Correcting Difficult Behaviors Through TBRI

Are behavioral issues that your foster child is struggling to outgrow sending you up the wall?

Being a resource parent comes with its fair share of challenges, but luckily, you have Kamali’i to provide you and your child with resources to succeed. Below, you’ll find tools you can use to correct problematic behaviors and encourage adaptive behaviors based on the TBRI corrective framework.

What is TBRI?

TBRI stands for Trust-Based Relational Intervention and is a powerful framework for supporting at-risk youth who have experienced trauma, adversity, or abuse. TBRI empowers caregivers with powerful tools to correct troublesome behaviors in kids and slowly replace them with better actions that will enable future success.

Dealing with Difficult Behavior

Problematic behavior from an at-risk child is not a personal attack on you and shouldn’t be interpreted as such. Instead, treat troubling behavior as a challenge that you and your child must work together to solve. Their behavior is likely a response to past trauma, such as a stressful pregnancy, a difficult birth, early hospitalization, abuse, or especially neglect. 

For TBRI to work, it’s important to understand that any sign of aggression is something your child is expressing at that moment, not who they are. Every child has a story to tell. If we give them permission to share, we can help them work through their emotions, identify the source of their behaviors, and then take the necessary steps to correct them. 

The correction process in the TBRI framework begins with connection. If you can establish a trusting relationship, your child is more likely to work with you. Conversely, failing to foster a trusting connection and responding to challenges with a correction-first approach is more likely to backfire. While it may work in the short term, it could also create a growing rift between you and your child. 

The Importance of Connection

Studies on monkeys have clearly demonstrated just how important connection is for all primates—including humans. Dr. Harry Harlow’s groundbreaking research on the effects of social isolation on rhesus monkeys, which may be seen as ethically questionable today, nonetheless demonstrates the unsettling results of physical and emotional neglect and that adequately meeting a child’s needs goes beyond merely providing food and shelter. 

In Harlow’s experiments, when motherless infants were given a choice between sustenance and comfort (i.e. a “mother” made of wire who could provide milk and a cloth “mother” who felt more like a living monkey), 85% chose comfort. 

Furthermore, Harlow found frightening events couldn’t produce the same psychopathology that resulted from neglect. Even when the fake mothers extended retractable spikes, inflicting pain on the orphaned monkeys, their desire for nurture always led them to return to the mother. In other words, they preferred abuse over neglect. 

When Harlow deprived monkeys of all social interaction—essentially placing them in solitude—the results were shocking. Social deprivation resulted in changes to brain chemistry, altered immune function, and failure to interact socially and reproduce when reintroduced to other monkeys.

Harlow’s experiments aren’t just theoretical. Observations from the plight of orphaned children following World War II seem to corroborate Harlow’s findings. Following the war, 90% of orphaned children in England and the United States died from despair during their first year in an orphanage. In fact, the foster care system was actually developed in response to these staggering death rates.

That’s why it’s so important to avoid isolating a foster child as a punishment for their actions. If you want them to stop and think about their actions, keep them near you to avoid making them feel like they’re being shunned. Childe

A Connection First Approach

TBRI emphasizes connection first so you can make corrections in a safe environment. By establishing a connection, your child then understands your intention toward them—helping contextualize the correcting behavior. If a child comes to you in search of affection, and you provide a structure first, it can harm their ability to trust you. 

Without connection, structure can be interpreted as a threat. For this reason, the creator of the TBRI framework, Dr. Karyn Purvis, emphasized the need to balance structure with nurture. As you increase the amount of structure in a child’s life, it’s important to increase the degree of nurture being provided to them equally. By creating a nurturing, sensory-rich environment with playful engagement, you can help them to begin the healing process. 

How to Establish Connection

When establishing a connection, communicate your intention toward the child. Get down on their level and build eye contact slowly, not forcibly. Show empathy by communicating the feelings of everyone involved. In TBRI, our mode is playful engagement, which is how you ideally want to begin and end every interaction. 

When a child does something correctly, make sure to praise and reward them. Remember that human relationships are the greatest reward and that scheduled one-on-one time is a great way to foster connections and improve mental health. 

Furthermore, whenever an opportunity arises, ensure your child understands how precious you know they are. Recognizing their potential and inner goodness will help build up their self-esteem and grow your relationship.

How to Effectively Correct Behavior Using Memory

Correcting troublesome behaviors isn’t about capitulation, it’s about attunement. Trying to intimidate a child through the fact that you’re bigger than them or have a greater degree of control, though potentially effective in the short term, will not affect long-lasting change. 

The ideal response to any unwanted or inappropriate behavior is immediate, preferably within 3 seconds while their memory loop is still active. The correction should also be efficient—a measured response to the behavior, not something outlandish or over the top. It should be direct, with sustained eye contact, and action-based. Critically, any correction should be leveled at the behavior, not the child.

In TBRI, our mode is playful engagement. You should start the correction with playful engagement and end it with playful engagement. If the child doesn’t initially respond to playful engagement (for example, gently reminding them to use their words rather than grabbing for or demanding things), you can then present them with two choices on how to proceed (in this example, either they ask nicely or don’t get the thing they want). If that still doesn’t work, you can put them in a time-out to stop and think about actions until they’re ready to make the appropriate choice. As we mentioned earlier, this step shouldn’t involve shunning them. Keep them near you and wait until they’re ready to re-engage.

When correcting a behavior, utilize body memory by returning your child to “the scenes of the crime.” For example, if the bad behavior involved multiple rude or inappropriate actions toward other children, walk them over to apologize to each child in turn.

When the child has made an appropriate choice, and the correction is over, it’s over. Continuing punishment or withdrawing relationships after finding a resolution can produce toxic results.

Conclusion

If we can remain compassionate, lovingly firm, and proactive, children can learn adaptive skills to replace maladaptive behaviors that are causing them to fail.

For more advice on growing connections and navigating issues with your foster child, check out our blog.