There’s no such thing as unexpected behaviour

This piece was hard to write. It holds my grief. It documents not only what happened to my child, but how systems made it worse by pretending to be surprised. I share it because too many families are made to carry this alone.

Every time I see the phrase unexpected behaviour in a school document, a safety plan, or a therapist’s note, I feel something in my chest tighten—a recoil against the assumption that this behaviour arrived without cause, a refusal to account for everything that came before. It is a phrase that seems, on the surface, neutral—an institutional shorthand for incidents that fall outside the scope of what a classroom or program is set up to handle—but beneath that polished exterior, it carries a message of disinterest, of blame, and of wilful forgetting.

Because the longer I parent a neurodivergent child who has survived trauma, the clearer it becomes to me that the behaviour is never unexpected. What is unexpected is that adults continue to act surprised.

Just a Parent

On “unexpected behaviour”

I used the phrase myself, in emails and meeting notes and carefully-worded requests for support—because it was the accepted currency of school systems, the coded language of credibility, the tone you adopt when you are trying to be heard inside a framework that already suspects you of overreaction. I used it hoping that aligning myself with their terminology would buy my child a sliver of grace, a moment of protection, a fraction of a plan. But the whole time, I knew it was a lie. Robin’s behaviour was only ever surprising to people who refused to look back.

When I wrote to the school after summer camp had gone badly—two meltdowns in the first two days, one involving biting, one involving hitting an instructor—I already knew what they would see: aggression, risk, liability. They would see what they call unexpected behaviour. So I tried to preempt it. I positioned myself as proactive, cooperative, forward-looking. I said: let’s plan for the fall. Let’s align supports. Let’s get ahead of the transition to a new teacher. But I still called it unexpected—even though there was nothing about Robin’s distress that caught me off guard.

What trauma makes predictable

There is no mystery here. Robin had endured a year of emotional dislocation and inconsistent support. He had cycled through eleven different aides in kindergarten alone, each one a stranger with no time to build trust. He had formed a rare, anchoring attachment to one teacher, who eventually left. He had been repeatedly exposed to unstructured environments without sufficient adult oversight. He had been the target of ongoing peer teasing and minor assaults that were brushed off as accidents. And he had been restrained and punished as a toddler in daycare—something he remembers not in words, but in body, in startle responses, in the way he flinches when trust is broken. He had asked for help in every way he knew how. And again and again, his needs were deferred, minimised, or reinterpreted.

Of course the behaviour escalated. Of course it became harder to predict.

Because trauma embeds itself in the nervous system. It does not ask permission before it erupts, and it does not offer neat narrative arcs. The more a child is asked to self-regulate in environments that remain unsafe, the more his body learns to protect itself through speed, volume, and instinct. What looks like unpredictability is often the result of layered, accumulated, unresolved harm. What looks like volatility is often a child who has learned that soft signals are ignored—and so the signals get louder.

To call that unexpected is to make the child the glitch, the anomaly, the disruption in what the adults assumed would be a smooth day. But no one is shocked when a wound festers after repeated exposure. No one calls it unexpected when a fire breaks out in a building that’s ignored its smoke alarms for months. The surprise only comes when you refuse to see the conditions that made the reaction inevitable.

The phrase as deflection

There is a kind of institutional convenience—even institutional amnesia—in the phrase. And on a broader level, that amnesia functions as risk mitigation, a bureaucratic tactic to mystify how issues developed so that accountability can be deferred or erased. When adults act as though behaviour is inexplicable, they obscure the chain of neglect and misattunement that made it likely all along.

In Robin’s case, I believe the confusion they claimed to feel—the fuddled responses, the wide-eyed mystification—was less about what happened and more about why it happened now. Because Robin could appear fine for a few days. He could hold it together, comply, mask, perform what they expected of him. And then something would happen—something that reminded his nervous system that he was alone, unsafe, or misread—and he would explode. And they would act bewildered.

But I kept telling them. I said: you cannot leave him unsupervised. I said: if he gets hurt, he will come up swinging. I said: if you don’t protect him, what happens will be your fault. And they heard me, and then forgot me, again and again, in what can only be called an institutional amnesia—strategic, repeated, and convenient.

Unexpected behaviour permits crisis framing. It justifies exclusion, isolation, escalation. It rewrites patterns as incidents. It makes the child’s pain look like the problem, rather than a warning. Phrases like medical exclusion enter the discussion.

What it would take instead

I did believe one thing the behaviour consultant said: that sometimes, over time, Robin’s big reactions became a way to resist the unbearable. At first, those reactions were automatic—pure nervous system response, fight or flight in the face of pain or confusion or betrayal. But when you experience again and again that exploding gets you out of something, that escalation is the only thing that ends the pressure or makes the adults respond, it can slowly become a learned response. Not voluntary in the sense of freedom or clarity—but deliberate in a sad, weary way. Like building a shortcut through devastation. Like carving a tunnel with your hands because the exits were locked.

