Positive Behaviour Support for Children and Adolescents with Trauma-Impacted Behaviour

Positive Behaviour Support for Children with Trauma-Impacted Behaviour is a practical, step-by-step guide that helps caregivers, educators, and professionals understand behaviour through a trauma-responsive, attachment-informed, and compassion-focused lens. Rather than viewing behaviour as deliberate misbehaviour, this book reframes it as communication — a reflection of the child’s internal state, unmet needs, sensory overwhelm, and survival responses.

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Trauma can significantly shape how a child or adolescent experiences the world, responds to stress, and navigates relationships. When a young person has lived through chronic stress, unpredictability, fear, or unsafe environments, their nervous system adapts for survival. What may appear as anger, avoidance, defiance, controlling behaviour, emotional shutdown, or rapid shifts in mood is often the body’s way of staying safe in moments that feel threatening — even when no danger is present.

Positive Behaviour Support for Children with Trauma-Impacted Behaviour is a practical, step-by-step guide that helps caregivers, educators, and professionals understand behaviour through a trauma-responsive, attachment-informed, and compassion-focused lens. Rather than viewing behaviour as deliberate misbehaviour, this book reframes it as communication — a reflection of the child’s internal state, unmet needs, sensory overwhelm, and survival responses.

Inside, you will learn how to:
• Understand how trauma, chronic stress, and disrupted attachment shape brain development, behaviour, and emotional regulation
• Recognise early signs of fear, overwhelm, hyperarousal, dissociation, or shutdown
• Reduce triggers by creating predictable, safe, low-arousal, and attuned environments
• Support emotional regulation through co-regulation, connection, grounding, and sensory strategies
• Conduct a functional behaviour assessment that considers trauma history, safety cues, and relational needs
• Develop proactive prevention plans that build felt safety, predictability, and emotional stability
• Respond calmly and effectively during escalation, avoidance, shutdown, or survival-based behaviour
• Build the child’s strengths, coping skills, emotional literacy, and relational capacity through sensitive, paced teaching

This book includes practical tools and templates to guide you through assessing, managing, and preventing behaviours of concern. Whether you are a parent, teacher, support worker, allied health professional, or behaviour support practitioner, you will gain clear, actionable strategies that help the young person you support feel safe, regulated, understood, and empowered — in a way that honours their lived experience and supports healing through connection.