What is behaviorism? What are your experiences with it?

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Hi all, after an interesting discussion on another thread, that got off the topic of toilet training, I thought I'd start a new thread here.

I am a behaviorist at core. I endorse a specific brand of behaviorism called "Positive Behavior Support" that emphasizes maximizing dignity and quality of life for all people concerned. It is also (like all behaviorism) based heavily on behavioral principles that were originally developed based on animal models. For me personally, I see that as a strength, since we're all animals, the concepts apply to all humans. That makes it a flexible tool. I also know that there are people who approach the same tool differently and see it as a reason to treat humans like animals.

Although ABA (applied behavioral analysis) is considered the gold standard treatment for ASDs. I am also aware of people who have had horrible experiences with "behaviorists" or "ABA". I understand that the behaviorists in question were doing things that seemed sensible to them based on the same principles that I follow. In my own early career, I was told to do things that were "behavioral" and that in retrospect, knowing what I know now, I cringe at.

At this point, the basic concept that I ascribe to most is understanding the functions of behaviors (functional behavioral analysis). I assume that everyone does things for a reason, and by determining what their reasons are, we can find other ways for them to get their needs met. Often, this involves children and teens who are using physical aggression to get their needs met. I try to understand their needs, and teach them better ways to go about expressing them. I also try to teach their parents to be better at listening and responding to those needs. I see all of this as a dignified and humane pursuit, but I know that for some people "behaviorism" is a dirty word.

So what I'd like to do here is ask people to share their own experiences, positive and negative, and maybe clear the air about what behaviorism is and isn't.

when I taught sunday school, I used to give out lollipops in return for memorized bible verses. it worked great.

I think the vast majority of parents use behaviorist techniques to some extent. Most parents praise and reward their kids and discourage unwanted behaviour. I think the way it is applied is important.
For eg the discussion on the other thread about taking away something a child likes and reappropriating it as a reward for toilet training isn't something I would be comfortable with as, to me, that is punitive from the start. Equally, while I see the merit if holding out a while for a child to say a word you know they can say, I would not do it to the extent they became distressed.
I think particularly with my autistic child there is the danger that if he is put under too much pressure he will completely shut down and you get nowhere.

My experiences in formal behavioralism was with the FBA (functional behavioral analysis.) which if I am understanding correctly is under the umbrella of ABA. (I knew it was behavioralism, but not necessarily that it was considered a component of ABA--assuming that is indeed correct.)

Our FBA was horrible b/c they didn't actually find any causes(or alternately did not like what they found, and chose not to list them) so antecedents were listed as "none." Consequences were checked off as "tried" and "succeeded" when sometimes they were not even tried, (I know this b/c I was up there constantly and had a very clear line of communication with his teacher) and when they were tried and failed miserably and made things worse. Presumably, this was just what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to justify doing, to follow a set procedure of incrementing punishments.

Obviously, I do not expect anyone to defend poorly implemented behaviorism. What I would be interested in knowing is what one can do when cannot isolate a specific cause because there is a cascading effect of minor triggers and the child is generally unable to correctly label his own feelings and their causes. Also, what does behavioralism say about meltdowns that are disruptive and the child has poor emotional control and therefore cannot be reasoned or punished into behaving differently?

I agree, and this is where there's a thin line between behaviorism done well, and a traumatic experience. In the example of discrete trial training - you repeatedly practice specific skills, and when the kid gets it right, they get a reward. Some people take that to mean that if they don't get it right, they don't get the reward. Which can result in frustrating episodes where the adult is taunting a child with a cracker, and the child is sitting there crying, unable to say the word.

Another part of good discrete trial training is ensuring a good ratio of requests and rewards, also referred to as "errorless learning." The idea is that the child shouldn't be given an opportunity to experience failure, so they won't get frustrated. In practice, this means as soon as they start to make a mistake, you help them, make the task easier, and make sure they still have an easy shot at the reward. Then you adjust, from then on, you lower your expectations until you are confident that the child can do better. In the example of offering a child a cracker, you may accept an approximation like "ka" instead of expecting a perfectly formed word. That is - until the child can consistently say "ka" then you increase the expectation. This principle is a part of many brands of "ABA" including verbal behavior and pivotal response training. But there are certain "old-school" practitioners of ABA who drill children and frustrate them without giving them enough slack.

