ABA Therapy

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What is it? I overheard my therapist and mother speaking about it during a session today and I've read a bit about it, but never understood what it's suppose to do. My mother wants me in the program for it, however I've been quite resistant. However, as of current since I'm financially dependent on my parents I can't exactly reject their opinion on the subject.
Parents are having me go through the program for 2 - 3 hours a day, once a week for an entire 6 months. They basically want me to become independent of them, since they're already in their 50s.

ABA is usualy giving positive feedback in different ways when a behavior/action isnt done,its a type of conditioning- due to living a decade in institutional and residential care have had ABA and a more extreme form of it which used negative feedback such as being thrown to the floor and pinned in a very twisted position when refused to give into staff demands, removing everything from bedroom including the curtains,bed sheets [the matress was vinyl and the quilts were plastic covered],and being refused access to the outdoors for days.

That is totally inhumane and disgusting! I certainly hope they DON'T do the extreme form of this anymore. In any other context say if it was a minor, that would constitute child abuse in my mind. If this were done to an animal for obedience training, it would be considered animal abuse. It disgusts me that they believe that treating someone in this fashion would improve things. Hell they can't even legally treat criminals this poorly. Makes me so friggen mad when I hear about things like this!

You are a warrior, woman! I'm not just saying that~

Hi Sylph - I wouldn't be too worried, I think it can be really helpful and maybe you will learn a little bit about how non Autistic people think - a good thing to know as you go through life.

Honestly, the way that they mistreated you enrages me. ABA doesn't do s**t to improve things, it just breaks people. I believe that they tried some mild ABA techniques on me back when I was in public school (elementary especially), and while they were well-intentioned and didn't involve any outright abuse, they still kind of screwed me up. I just hated the unfair treatment and increased scrutiny I faced compared to the other students, and as a result I developed a deep-seated hatred of rules and authority from a young age. It's not so bad now, but back when I was in elementary/middle school, it was very much me vs. the teachers and administration, and this continued somewhat in high school as well.

I had it when I was younger - maybe I had the milder version, mine was actually a little useful, could have been more useful if I was better at following directions. It was about self awareness and social skills.

The ABA that my kids received is basically using the exact same principles as training a dog (it's classical conditioning). In my humble opinion, the only real use for it, is teaching skills that are necessary even without understanding. For example, ABA was used to teach my son to respond to the command "stop". With that command, I needed him to stop when told to stop (he's a runner), but didn't necessarily need him to understand the word. It worked. But I don't approve of teaching social skills with ABA because it's fake. It's like how you can teach a dog to "shake hands" but for the dog, the action is totally meaningless. The dog just knows if he does it, he gets a treat. Well, the same thing happens with ABA, if you teach the kid to shakes hands (or whatever). I would rather my child understand the social skills, because my child is a human not a dog. I'll hop off my soapbox now.

Generally speaking, what they do in an ABA session (with kids anyway) is have a list of goals and move through the list. The first goal, present the task, give a verbal cue to do it, wait, give a visual prompt, wait, give a physical prompt, reward. They usually move through the goals really fast doing several in a matter of minutes. They repeat it over and over, first removing the physical prompt, then removing the visual prompt and so eventually the child does it with just a verbal cue. It works because, like Pavlov and his salivating dogs, the child associates doing the action with a reward. Eventually, the reward too gets phased out. You can look it up on YouTube to see it in action. I've never seen it done with any over the age of 13 before though.

Edit (for addition and clarity): Here's a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbVG8lYEsNs

Last edited by WelcomeToHolland on 09 May 2014, 7:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I really don't like ABA. Even without the potential for abuse that KoR mentioned, it's too rigid a teaching method, especially for autistic children. It is based on the idea that the client's thoughts and feelings are irrelevant, and that only behavior is a useful measure.

The type of ABA used for autistics was first designed by Lovaas, who designed it at first to be used on "effeminate" boys to force them to conform their behavior to Lovaas's male ideal. It was little changed when it was applied to autistic people to try to make them "indistinguishable from their peers"--i.e., to force them to act in neurotypical ways.

ABA doesn't consider the function of behavior; it is just categorized as desirable or not. It doesn't teach the reasons behind things. It encourages rigid compliance and discourages flexibility and self-determination. Many modern "ABA" therapists are, thankfully, not using the original ABA principles; they are more like occupational therapists, in practice. The less actual ABA is in the therapy, the better it seems to work, the happier the child seems to be.

Behaviorism is now considered rather out-of-date in psychology; the cognitive revolution long ago taught us that thoughts and feelings are important and can be part of a scientific course of treatment. The only things straight behaviorism is still used for, is for animal experiments and for autistic children.

There are better ways to teach. We need to find them. Crushing the will of a child in order to make them look more normal is not going to help anyone.

Awareness (cognition) should be at the vanguard of psychological principles.

Blind behavioralism relies more on instincts, and there's no introspection in it---it's action and reaction, only.

Yeah.

I think therapy for autistic children should encourage them to explore, to experience the world, and to experiment with things. It should encourage interaction and communication, and it should include teaching the child about themselves--self-awareness, knowing what makes them feel better, what they like and don't like. It should include teaching them to express themselves, so that they can talk about what they want and don't want, and can express decisions and learn how to care for themselves. Autistics have such trouble with rigidity--goodness knows I do; I go to pieces when things are unpredictable. A rigid teaching method is the exact opposite of what you need to have to learn how to deal with the chaos in the world you live in.

So... I would suggest, speech/language and occupational-therapy based methods. Not ABA. At least, not classic ABA. There are some small parts of ABA that can be useful, such as the process of breaking a task down into small parts and teaching one at a time. Rote tasks lend themselves to that style of teaching. But once you get to practical things that can't be done the same way every time, like communication and problem-solving, ABA is worse than useless.

Rewards, by the way, aren't particularly useful either. Rewards cause a person to lose interest in the task itself. If you're rewarded for something, you start to dislike the task, and will stop doing it once you're no longer rewarded. (To test this, pay your child for drawing pictures. You will see that they stop enjoying drawing and dash off prefunctory pictures just to get the payment.) What a person really needs to learn isn't reward, but feedback. They need to know when they have done something well. So you can use small rewards--small enough that they aren't motivational in and of themselves--to tell someone they have done well, but you should not force a child to work for contingent rewards. Otherwise, they will lose interest in the task, or never gain any interest in it to begin with. Encouraging curiosity and exploration does much more good than any reward ever could.