I have more than once sat with two behaviour reports about the same young person, written in the same week, that read like descriptions of two different people. One had him as disruptive, defiant, a problem the writer had run out of patience for. The other had him as quiet, cooperative, a bit shy even. Same week, same young person, two accounts that would not sit in the same sentence.
For a long time, my instinct in that moment was to work out which report was closer to the truth. That is how I had learned to approach it: build a picture of the young person, decide what they were really like underneath, and treat anything that didn't fit as noise. The polite version is the mask, or the difficult version is the mask, and somewhere behind both is the real child we are trying to reach. I no longer think that is the right question, and a criminologist's work is a large part of why.
When a young person behaves badly, one of our strongest instincts is to look inward. We ask what is wrong with them. We look for the cause in their character, choices, attitude, or even their upbringing. We say he has an anger problem, or she is going off the rails, or he has made his choice. The language treats behaviour as a fixed thing the young person owns and carries from room to room.
That instinct is not stupid. Character is real, and choices are real. The problem is that this view quietly ignores something practitioners see every day: behaviour is often far more variable across settings than we assume. The kid who cannot sit still in one classroom is fine in the one next door. The teenager who is aggressive at home is gentle at his part-time job. The young person who spirals on a Friday night is steady on a Tuesday afternoon.
If behaviour were simply a property of the person, it would travel with them. Often it does not. That inconsistency is not a distraction from the truth. It clues us in that behaviour comes from more than the person alone.
Per-Olof Wikström, a criminologist at Cambridge, spent years building a framework for understanding how person and setting come together in acts of rule-breaking. He called it Situational Action Theory, and while the academic version is dense, the central claim is clean.
Crime and rule-breaking, he argues, are the outcome of an interaction between a person and the setting they are in. Not the person alone, nor the setting, but the meeting of the two. To understand why someone broke a rule, you have to look at who they are and the setting they were in at the same time, because the interaction between the two shapes what happens.
Wikström built the theory to explain rule-breaking, not every kind of behaviour. I find the same lens useful well beyond that. When a young person behaves very differently from one place to the next, arguing at home and settled at school, or the reverse, the setting is part of the story, not just the child. Two parts of it matter most for what we are dealing with here.
The first part is what Wikström calls a person's crime propensity, and it rests mainly on two things. One is their morality, meaning the rules they personally hold about what is right and wrong, and the moral emotions attached to those rules, including anticipated guilt or shame when they consider crossing a line. The other is their ability to exercise self-control, the capacity to resist pressure or temptation to do something that conflicts with their own moral rules.
Crime propensity is not fixed at birth. It develops over time through what Wikström describes as moral education and cognitive nurturing, much of it happening through the ordinary environments of childhood and adolescence: families, schools, peers and communities. A young person with a strong, settled moral compass has a high bar to clear before rule-breaking even registers as an acceptable option. Where those moral rules are less settled, or where a young person's environment has repeatedly treated certain kinds of rule-breaking as normal or acceptable, that threshold can be lower.
The second part is the setting, and this is the half we often underrate. A setting is not just a physical place. What matters is its moral texture: what the people in it treat as normal and acceptable, how clearly they uphold those expectations, and whether anyone is likely to intervene. It also matters what temptations or provocations the place happens to throw up in that moment.
Two settings can ask completely different things of the same young person. A structured classroom with a teacher who knows him well and a clear sense of what happens next asks for one kind of behaviour. An unsupervised hour in a place where the norm is to push limits, and nobody is really watching, asks for another. It is the same young person, but the situation he is responding to has changed. The question the room puts to him has, too.
The idea from Wikström that I find most useful in practice is what he calls the moral filter. It is not personal morality on its own. It is the interaction between a young person's own moral rules and the moral rules of the setting they are standing in, and together those shape what even registers as a real option.
Much of the time, we do not consciously weigh up whether to break a rule. The prohibited act simply does not register as a live option in the first place. Walking past an unattended till, the thought of taking the cash does not enter as a real choice we then talk ourselves out of. What we hold to be right, and what the place around us treats as normal, have already filtered it out before deliberation begins. Self-control has nothing to do yet, because nothing has been perceived as a choice.
Self-control matters most when a young person's own moral rules say no, but the setting is pulling the other way. That is when the option can register, the internal wrestle begins, and the capacity to stick to their own rule has work to do.
This has a sharp implication. Strong personal rules against an act make it less likely that rule-breaking will register as an acceptable option. When the setting reinforces those same rules, it may be filtered out before deliberation begins. When the setting points the other way, self-control matters more. Where a young person's personal rules are more permissive towards rule-breaking, more of what a criminogenic setting offers may pass through that filter as a genuine option. In Wikström's long-term study of young people growing up in Peterborough, the pattern was striking: the higher a young person's crime propensity, the more sensitive their offending was to criminogenic exposure. Among young people with very low crime propensity, those environments made comparatively little difference.
This direction of finding matches what I have seen repeatedly in practice. Some young people seem relatively steady across settings. Others vary enormously depending on the room, the people in it and what that environment is asking of them. That variability is not, by itself, evidence of a character flaw. It is information about the interaction between the young person and the environments they are moving through.
