why do autistic children head bang?

i am currently studying at Manchester Mertropolitan University for a Masters Degree in Special Needs Education, i have had experience of working with children with autism, as well as having a child with autism in my family.

i am writing an assignment at the moment regarding children with autism and the challenging behaviour that they can present and am struggling to find information on head banging.

i have witnessed head banging many times afther the child has had a tantrum but never understood the reason for it.

is there a specific reason why children headbang? is it a self injurous issue or do they get some sensory stimulation from it?

obviously i understand that there may not be a definitive answer to this question but what just wondering what your ideas are?

[Jason C Bourret, Ph.D., BCBA-D]

This is a complex issue and the answer is that it depends. We know that different children emit self injury for different reasons and, even for a given individual, self injury may have multiple causes. We also know that it happens for a reason and identifying the reason for the behavior underlies modern behavioral approaches to treating problem behavior and teaching functional, appropriate alternatives. In some cases the behavior may be self stimulatory and in other cases it may serve one or more communicative functions and there are empirical analyses that can identify why the behavior is occurring in a particular instance. This is particularly important because treatment for behavior that occurs for one reason will be ineffective, or at times make things worse, for behavior that occurs for a different reason.

For example, two common reasons why self injury can occur are that it may produce attention from caregivers or it may get the child out of having to do tasks or activities that the child doesn’t want to do. If the behavior is the child’s way of getting attention, an effective treatment might involve teaching the child an appropriate means of getting attention and not attending to the problem behavior. However, if you were to apply that sort of intervention to behavior that is the child’s way of getting out of activities that he/she doesn’t want to do (i.e., not giving it attention), you’re also letting the child out of the activity. This ends up reinforcing the problem behavior, teaching the child that self injury is an effective way of escaping from undesired activities, and making the problem much worse. If you applied this intervention to self injury that was self stimulatory in nature, it would be ineffective but at least wouldn’t exacerbate the problem. So, there’s no single reason why self injury occurs and empirical analysis is the only way to be sure that an intervention is appropriate for a particular individual’s behavior.