My understanding of the whole practice is that the goal is to have a child who is excited and motivated to learn, not one who is frustrated by repeated failure because our expectations for him or her are too high for their current level of understanding. In practice it is like a dance, where you try to gently guide the child, but you slow down, or stop pushing when you see the need, so as not to frustrate them.

Regarding the issue of restricting reinforcers. I'll try to recap my point: In some situations it is necessary to establish control over reinforcers when children are given too much free access to the things that they love. This does not mean that they no longer receive those reinforcers, but it does mean that the parents find ways to control access, so that the child has to work in some way to receive them. In the end, my goal is that children find themselves receiving the same amount of the enjoyment as they did before, but now it is helping to teach them something, rather than just being there for free. If done well, this is not particularly punitive - as the work that the child is asked to do is never so difficult for them that they are not able to do it. -If it is, we adjust and find ways to make the task easier. In fact, it gives parents a lot of opportunities to remember and point out how good their child is being, tying in verbal praise with the reinforcer. It makes the kid proud of all the work that they did to get their favorite things. If done poorly, this can lead to frustration - just as the example above, where the child is unable to get access to the things they love, because the things that are being asked of them are beyond their ability. This leaves the child feeling like a failure who is being punished.

There is a common alternative, where a child has free access to their favorite things except when they are misbehaving. Then those things are taken away as a punishment. In practice, this looks very similar to the above paragraph, well-behaved kid has toys to play with, and poorly behaved kid doesn't. There is one very important difference: In the above example, the child is constantly receiving things and being told what a good job they are doing, they learn over and over again what appropriate behaviors are, and this is delivered as a positive message, "good job washing your hands! Now you can have a snack!". If things are only taken away as punishment, then the main lesson that they hear is when they have done something bad. The words that wind up getting repeated a lot in the house are "no" and "bad" "No snack, until you wash your hands!"

Wow, well I can understand your frustration. If there are no antecedents, then the only possible reason the child misbehaved was because he's a "bad kid" (I'm being facetious - just following the logic they may have used). It doesn't lead to any options for treatment except maybe throw medicine at the problem. The problem with FBA is that it is a legal requirement for many schools, because it is an excellent tool. Unfortunately the result is that it is often being implemented by people who have no idea how to use it properly.

The idea of isolating a specific cause is just part of the process, but an important one. Let's backtrack a bit - can you predict when your kid is going to have a behavioral problem? What things let you know it's coming? The antecedent or trigger is the part that people tend to focus on, but more modern approaches to FBA take into account "Setting Events" or "Establishing Operations". The two terms are fairly similar, and they refer to things that affect the likelihood that an antecedent will result in a behavior. Examples of these include medical issues, being tired, being anxious, being in a new place, being with an unfamiliar person. In certain contexts, the child may behave perfectly well, but in the wrong context, certain things may set the child off. If that's the case for your child, then the trick is identifying both the individual triggers and the specific contexts that contribute to that thing being a trigger. Once you have a sense of those, you can figure out what functions the behavior may serve - (the acronym MEATS is helpful: Medical Escape Attention Tangible Sensory). After you figure that out, you can take a variety of approaches, depending on the specific issue.

I wrote an article about this a few years ago in The Autism File, where I go through some potential strategies, specifically as problem behaviors relate to illness if you are interested: http://www.autismone.org/content/identi ... -mulder-ba

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Last edited by EmileMulder on 15 Jan 2014, 9:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

l definitely will check out your link.

