Why transitions are so hard — and what actually helps

Leaving somewhere good, turning the screen off, getting in the car. A plain-language look at why these moments go wrong — at home, on shift and in the classroom — and what tends to make them easier.

Ask a parent, a support worker or a teacher which parts of the day reliably go badly, and most can name two or three straight away. It’s rarely the whole day.

At home it’s the twenty minutes around leaving the house, the end of screen time, the hour before bed. On shift it’s the end of a favourite activity, the drive back from an outing, the day the usual worker doesn’t turn up. At school it’s the bell, the change of room, the wet-weather timetable.

The person in the middle might be four or forty. Transitions don’t stop being hard at eighteen — they just stop being talked about.

These moments have a name — transitions — and they are one of the most commonly reported triggers for behaviour that worries people. It’s worth understanding why, because the reason points at what’s likely to help and what isn’t.

A transition asks for three things at once

When someone is asked to stop playing and put their shoes on, we usually think of it as one request. It isn’t. It’s three, stacked on top of each other:

Stop something. Often something good, and often with no warning that made sense to them.
Start something else. Which may be boring, hard, uncomfortable, or completely unknown.
Trust that it works out. That the good thing comes back later, that the next bit isn’t as bad as it looks, that someone will help if it is.

Any one of those can be the sticking point, and they need different things from us. That’s why “he’s fine at school but not at home”, “she can leave swimming but not the park”, and “he’ll do it for Tuesday’s worker but not for Thursday’s” are all so common. It isn’t inconsistency. It’s that the three parts aren’t equally hard in every situation.

Why it’s harder for some people

Time is invisible. “Five more minutes” is a phrase, not an experience. If you can’t feel how long five minutes is, a warning isn’t a warning — it’s just a sound that happens before something you didn’t want. Plenty of adults can’t estimate five minutes either; we just have clocks and phones and years of practice reading them.

Spoken words are the first thing to go. When someone is already stressed, processing a sentence gets harder, not easier. That’s the exact moment we tend to add more words — explaining, negotiating, repeating. A picture stays still and can be looked at twice. A sentence is gone as soon as it’s said.

Past experience teaches something. If “two more minutes” has previously meant thirty seconds, or forty minutes, or “actually we’re leaving now”, then the warning has stopped carrying information. If getting upset has previously brought the iPad back, then getting upset is a strategy that works — not a failure of self-control.

There may be no way to ask the obvious question. “When do I get it back?” is a reasonable thing to want to know. Someone who can’t ask it is left guessing every single time — and if the person beside them changes shift to shift, they’re guessing about a different person’s answer each day.

Some people can’t see what’s next. Not metaphorically. If the next place is unfamiliar, or the routine is new, “we’re going to the appointment” is a sentence about a thing they cannot picture at all.

Nobody has explained it to them. Not because anyone was careless, but because it was in a roster, a handover note or a plan, and never in a form the person themselves could read.

The part that’s easy to miss

There’s a difference between not knowing what’s coming and not wanting what’s coming.

Showing someone what’s coming addresses the first one. It’s genuinely useful, and for a lot of people it’s the missing piece — plenty of hard moments are hard mostly because they arrive out of nowhere.

But it doesn’t do much about the second one. If the problem is that the good thing is ending and they’d like it back, then a clear, well-taught, beautifully laminated picture of the car is still a picture of the car. Now they know exactly what they don’t want.

This matters because it’s the difference between “we need to make this predictable” and “we need to work out what’s actually going on here” — and those are different jobs.

What tends to make things worse

Surprise. The transition that arrives with no lead-in at all.
Warnings that only ever mean bad news. If a timer appears only when something good is about to end, the timer itself becomes the thing that starts the distress. Timers need to appear at boring moments too.
Promises that don’t get kept. “One more turn” has to mean one more turn, every time, or it stops being information.
More talking. Well-meant, and usually counter-productive once someone is past the point of processing it.
Different rules in different places. Home says one thing, school says another, the respite worker says a third. Everyone is being reasonable, and the person in the middle has three systems to learn. The same thing happens inside a single service when a roster changes and nobody wrote down how the last person did it.

What tends to help

Make the same thing happen the same way. Predictability is dull and it works.
Show it rather than say it. A photo, a symbol, a written word, an object — whichever one this person actually recognises.
Make time visible. A shape that empties tells you more than a number that changes.
Say what’s after, not just what’s ending. “Two minutes, then bath” is a much better sentence than “two minutes”.
Practise when it doesn’t matter. New things should be learned on easy days, not tested for the first time on hard ones.
Be honest about what you can deliver. A short break you can give every time beats a long one you can only give sometimes.

And a realistic note

None of this works every time, and some days it won’t work at all. Illness, poor sleep, pain, a change of medication, a bad week at school, or nothing you will ever identify — these will all beat a good routine.

That isn’t the routine failing, and it isn’t you failing. It’s worth saying plainly, because the most common reason a family or a team abandons something that was starting to help is a bad fortnight that had nothing to do with it.

The reasonable expectation is not “this fixes it”. It’s “these moments get a bit shorter, a bit less frequent, and a bit less awful, and everybody gets more warning” — and that is a real improvement in anyone’s week, whether you’re living it or rostered on for it.

Where to go from here

If you want the evidence behind all this — what’s well supported, what isn’t, and where the honest limits are — I’ve written that up separately in what the research says about visual supports.

If you’d rather just try something, there are two free tools on this site: a visual timer that needs no setup, and a First/Then board that takes about a minute to make. There’s a guide to choosing between them.

And if these moments are still going badly when the person knows exactly what’s coming — that’s the situation where showing them isn’t the missing piece, and it’s worth a conversation. Get in touch, or read about how to get a behaviour support plan.