Come back to the two behaviour reports.
Once you hold the person and setting in the same frame, the two reports no longer have to contradict each other. The young person in both reports is genuinely the same. What differs is what each environment asked of him, and what that interaction made available to him as a real option. In one classroom, the interaction between him and the setting supported settled behaviour. In the other, it did not.
We do not have to assume he was wearing a mask in either place. His behaviour emerged from that specific meeting between him and that specific room. The behaviour was real both times. It just was not the same behaviour, because it was never only about him.
This is worth saying plainly, because the alternative does real damage. When we decide the difficult version is the real child, we label him. The label can follow him into the next room, shape how the next adult reads him, and begin to undermine the settings where he had actually been doing well. When we keep treating the worst version of a young person as the true one, we risk changing the expectations, relationships and settings around them in ways that make that version easier to repeat.
It would be tidy if it always split cleanly, difficult in one setting and fine in another. In reality, it doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes the difficulty shows up plainly in both. Other times both rooms are hard even when only one of them looks hard from the outside. Either way, when the school rings about the same young person the parents are already struggling with at home, the temptation is to read it as proof the behaviour really is just in them after all.
In my experience, it often points somewhere else. Picture a young person who spends the whole school day holding themselves together in a place that asks a great deal of them. Sitting still, reading the room, managing noise, people, and expectation, keeping the lid on. For some young people, particularly some autistic young people, that effort can include masking or camouflaging: not pretending to be someone else, but working hard to suppress or manage parts of their natural response to meet the demands around them. That pattern is best documented in autistic young people, though I have seen related versions of it more widely.
That effort is not free, and by the end of the day, sustained effort can leave a young person exhausted and less able to keep regulating in the same way, and home is where it finally stops. That does not mean home is the problem. For some young people, home may also be the place where they feel safe enough to stop holding so much in.
Read that way, the acting out at home is not a second, separate problem. It can be the cost of the effort spent everywhere else, a young person who is spent by the time they walk in the door, closer to overload than deliberate defiance.
This matters for how we read the pattern. Difficulty in both settings is not automatically a worse young person. Behaviour that looks similar in both places can still have very different causes: exhaustion, but also different demands, relationships and expectations, or something specific going on in each place. You shouldn't assume that every time. It is worth asking before moving to a firmer consequence, because if sustained effort, exhaustion, or overload is contributing, the help is working out where that load is coming from and whether some of it can be reduced.
If behaviour emerges from the interaction between a person and a setting, then we have two places to work, not one. In my experience, we tend to put far more energy into changing the young person than examining the settings around them.
The person side is the long game. You cannot install a moral compass with a lecture or a consequence chart. It develops through relationship, through being around adults who model something worth copying, through the slow accumulation of small moments in which a young person is expected, supported and trusted to act well. Mentoring can matter here not simply because a mentor delivers wisdom, but because a strong relationship can become one of the contexts in which a young person's sense of themselves develops. This is patient work. It does not show up on a weekly report.
The setting side is where we could act far more than we do, and often faster. If a young person only comes apart in particular places, at particular times, under particular conditions, then those conditions are worth examining. Some will be constraints, but others are things we can deliberately change. Who is around during the unstructured hours. What the norms of a given space actually are. Whether anyone with a relationship to the young person is present when the pressure tends to peak. What the environment quietly treats as normal. Change enough of that and behaviour can change, sometimes before anything fundamental about the young person has changed.
This is not about surveillance or locking things down. Tighter control is not always the answer. Where a young person's own rules already keep an act off the table, additional control may add very little. It is about recognising that an unstructured afternoon, a poorly matched environment, or a space where unhelpful norms go largely unchecked may be doing more of the work than we realise, and that sometimes changing that setting is more achievable than trying to change the young person first.
When a young person's behaviour worries you, it is worth asking a different set of questions than the usual ones. Not just what is wrong with them, but where this actually happens, and where it doesn't. What is different about the settings where they are fine? Who is present, or absent, when things go wrong. What does that particular environment treat as normal? What is one thing about the room, rather than the child, that could change this week?
Those questions do not replace holding a young person to account. They sit alongside it, and in my experience they often point to something you can actually move.
There is a line I come back to often, and it belongs here too. We can understand behaviour without excusing it, and guide young people without judging them.
Situational Action Theory was built to explain crime and rule-breaking. I have used its person-setting lens more broadly here. It is not a theory about who is to blame, and it does not excuse anyone. A young person still chooses and answers for what they do. What changes is not accountability. It is understanding, and it tells us that if we only ever look inside the young person for the cause, we will keep missing the interaction with the setting that helped shape what happened, and we will keep reaching for solutions aimed only at the young person when part of the answer may sit in the environment around them.
The young person has responsibility for their actions. The adults around them have responsibility for the environments within their influence. Both of those are true at once, and holding both is where the real work sits.
So when you are handed two accounts of the same young person that will not reconcile, resist the pull to assume that only one of them can be real.
There may be truth in both. The more useful question is not which one is real, but what each setting is drawing out of them, and what you might change about the rooms they spend their time in.
In my experience, that is often where something can actually move.
Photo by Cemrecan Yurtman on Unsplash