At home, yes, the antecedents are very clear. At school, some of them were similar and additionally there were ones that were social failure related. I am sure there were others that I did not happen to witness, as well. Sometimes, what they did was the actual trigger. (Punishing him for things like failing to do the motor skill exercises that they concluded would help him stay/become calm by attempting to keep him pent up in a corner of the motor lab)

At home, I am very rarely surprised by a meltdown. Usually I see it coming and it either occurs b/c the antecedent is something I cannot prevent from happening or I choose to let him be challenged by something so he can learn to deal with his emotions better. Every now and again a new antecedent pops up, or he backslides for some reason and something he once handled Ok, is not manageable any longer. Sometimes it is because of other increased stressors, sometimes it just seems to pop up.

I am going to have to think about the combination of trigger and context. I would say in general his home is like Sheldon's ((The Big Bang Theory (0, 0, 0, 0) and that he can tolerate more on his home base than elsewhere just by virtue of being home. I would also venture that school became almost a PTSD association trigger and things became much worse there, just by virtue of him being in that building.

Right now our biggest behavior issues are centered around rigidity, frustration and perfectionism (being comfortable with failing sometimes) and things being interrupted, even innocuous things like someone on a PBS Kids show being interrupted while counting, or a TV camera panning away from a digital countdown display he was watching. I have focused on calming techniques and explaining things after the fact with rationality because I can see he is trying hard most of the time to control his very strong emotions.

I praise him when he manages the emotions better than usual, but do not punish him when he doesn't, unless I see something that indicates self-control. He will get a calming time-out when appropriate, which is a sort of stealth punishment in a way b/c he is is the same place the punishment ones used to be, he still misses fun activities for about the same amount of time, but it works better as he cooperates instead of fighting a return to calmer waters. We are part of a team instead of him thinking I am an adversary and that seems to help.

We do use punishments are rewards when he tests limits and appears to have control of what he is doing, but we handle most of our behavioral issues by attempting to fine tune his environment at this point.

We have some functional skills that we need to work on too, and we do periodic incentive systems for those, and they seem to help some of the time. Sometimes, though it isn't about motivation, so much as lack of confidence and a desire to avoid failure and meltdowns. So I think that is more about realizing the world won't crash in on him when he is not perfect.

Brave! And a good general strategy - one pitfall with that strategy that I'll point out, for those who might not be aware - your goal should be for him to succeed when challenged, not fail. If it's so hard that he has a meltdown, you won't reinforce him, and he doesn't learn anything. So you just get meltdown and no payoff. Knowing those contextual factors can help you set up a scenario where the trigger is present, but the context is good enough that he can still cope effectively, then you can reward him for it and he learns from it. So you want to push him close to that line to get the challenge, but not over it (and just get failure). One common example is going to a store - which can be hard for a lot of kids on the spectrum. I recommend that parents practice this at times when they know the store is going to be empty, limit the time they spend in the store, and make sure they have good reinforcers for when the child has a success. You do everything you can to set up the contexts for success, and then you reinforce the replacement behaviors that help the child deal with those triggers. As the contexts get harder, the kid gets better at the replacement behaviors, and eventually they learn to use them across different contexts.

Reading your post, I'm seeing that you are also heavily influenced by behavioral principles. I knew we had more in common than differences!

I totally agree with not setting a child up to fail. You are right to make that point explicitly clear.

It is not that I disagree that incentives and disincentives can be used effectively. It is about how they are used and an assumption by some that everyone can use them in all contexts. It is like that old adage that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I do believe that there are children for whom traditional methods do not apply or are not appropriate for the same contexts that they might be appropriate for others.

In addition, I think when the child is able to understand, reasoning works a heck of a lot better, most of the time with a lot of AU (and probably NT) kids. For example, when a child understands why homework is important to his future, and he is capable of weighing short term and long term utility, you don't need the carrot or the stick. It just works. That is ideally where you want to be, and eventually the child has to grow up to be internally motivated, anyway. If a kid grows up and still has a short-term utility preference, then he is going to make a lot of poor decisions when Mommy is not around to use ABA.

