 So, let's get on with the treatment program. After you've taken those summary assessments, right, you can then, or after you've written those, you can then formulate a program. Should you do it? That's the big question. Should we actually go ahead with the program? Because it's going to be a lot of work, all right? And the first question you should always ask is, who is going to benefit from this program? Is it the client? Or is it someone else? So, the client, this gets a little odd to talk about, because maybe a teacher hired you to do some work, all right? But the client is really the person whose behavior you're changing, okay? So, is the client going to benefit from you implementing a procedure, or is the teacher going to benefit? Or is someone going to, is someone else going to be hurt in the process? Who really is this about, all right? And that's kind of a tough question to ask, because obviously, well, it's a problem behavior, so it must be a problem for the kid. Maybe, maybe not. It might not actually be a problem for the kid. Escape from academic tasks is only a problem if you want them to learn. If you don't give two hoots about learning, then escape from an academic task is irrelevant, right? If you don't care if they learn the material or not, then escape from it's just completely fine. So, throwing a tantrum or throwing a pencil or getting up and walking across the classroom to get a glass of water, maybe okay, all right? At the very least, your program cannot be harmful to the client. If it is going to be harmful in any way, shape, or form to the client, stop there. Tell whoever the person is that you're working with that, nope, this cannot continue for ethical reasons or whatever the case may be. Can the problem be operationalized? A lot of times, you'll get a teacher that says, well, he's just a bad child, right? Or something like that. Well, they're bad kids. I just, I can't deal with them. They're bad kids. Fix it. You're a behavior modifier. Fix it. All right? If you can't operationalize that bad child or problem behavior, whatever it is, you're done. Okay? Walk away because there's going to be nothing you can do to improve the outcome in this scenario. Because they'll just come up with new behaviors or new examples or they'll say something like, oh, it's just an attitude, right? Attitude doesn't cut it for an operational definition. Oh, the kid has a bad attitude. What the heck does that mean to have a bad attitude? Does my cat have a bad attitude? Does my dog, do I, you know, maybe I do have a bit of a bad attitude about this because I've dealt with this particular issue before and it pisses me off. Anyway, so if you can't agree on those very specific behaviors, if you can't operationalize them, walk away because you will fail, right? And not the sense that you will fail at implementing a behavior change plan, but you will fail in the eyes of the person that's hiring you because the kid will still be behaving inappropriately. Is the problem actually important? Or is this a kid being a kid? Is this a normal developmental issue? Is it a medical issue? Right? So we've got a kid in class that's sneezing all the time, is disrupting the class, but guess what? Maybe your building is just dirty, right? Maybe it's really dusty in the class or maybe the kid's allergic to something that he's wearing or something in the environment. Who knows what it is? So is the sneezing a problem for everybody in the class? Well, kind of. How would we fix that? Well, we're not going to go to the kid and punish him for sneezing. That's for damn sure, all right? We're going to look in the environment and see if we can find some other solutions. But again, always about this, always getting back to this important thing. Is this really an issue or is somebody just got a burp up their bum, all right? And you'd be surprised how oftentimes people just have a burp up their bum, all right? It is just one of those things that a teacher or a parent or whoever gets something in their head that this kid is being problematic or they're always trying to undermine me, but maybe that's not actually the case when you sit down and actually operationalize things. You never know, but you have to observe, you have to look and find out. Will you need another specialist? Are you going to need somebody else to come in and help you out? Are you going to need a medical doctor? Are you going to need some environmental engineer to address the issues in the classroom with regard to the clean air stuff or whatever it is? The point is that do you need anybody else? Be honest, all right? Your job and our job as behavior managers is simply to manage behavior. We're not out there to address anything else. We don't prescribe medication, we don't diagnose, we don't do any of that stuff. We don't diagnose ADD, we don't diagnose mental health issues. We deal with behavior and behavior alone, all right? Now granted, that's a pretty broad area and it undercuts all sorts of stuff, including mental health issues, but we're not qualified, not trained, and legally not allowed to do diagnosis, especially not in the medical area, but not even of mental health disorders. So maybe you do have a kid that seems to be depressed on the surface. Well, guess what? Call up the school counselor, call up the school psychologist, and get them involved at that point. You don't want to work alone here, all right? In fact, good behavior modification programs are done as sort of a team approach. You're looking at everybody involved, all right? If you're in a school, you've got the principal, you've got the teachers, you've got the parents, you've got the kids, you've got the other kids in the classroom. Everybody should be involved that you can get involved, or that needs to be involved, because that way you're really changing the environment for this kid and actually selecting the appropriate behavior. Can this be easily managed or not? Maybe the kid is standing up and throwing his desk across the room and doing all sorts of stuff. Who