What is ABA like?

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Seems to me the best way to teach an autistic child is to tailor the teaching style to the learning style. We are just too diverse for any one thing to work for everybody, or even for most autistics.

Rewards / punishments are a bad idea in general; they move the focus from the task to the reward / punishment, making people less inclined to do the task.

If anyone tried that level of control on me, I'd go nuts.

What gets called ABA varies a whole whole lot to the point that you wouldn't call them all one thing if you looked at what they were instead of what they were called.

Some of it really is wrong. And I don't just mean the kind with aversives (which yes, still exists, it's not just in the past).

Like... there's forms of ABA where they teach an autistic person in a systematic manner, using rewards and doing everything the supposedly "nice" kind of ABA, and what they teach the person is to ignore the signals their body sends them. I have had a form of behavior modification that worked like that. The behavior they wanted to change was when I hid out in my room. So they gave me rewards if I would come out of my room, even more rewards if I spent time around people, and so forth. What they didn't understand, was that I needed that time alone in my room just as much as I needed sleep. It was a way of dealing with overload, and with some of my visual processing difficulties as well. After being taught to ignore these things, I became overloaded to the point of serious crashing far more often than I used to, and yet even as I was shutting down, I would go out around lots of people. It was horrible. Really, truly, horrible.

And sometimes ABA is used like that, to teach a person to behave in nonautistic ways even if their autistic behavior has reason and purpose. It is used to force children to make eye contact even though it hurts them. It is used to stop children from stimming in ways that allow them to understand their environment and deal with overload. I've heard from several parents who ABAed their children out of stimming and their children developed self-injurious behavior as a result. So even the "good kind" of ABA can be used in ways that are frankly just as bad if not worse in the long run than some of the aversive kinds are.

I actually know several families whose children lost their toilet training due to certain kinds of ABA. These kinds didn't use what's normally called aversives or anything. But they involved things like physically forcing an autistic child to sit or stand in a particular place. If that place was the bathroom, they became so afraid of bathrooms that they wet their pants rather than use one. If that place was a chair at a table, some of them lost the ability to sit in chairs.

Plus there are autistic people where this sort of directness is incredibly aversive all on its own. Temple Grandin wrote about how she benefited from having people grab her chin and turn her head towards them, but Donna Williams wrote that if someone did that to her it would have been total emotional and sensory overload. Some autistic people are exceedingly sensitive or high-strung and just can't handle the directness involved in many kinds of ABA, even the "good" kinds.

Then there are kinds of ABA that are just kind of... meh. They supposedly teach people functional skills like dressing and bathing, but this kind can often result in situations where the autistic person cannot generalize what they have learned in ABA, to actual real life situations. So all this effort spent, and yet the kid is either completely prompt-dependent, or unable to do it at all in situations other than the exact situation they were taught in. So this kind isn't exactly awful, but it's not exactly useful, either.

And then you sometimes get something calling itself ABA that is just teaching things in a way that actually helps an autistic person learn. This only works with some kinds of autistic people, even at best, though. I know an autistic guy with an autistic son who just totally clicks with whatever form of ABA was used on him, and his learning just completely took off when given this kind of ABA.

It's hard to describe the differences between all the different types, though. And people doing every kind will swear up and down that they're doing the really good, useful kind. Whether or not that's true. And now I'm going to make a separate post about me personally as opposed to ABA in general, just to break this up into parts so it's not so long.

I'll never say that nobody benefits from ABA, but there are a whole lot of people who not only don't benefit, but who find that ABA actually impairs our ability to learn. This is highly relevant to anyone thinking about choosing ABA, for themselves or for their children.

I add, I don't stop stimming. Stefano is free to stim every time he wants. I learned that when he rocks he's happy and when he flaps his hands he's nervous.

You say "10% of autistics don't benefit from ABA", but that doesn't mean that 90% of autistics should be in ABA. There are much, much better ways to teach most autistics; and when "benefit" is measured by whether the ABA has successfully changed the child's behavior, rather than whether that child is reaching his potential and learning in a way that is easiest for him.

So... say 90% of us respond to rewards. That doesn't mean that rewards are the best way to teach us; doesn't even necessarily mean that it's the best way for any autistic person at all. "Effective" does not mean "optimal"; it doesn't mean that it can't cause damage or take up time that could be better used for something else.

I do not believe Callista subscribes to functioning labels (at least form reading her blog, she outright objects to them). I would hesitate to assume that's what she means.

Alright then, lets say individuals with communication skills.

Alright then, lets say individuals with communication skills.