Positive Behaviour Support for Children and Adolescents with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI)

Positive Behaviour Support for Children with Acquired Brain Injury is a practical, step-by-step guide that helps caregivers, educators, and professionals understand behaviour through an ABI-informed, attachment-aware, and compassion-focused lens. Rather than viewing behaviour as deliberate misbehaviour, this book reframes it as communication — a reflection of the child’s cognitive load, internal state, unmet needs, sensory vulnerabilities, and executive-function challenges.

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Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) can significantly shape how a child or adolescent experiences the world, responds to stress, and navigates relationships. When a young person has neurological injury that affects memory, processing speed, impulse control, emotional regulation, or sensory integration, their nervous system adapts to cope. What may appear as anger, avoidance, defiance, controlling behaviour, emotional shutdown, or rapid shifts in mood is often the brain’s way of managing overwhelm, confusion, or threat — even when no danger is present.

Positive Behaviour Support for Children with Acquired Brain Injury is a practical, step-by-step guide that helps caregivers, educators, and professionals understand behaviour through an ABI-informed, attachment-aware, and compassion-focused lens. Rather than viewing behaviour as deliberate misbehaviour, this book reframes it as communication — a reflection of the child’s cognitive load, internal state, unmet needs, sensory vulnerabilities, and executive-function challenges.

Inside, you will learn how to:
• Understand how ABI affects brain development, cognition, communication, emotional regulation, and behavioural control
• Recognise early signs of confusion, fatigue, overwhelm, frustration, hyperarousal, or shutdown
• Reduce triggers by creating predictable, structured, low-demand, and cognitively supportive environments
• Support emotional regulation through co-regulation, pacing, sensory supports, and simplified communication
• Conduct a functional behaviour assessment that considers cognitive capacity, fatigue patterns, safety cues, and relational needs
• Develop proactive prevention plans that promote predictability, reduce cognitive load, and build emotional stability
• Respond calmly and effectively during escalation, shutdown, fatigue-related behaviours, or impulsive/reactive behaviours
• Build the child’s strengths, coping skills, communication abilities, and independence through sensitive, paced, capacity-building 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 neurological differences and supports growth through connection and consistency.