knows? Maybe it's not easily managed. Maybe you need somebody to specifically deal with this kid on a one-on-one basis and it's not going to work in the classroom, all right? Maybe it's something that's happening at home while the parents are away. That's going to be a challenge to manage the behavior. Let's say a teenager that's a latchkey kid comes home, nobody's home, and they're doing inappropriate stuff while they're at home, like starting fires or something like that. Well, that's not going to be easy to manage. You're going to have to come up with some other techniques. You're going to have to implement some other things by that. Maybe the kid would have to go to somebody's house, or maybe you're going to need somebody there all the time to watch the kid. Does the behavior go beyond the program? Can you generalize this stuff beyond the six weeks that you're going to be working with? If not, stop. Your goal is permanent change, not temporary while I'm here change. Again, if you do your job right, you don't need to come back. You don't want repeat clients. That means you failed, all right? And I'm being a bit harsh, but you get the idea that we want to work ourselves out of a job. There's always new kids next year, so you're never really going to be out of a job. But the point is, is that you should be out of a job with that client. Once you're done with those changes, once you've worked with them and programmed for generalization and done all the stuff that we've talked about, then you're going to be able to move on. And hopefully their behavior will be fixed. So it's a fun one. Can you actually get the assistance from other people that you need? Will the teacher work with you? Will the principal work with you? Will the para educators work with you? Will the parents work with you? Will the other siblings work with you? And can you control the people that will stand in your way? You'd be surprised how often a teacher will undermine a treatment program. You'd be surprised how often a parent will undermine a treatment program. You need to be able to control their behavior as well, and a lot of times you won't. Let's say you've got a kid at home that's engaging in inappropriate behavior with his dad, you know, back talking and doing whatever. But every time he back talks, dad gets pissed off. Then mom gives a bunch of reinforcement and tries to make things OK for the kid. And it doesn't have to be dad or mom. It can flip around. You know, maybe the kid's back tacking the mom and dad steps in and saves the day. Well, guess what? The kid just got reinforced for, you know, for back talking because dad walked in and saved the day. He got all pissed and mom got pissed off at the kid and started punishing him. And then dad's like, well, it's OK. Don't really worry about it. Let's go out and play Frisbee. Whatever, right? But the point is that there's that undermining going on and it happens a lot. So you need to make sure that those people that work with the client other than yourself that you actually have control with them and that they're on board. It's a certain amount of sales, right? You got to sell yourself. You got to sell this program. You got to make the other people believe that if they don't do what you're suggesting, they will ruin it. They will waste money and they will ruin the program and the behavior will not get fixed. And oftentimes this is something that they have to learn that they don't know it offhand because, trust me, a parent going to somebody for help with their kid. That's a hard, hard thing for a parent to do. And when they do it, then there's going to be a bit of a resistance because you're thinking about behavior and analytic approaches. They're definitely not thinking about that. They're thinking about things from a perspective, a day card, a mind, body distinction and desires and wants and needs and emotional issues. And you're going to look at emotion from a sort of biological perspective and then also looking at it from a classical conditioning and operating conditioning perspective. So there's going to be some conflict there and they're probably not going to believe what you're doing right off the bat. So you need to get some successes. And the parents or the teachers or whoever might actually undermine you a little bit. But if you can show that what you're doing works or that they're undermining caused a problem, then you can then demonstrate that what you're doing is effective. And go back and look at those Nanny 911 videos and you'll see what I'm talking about. That's the parents will often undermine the nannies and then it fails and the nannies go in and train them. In fact, one of the big things about behavior model programs are often about training the people that are in direct contact with the child rather than training the child themselves. So more often than not, you're working with the teacher to maintain these behaviors. You're working with the parents to maintain these behaviors as well. Are you qualified to deal with the issue? If you're not, walk away, be honest. Have you dealt with a behavior like this before? Do you have a set of tools that you think are going to work? Or is this just too much? If you think it's too much, walk away. Because you need to be keeping your professional head on here and not taking on too much. And also, are you available? Do you have enough time? I don't get to do as much of this stuff as I would like. I've done some consulting in the schools. I've done some consulting with families. But I would like to be spending at least a day a week out doing consulting. But I don't have the time. I teach too many classes. I've got too much research going on. I've got too much service work going on from other perspectives. And right now, I don't have the time to be a consultant in this area. And I would love to, but I'm not going to tell somebody that I can work with their kiddo and then drop the ball because I can't be there the three days a week that I need to be there. So you've got to be honest with yourself.