19/10/2025
Why We Still Don’t Understand Behaviour
Every now and then I make the mistake of scrolling social media. This time it led me to the comments under a viral ‘parenting’ clip. It’s like wandering into a room full of shouty people offering advice no one asked for. This time, it was Supernanny that old show where a ‘behaviour expert’ turns up to sort out a struggling family. I should not have gone to the comments but I did.
I didn’t watch the clip. Straight to the comments. But I know the format. She marches into someone’s home and restores order. She isn’t calm, not really. She’s composed in the way people are when they’re holding on tight to everything. The voice is firm, the body language clear. It’s a performance of control dressed up as composure, and unbelievably, the internet still seems to want it. Then I made the mistake of looking at the comments:
That child needed a shock collar.
A good old-fashioned spanking required.
Give them a bite on soap.
This is a juvenile delinquent.
Time for a smackdown I’d say.
Literally hundreds of comments saying the same thing. Stop the behaviour. Tell the child who’s boss. MAKE them behave.
I read no comment that wondered how the child felt. No one asked what might be happening beneath the behaviour. The conversation wasn’t about understanding, it was about controlling.
This is exactly how many talk about horses.
When a horse bites, bolts, bucks, or plants its feet, many reach for the same vocabulary. He’s being naughty. He’s testing you. He doesn’t respect you. You need to show him who’s boss. The conviction is the same: the animal is wrong, and control is the cure.
In the 2000s, the shelves exploded with parenting books and every kind of program promising to show the ‘right’ way. I remember one book telling me to ignore my child crying at bedtime. I tried it. Maybe thirty seconds. Then I caved. My child was, and always will be, an individual, not a problem to be fixed. This was just after I bumped into clicker training dogs and my uncomfortable journey into understanding behaviour.
Behaviour isn’t the problem. It is the message.
A tantrum, a spook, a refusal, a meltdown are forms of communication. They come from discomfort, fear, frustration, confusion. Yet we’ve built a culture that reads those behaviours as disobedience. We label them as defiance because we’ve been trained to value obedience more than understanding.
A quiet child is a good child. A compliant horse is a good horse. We praise stillness even when that stillness is just shutdown. It’s what happens when a being realises that communication is useless.
What unsettled me most about the comments? Hundreds of people, all focused on stopping the child, shutting them down, showing them who’s boss. Almost no one wondered why they were behaving that way. The discussion wasn’t about understanding, it was about control. That same discussion is prevalent in comments on horse ‘trainers’ treating horse behaviour the same way.
When I work with horses that have been labelled ‘difficult’, I often hear the same story. The horse has resisted, the human pushed harder. The human feels challenged, the horse feels trapped. Both sides are shouting, but in different languages. On the inside, there is confusion and fear for both human and horse.
Understanding behaviour takes humility. I know this from personal experience and the process breaks you down, ready for a rebuild. It means giving up the illusion of control and learning to listen. It means being willing to notice that what looks like bad behaviour, might actually be a perfectly reasonable response to an unbearable pressure.
This work isn’t easy. It’s slow, quiet, and there is no drama. There’s no viral moment of triumph to share. It’s hard, patient work that builds trust. And trust comes from safety. Safety comes from feeling heard.
This often needs me to advocate for a horse that has been mislabelled as ‘difficult’. I don’t need to ask anything. It is about starting new conversations. Creating space for a new relationship to grow where there are no ‘winners’ but nor are there ‘losers’.
My question, I think, is why so many still don’t understand behaviour?