When you talk about real life consequences like in the other thread (no work, no eat) it is true, but for adults it eventually needs to be reason driven as opposed to driven by immediate consequences. I understand why children need immediate consequences, but the danger is not moving towards the ultimate goal of actual thinking, or making sure the child understands that you are being fair. Trust is really important to these kids as they may have no one else but you to trust and when they navigate the school system you need them to tell you what is going on there to the best of their ability.

The food thing rankled with me because food insecurity is a real thing. Creating artificial scarcity with a food item is worse than just taking away computer time or something like that. Food as a motivator requires more care than your initial unedited post made it seem and that concerned me. A child for whom this reward system is most likely to be used is not going to understand that you are not depriving him of necessary food, just treats that can be scaled back with no nutritional harm. It hits at a very basic level of need, and should not be used carelessly. Your later edits/posts showed more care than it initially appeared.

If you look at a lot of the posts that are made here, they often start out with a preface that the parent tried all the traditional, suggested stuff. The reason they post is because that stuff is not working for their child and they need something a little out of the box. Yes, sometimes suggestions with individualized tweaks for special interests etc. is all that is needed, but often times the issue is much more complicated and the responses look like a string of "Yes, I have tried all that, too, I wish I could help, but we have not figured it out either."

Our kids are different. They are different from each other and I am not at all saying behavioral principles have no place. They do, but I think it is much trickier as sometimes the issue is motivation, but a lot of times there really is something else and so the motivators have to be really strong to counter whatever that is, if whatever that is can't be sufficiently mitigated.

many good points.
One of the things about a good behavioral approach is it shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. One of the tricky things about responding to posts on here, is parents don't always give the kinds of details that I would be looking for. So I try to go for general principles in my advice, and I think it's easy to misinterpret those things. You're right that food reinforcers as a whole are tricky, but I think it was more of a misunderstanding than anything. I wouldn't advocate restricting a kid's diet for the sake of reinforcement training, but I would advocate limiting access to things like candy and junk food. And in the situation where the child was not motivated by anything else, I would recommend using food reinforcers - otherwise I stay away from food as a rule, except when working on a feeding program. Again, because I was trying to go broad, I didn't get into specifics and left it up to interpretation. So, more of a misunderstanding than anything else.

As you mentioned, a long-term goal is to be internally motivated. I see this all as consistent with behaviorism, but an extension of it. As I mentioned, behaviorism comes from animal models, but as humans we are more complex. Once you add in the complex layer of thoughts and emotions that we have on top of those simple behavioral principles, the picture as a whole becomes more complex. When trying to understand clients, I still try to reduce things to simple first-then models and when things are being internally driven, I let that be part of the model. This is essentially how cognitive behavioral therapy works (CBT), which is a standard treatment for NT adults with depression, anxiety etc. So instead of having an external antecedent - behavior - consequence (John sees his visual schedule, John does his chores, John gets to play), the antecedents and consequences can be internal (John remembers his homework, John does his homework, John feels a sense of accomplishment and relief). Even the behaviors can be internal, like specific thoughts or worrying. There is a point where things naturally start to transition from externally motivated to internally, and parents can help to set the ground work for how this happens: for example, will the child be driven by anxiety of making a mistake, or excitement about finishing a task? To some extent, parents can help shape that by creating an environment that punishes mistakes, or one that rewards success. - I'm not blaming anyone with anxious kids here, there are other factors involved as well.

So I agree with you that certain techniques don't apply in certain situations, but for me I can see everything in terms of that basic model with added layers of complexity. It helps me make sense of things, and figure out where things went wrong, and how we may be able to go about fixing them. You are also right to point out that if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like nails. I try to stay open-minded to alternative approaches at all times, but you're right. I use an overly simplified model to understand behaviors, and that gives me a tool that can be useful, but it also necessarily means that I leave out potentially important information, and I can miss things. That criticism applies to behaviorists as a whole as well; people can get complacent. When working with a lot of kids, it's easy to see similarities between one kid and another you treated successfully before, and so you fall back into that one-size-fits-all mentality, and usually it works pretty well, but sometimes it just doesn't, and people need to have the humility and self-awareness to reexamine what they are doing.