And the heartbreak of it is this: through their failure to listen to Robin’s subtle cues, to respond to his early distress signals, to meet his relational needs before he was in crisis, the adults around him trained him—unintentionally, perhaps, but unmistakably—to use big reactions as his only reliable exit. What might have been soothed with presence and care was instead reinforced through neglect. What could have been eased through co-regulation was hardened into a strategy of last resort. They shaped his desperation, and then punished him for expressing it.

That kind of adaptation is not strategic—it is survival that becomes ritual. And when the behaviour becomes voluntary in that way, it is already a tragedy. that sometimes, over time, Robin’s big reactions became a way to resist the unbearable. At first, those reactions were automatic—pure nervous system response, fight or flight in the face of pain or confusion or betrayal. But when you experience again and again that exploding gets you out of something, that escalation is the only thing that ends the pressure or makes the adults respond, it can slowly become a learned response. Not voluntary in the sense of freedom or clarity—but deliberate in a sad, weary way. Like building a shortcut through devastation. Like carving a tunnel with your hands because the exits were locked. That kind of adaptation is not strategic—it is survival that becomes ritual. And when the behaviour becomes voluntary in that way, it is already a tragedy.

I believe in the possibility of healing. I believe behaviour can shift and soften. But that shift depends on adults who are willing to respond with pattern recognition instead of shock, with preparation instead of panic, with memory instead of institutional amnesia. It requires support that is relational, consistent, attuned, and preventive—not reactive, moralising, or episodic.

There is no such thing as unexpected behaviour.

There is only behaviour that adults failed to expect because they chose not to look honestly at what came before.

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Appendix: ABA language and its euphemisms

The following section explores common terminology used in Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and behaviourist-informed school support models. These phrases are often presented as neutral, technical descriptors—but they carry ideological weight and material consequences. Each entry below names the harm embedded in the language and reframes it through a trauma-informed, relational lens.

Unexpected behaviour

A phrase that centres adult surprise rather than child context. Suggests the incident came from nowhere when in fact it reflects long-ignored signals, cumulative harm, or unmet need. See debility.

Extinction

A term used to describe the elimination of a behaviour by withdrawing reinforcement. In practice, it often means adults ignore a child’s distress response until it stops—regardless of what is being communicated. Leads to masking, collapse, and sometimes trauma.

Antecedent

Supposedly the “trigger” or environmental event that immediately precedes a behaviour. This model focuses narrowly on the moment before, rather than the long arc of context, memory, and nervous system state. In many cases, the real antecedent is yesterday’s dismissal or last week’s rejection.

Function of behaviour

The idea that all behaviour serves one of four functions (escape, attention, access, or sensory). This framework pathologises need and flattens meaning. It turns protection into defiance and help-seeking into manipulation.

Replacement behaviour

ABA’s solution: teach the child a new, adult-approved behaviour to replace the one that caused disruption. But unless the original need is met, the child simply learns to perform compliance, not to feel safe.

Non-contingent reinforcement

A term for giving children what they need before they ask for it—like connection, sensory input, or predictability. Framed as a behavioural tactic instead of basic relational care.

Planned ignoring

A euphemism for withholding support in response to distress. Often weaponises adult attention and teaches children that only compliance earns connection.

This language does not describe behaviour—it disciplines it. It reframes pain as a puzzle to decode and correct, rather than a reality to respond to with care.

If we want something different, we have to speak differently. And we have to listen when the body tells the truth in ways that words no longer can.

Jargon doesn’t belong in these conversations

And here’s the deeper injustice: this jargon isn’t just confusing—it creates a wall. Schools use these terms with parents without even realising that they’re building a layer of inaccessibility, one that families are left to chip away at alone, Googling phrases late at night, trying to decode what was said in the meeting while nursing their shame.

Meanwhile, there is an expert in the room. You. The parent. The one who knows how to help your child come back from a panic spiral, how to ease the shutdown, how to navigate a meltdown without making it worse. But they make the conversation so opaque that it signals your knowledge is unwelcome, your presence ornamental.

What they should be doing instead is asking you: What helps at home? What makes your child feel safe? What do you see that we might be missing? And then they should listen like it matters.

But the real answer to those questions is almost always some form of better relational support—more consistent presence, deeper trust, longer attunement, more human connection. And those things require human beings: warm, regulated, relationally available adults who have the time, training, and nervous system capacity to show up day after day. Which means they need to be paid. They need to be valued. They need to be rested enough to co-regulate a child in distress instead of freezing, flinching, or moralising. And right now, far too many of them are leaving their classrooms to go work a night shift at the shelter or the grocery store just to survive.

This is not a system designed for care. It is a system of engineered scarcity. And the jargon, the mystification, the endless acronyms and euphemisms—they all work together to hide that fact.