co-regulation
Understanding how arousal affects thought, behaviour and the capacity for regulation
↓
Neurodevelopmental understanding
Recognising executive functioning, adaptive functioning and neurological capacity
↓
Lived Experience
Understanding how professional interpretations and labels are experienced by children and young people
↓
Secure Start Atlas Synthesis
Behaviour understood through the interaction of development, relationships, adaptation, arousal, neurodevelopment, meaning and context
Where Next?
Continue exploring:
→ Pain-Based Behaviour
→ Developmental Trauma
→ Attachment
→ Co-regulation
→ Emotional Regulation
→ Containment
→ Shame
→ Mentalisation
→ Neurodevelopment
→ Reflective Practice
→ Therapeutic Parenting
→ Therapeutic Residential Child Care
→ Assessment and Formulation
This page is part of the Secure Start Atlas of Therapeutic Care.
The Atlas is a living knowledge resource developed from conversations on The Secure Start Podcast. As new contributors, research, ideas and lived experiences emerge, this page will continue to evolve.