The Last Thirty Seconds

Yesterday, my son threw his shoe at me while I was driving 70 miles an hour down the 101.

Fortunately, it wasn't a heavy shoe, and it didn't distract me enough to be dangerous. It did surprise me, though. In nearly nine years, he'd never thrown anything at me while I was driving.

This summer has been hard for my son. Over the past few months, he's experienced more changes than he has in years. People he trusted have moved on, his schedule has changed, and summer looks nothing like the routine he had worked so hard to understand. For a child who thrives on predictability, that's a tremendous amount of change in a very short period of time.

Lately, every time we get in the car, there's an unspoken question: Where are we going? Therapy? Mom's office? The grocery store? Home?

Yesterday morning, we spent a few hours at my clinic, his favorite place to be. As we were getting ready to leave to pick up his sister from dance, I tried to answer that question before he even had to ask it. I made him a simple visual schedule showing exactly what our afternoon would look like: first we'd pick up his sister, then we'd go home.

I showed him the pictures before we left. I explained the plan. I hoped it would help.

It didn't.

The screaming started almost immediately after we pulled out of the parking lot. My Apple Watch politely informed me that I was in a loud environment. Gee, thanks, Tim Cook.

None of that surprised me. In fact, I expected it.

I've had the privilege of spending nearly twenty years helping families understand behavior. I knew this wasn't really about that afternoon. His reaction was the result of months of uncertainty. I also knew that once we passed the freeway exit where we normally get off for therapy, he would most likely settle because he would finally know we weren't going there.

So I did what I've taught countless parents and staff members to do. I stayed calm. I modeled deep breathing. We listened to Lava, one of his favorite songs that usually helps him regulate, and I kept driving.

Then came the shoe.

That, I didn't see coming.

A few minutes later, just as I expected, we passed the therapy exit.

The screaming stopped.

Today, we made the same drive again. The visual schedule came out again. Lava played again. The shoe flew again.

Later that afternoon, he spent time screaming on our kitchen floor.

The behavior looked the same, the story behind it hadn't changed.

The shoe wasn't thrown because he was angry. It wasn't thrown because he was "being bad." It wasn't even about the drive itself. It was one small piece of a much bigger story that had started weeks before we ever got into the car.

I've spent more than two decades studying behavior, and one of the greatest gifts behavior analysis has given me isn't simply understanding autism. It's changed the way I look at people.

Over the years, I've stopped asking, "What's wrong with them?" and started asking, "What happened that makes this response make sense?"

That question has changed everything.

Whether I'm working with a child, talking with a frustrated parent, navigating a disagreement with someone I love, leading a team, or watching my dog bark at the mail carrier, I've learned that behavior rarely exists in isolation. It almost always makes more sense when you understand the environment around it.

I don't tend to assign behavior to the person anymore. I try to assign it to the environment instead.

What changed?

What happened before this?

What are they carrying that I can't see?

Those questions have made me a better clinician, a better leader, a better wife, a better friend, and I hope, a kinder person.

Yesterday, they reminded me to see my son not as a little boy who threw a shoe, but as a little boy whose world had changed enough that throwing a shoe made sense to him in that moment.

If you had driven past my car yesterday afternoon, you would have seen a screaming child. Today, you would have seen one again. You might have wondered why I couldn't stop it.

What you wouldn't have seen were the months that came before those thirty seconds.

You wouldn't have seen the people who had come and gone from his life, the routines that had changed, or the uncertainty that had quietly accumulated until something as simple as getting into the car no longer felt safe.

You also wouldn't have seen a mom who wasn't trying to stop the screaming as much as she was trying to help her son feel safe enough that he no longer needed to scream.

Those are two very different goals.

Yesterday and today were a good reminder that my children are still my greatest teachers. Not because they teach me new behavior strategies, but because they remind me, over and over again, that there is almost always more to the story than what we can see.

I think the world would be a gentler place if we all became a little more curious before we became judgmental. If we paused before making assumptions. If we wondered what happened before the last thirty seconds of someone's story.

Because we almost never witness the beginning.

We arrive somewhere near the end, make our judgments, and move on.

But every behavior has a story.

We just don't always get to see the beginning.

Stephanie Ross is the Executive Clinical Director of Learning Beyond the Spectrum. This essay was written not from the perspective of a clinician, but from the perspective of a mom.