Understanding Behaviour in the Early Years

Researchers have identified four functions that cover almost every behaviour you'll encounter in an early childhood setting. The technical term is function of behaviour, but the practical question is simpler: what is this behaviour getting them or helping them avoid?

Attention — from educators, peers, or carers. The child is getting a social reaction: your redirection, another child's gasp, a concerned look from across the room. The reaction is the payoff. Responding consistently to the behaviour — even with correction — keeps it going.

Escape — from a demand, a sensory input, or a situation. Tidy-up time, a noisy group activity, sitting at the mat — if acting out removes the expectation, the behaviour works. It will happen again at the same time tomorrow.

Access — to an item, a person, or an activity. The child is trying to get something specific: the red truck, your lap, the iPad. If the behaviour reliably produces the item — even through a chain of events — it continues.

Sensory — works even without an audience. The behaviour produces a physical sensation that reinforces itself. It doesn't require anyone to react or anything to change in the environment. Common in toddlers who are still learning to regulate.

Most early years behaviour is attention- or escape-maintained. What makes the under-5 context distinct is that the communication gap is enormous. A three-year-old biting at morning drop-off is not being defiant — they almost certainly lack the words, the self-regulation, and the emotional vocabulary to tell you what's wrong. The behaviour is carrying a message their language cannot yet deliver. Your job is to read it.

Two children can do identical things for completely opposite reasons. A response that removes the payoff for one child hands it directly to the other. This is why generic consequences applied across the group rarely resolve the behaviour for anyone in particular.

For a closer look at how this plays out in toddler and preschool settings, see Behaviour is Communication: What Under-5s Are Telling You. For the technical definition, see function of behaviour in the glossary.

Prevent

Antecedent strategies reduce the conditions that trigger behaviour in the first place. They require no behaviour to occur at all. With under-5s, this matters more than in any other setting — the child's capacity for self-regulation, language, and impulse control is still forming. You cannot talk your way through it after the fact. You set up the environment so the situation is less likely to arise.

Predictable routine is the single most powerful prevention tool in an early years room. Toddlers and pre-schoolers have almost no internal capacity to predict what comes next. When they can't predict it, the unknown becomes aversive — and escape-maintained behaviour spikes around transitions. A routine that stays consistent across the day gives the child something to hold onto. Predictability is regulating.

Photo visual schedules support the routine by making it visible. A strip of real photographs showing the daily sequence — arrival, morning meeting, play, snack, outdoors — tells the child what is happening and, critically, when the non-preferred activity ends. Use photographs rather than illustrations for toddlers and children with limited language; real images are more immediately meaningful at this age.

Transition warnings are the single most underused prevention strategy in childcare settings. A five-minute and two-minute warning before a transition ends the preferred activity without ambush. The abrupt end of play is one of the most reliable triggers for meltdowns in under-5s — the behaviour is almost always escape-maintained (avoiding the transition) or attention-maintained (protest). Give the warning, acknowledge it, and follow through.

Offering choices within the non-negotiable reduces escape-maintained resistance. You're not asking whether tidy-up happens — it happens. But do they want to put the blocks away or the books? That small slice of control changes the antecedent context significantly for a child whose day is otherwise entirely directed by adults.

Sensory and movement breaks are not rewards — they're prevention. Toddlers and pre-schoolers cannot sustain prolonged seated attention without movement, and attempting to enforce it produces the escape-maintained behaviour that looks like "not listening". Build movement into the structure: after group time, before transitions, as a routine feature of the day rather than a crisis response. Consult your occupational therapist for children with sensory processing differences — what looks like the same behaviour may need different environmental adjustments.

Environmental redesign covers the physical setup of the room: sightlines, noise levels, materials accessibility, and group size. Crowded, loud, overstimulating environments create the conditions for dysregulation before a single educator says a word. If a particular area consistently produces conflict, the question is what about that context is setting it up — not which children are choosing to misbehave in it.

Setting events matter enormously with under-5s. A child who arrived hungry, overtired, or in a state of distress from the morning routine is already starting the day with a depleted regulatory capacity. A behaviour that would otherwise be manageable becomes much harder to navigate. Noting these setting events and the related concept of motivating operations helps you read the day more accurately — and adjust expectations and support accordingly rather than treating the behaviour as a standalone event.

Redirect

When a child is in the early stages of escalation — not yet at the peak, but clearly headed somewhere — redirection gives them a route back without a confrontation. At this age, the redirect needs to be immediate, warm, and concrete. Long verbal explanations during escalation are rarely processed and often feed attention-maintained behaviour.

