Functional alternatives are taught to replace what type of behavior?

Functional alternatives are taught to replace challenging behavior. This type of behavior often interferes with a person's ability to engage in everyday activities and can result from an individual seeking to communicate needs or a lack of skills to manage certain situations effectively. By teaching functional alternatives, the focus shifts to equipping the individual with appropriate skills to express their needs or cope with frustration in a more constructive manner.

These functional alternatives provide a way for individuals to gain the same outcomes or fulfill the same needs that the challenging behaviors were attempting to meet, such as attention, sensory input, or escape from demands. By reinforcing these positive alternatives, it is possible to decrease the occurrence of challenging behavior over time.

In contrast, the other types of behaviors mentioned, such as preemptive behavior, adaptive behavior, and passively disruptive behavior, do not specifically relate to behaviors that need to be replaced with functional alternatives in the same way that challenging behavior does. Each of these behaviors is addressed through different strategies that may not focus exclusively on functional alternatives.