Match the redirect to the function when you can: offer a movement break for a child who is escaping a seated activity, provide brief one-to-one attention for a child who is escalating for social contact. An effective redirect also introduces the replacement behaviour: "Use your words — say 'my turn'."

The replacement behaviour must be explicitly taught during calm, settled periods — not introduced in the middle of an incident. If a child doesn't have a practised way to request a break or to get your attention appropriately, they'll use the behaviour that has reliably worked before.

Respond

Once the behaviour occurs, the response is about not reinforcing the function. For attention-maintained behaviour, this means keeping the response minimal and immediately attending to appropriate behaviour — consistently, not selectively. For escape-maintained behaviour, it means following through with the expectation rather than removing it as a consequence.

The most important response tool at this age is teaching the replacement behaviour, which is what functional communication training (FCT) describes in clinical language. For a toddler, this is as simple as teaching the word or sign for "help", "break", or "my turn" — and then reinforcing that communication immediately so it becomes more efficient than the behaviour it replaces. See the glossary for more on what a mand is and why it's the primary target in early communication work.

For problem-specific guides in early years settings, see Toddlers Biting: What to Look For Before You Respond and Circle Time: When a Child Won't Join.

The purpose of tracking is to answer a specific question. Before you start, decide what you're actually trying to find out: Is the biting increasing or decreasing this week? When during the day does the behaviour peak? What happens right before it? Knowing the question shapes what you record — and prevents you from generating paperwork that nobody reads.

Three tools that work in an early years room without specialist training:

ABC data sheets capture what happened before (antecedent), what the child did (behaviour), and what happened after (consequence). In a childcare or preschool context, these are most useful for behaviours that are lower-frequency but high-intensity — aggression, biting, self-injury. You're not interpreting yet; you're building a record. Over ten to fifteen incidents, patterns emerge that are impossible to see in the moment.

Frequency tally sheets are the right tool for biting and hitting: you mark a tally each time it occurs, and at the end of the day you have a count. Week-on-week frequency data is the clearest way to demonstrate whether a plan is working. Keep the sheet visible, mark it immediately when the behaviour occurs, and track only one behaviour at a time.

Scatterplot grids map behaviour across time of day and show you where clusters emerge. After a week or two, patterns appear: the biting happens every day between 11am and noon (pre-lunch, hungry, tired), or the meltdowns cluster at tidy-up time every afternoon. Those clusters point directly at function and at where your prevention should be concentrated. See also Early Years Transitions: The Tidy-Up Problem for a common cluster pattern and how to address it.

A practical note: don't try to track every behaviour you'd like to see change. Pick the one that's most disruptive or most concerning, define it in observable terms — "biting that makes contact with skin" is better than "aggressive behaviour" — and track that one consistently for two weeks. Scattered data across five behaviours gives you nothing reliable to act on.

Most early years behaviour — tantrums, transition resistance, biting, not sharing, refusing to join group time — is developmentally typical and responds well to the preventive strategies above. Consistent routines, clear visual supports, and appropriate responses to function will resolve the majority of what you encounter across the room. That's not a low ceiling; it covers a lot of what looks alarming in the moment.

But some situations are signalling something that room-level support alone cannot address. Knowing how to distinguish between ordinary developmental behaviour and genuine concern is one of the most important skills an early childhood educator can develop — and it requires honesty about the limits of what a childcare or nursery setting is resourced to do.

Loop in the family when you're observing something consistently that they may not be seeing at home, or when home context (a new sibling, disrupted sleep, changes in the household) seems to be affecting what you're seeing at daycare. Family partnership is not optional at this age — parents hold context that changes what the behaviour means.

Talk to your director or a behaviour specialist when a consistent, well-implemented plan has been in place for three or four weeks and the behaviour hasn't decreased; when the behaviour is dangerous and you cannot keep the child and their peers safe; or when your gut is telling you this is outside the typical range. Trust that instinct. Early childhood educators accumulate a large amount of normative data just from experience, and when something feels genuinely different, that observation is worth taking seriously.

Consider a referral for early intervention or speech-language support when the behaviour appears to be driven by a communication gap that isn't closing with standard teaching. A toddler who is still communicating almost entirely through behaviour at 3.5–4 years, who is not responding to simple language, or who is significantly dysregulated across most of the day may need an assessment that goes beyond what your room can provide. Early intervention timelines matter — earlier referral means earlier support during the most plastic window for language and regulation development.

Escalating to specialist support is not a failure of room management. It is appropriate triage. The goal is always to match the level of support to what the child actually needs.