Alternative opinions of ABA?

[kpjigsaw]

We are strongly considering starting an ABA programme for our son, and it's been very useful looking at some of the posts on here about it. It seems that a lot if parents have found it to be very valuable which is why we are considering it. I was just wondering whether anyone has had a bad experience of it - I don't mean an individual poor tutor or whatever, I mean does anyone feel it didn't work or was even detrimental? Just trying to get a balanced view as it seems all the negative opinions are held by the 'professionals' rather than people who have actually experienced it.

Any thoughts?

It is a very tricky area, but in general the ABA tutors and supervisors I have used have been very sensible about looking what behaviours are deriving from and whether/how they can sensibly be worked on. The problem is when there are antisocial behaviours. I well remember a mum explaining to me that her autistic boy was only biting my arm because he was anxious. Apparently he bit everyone he met, because people in general made him anxious. I said to her, as tactfully as I could, that I didn't think it was important WHY he was biting, just THAT he was biting, and it needed to be got rid of as a behaviour (in the same way as my own autistic boy used to bite, but does not anymore).

But ABA tutors will not eliminate behaviours willy-nilly, without understanding whether the child CAN change them safely or not. That kind of thinking - that ABAers are cruel, rigid, inhuman and locked into an inflexible methodology, comes from a position of prejudice against ABA, from those who most frequently have never actually tried it.

Surely no-one is really so scared as to come on (anonymously) and post if they have had a bad/useless experience of ABA? I am totally interested to hear such a viewpoint, but just never have in all my years on mumsnet.

It's not really mechanical ZZZZZ - it's more just about being firm about anti-social behaviours, which will either harm others or mark the child out as different (and potentially bring harm to my child). It is all very easy and sweet when they are 5 - I am always seeing the 6ft 2 19 year old man in my mind too.

All I can say is that we love DS more than life itself and spend lots of time with him although he has had full time ABA for 2 years now. We are a very happy family on the whole and ABA enhances that rather than detracting from it. It would have been much more destructive to all of us to have him constantly tantrumming, stimming and generally being nothing but a ball of uncommunicative frustration. I would defy anyone to say what he has achieved would have been matched by the fortnightly help offered by the LEA and delivered by their scandalously inexperienced staff

You observe the behaviour. You decide whether you want to increase it or decrease it based on strict ethical criteria (I think it is something like your action should be good for the child AND good for society and you should be able to justify that) and then you start to collect information on it.

Sometimes this is easy. You can ask the child 'why do you do that?' Sometimes it will take a couple of weeks of filling out charts about when the behaviour happens, what is in the environment, what happens just before, what happens just after. Then you create a hypothesis and test it by changing one of the recorded variables and measuring what changes. If it isn't going the way you want after 3 goes you try something different. This does make is sound mechanical and a lot harder work than it is.

The emphasis is always that the child is right and behaving appropriately. If the child is walking out of the classroom, they are right to, because all things in their environment (including their internal environment) are telling them that that is what they should do. You don't try to 'force' anything else.

You might find after observations that the behaviour (i.e. walking out) only occurs during certain activities, when noise levels rise or when. You might notice that noise levels always rise at 'free-time', so you engineer noise levels to rise at a different time to see if it has the same effect.

Once you have established the cause you look into ways that you can address the behaviour. You don't bully a child into discomfort but set up a programme of intervention with very small steps. You would, most likely for a perceived sensory issue, involve an OT to give advice. You would probably then begin a desensitisation programme with the child moving closer and closer to the 'noise' from a distance. BUT, 3 goes (unless your data tells you the child grasps things at 2 goes or 6 goes) and then you change direction. No slogging dead horses because 'well it works for other children with this problem, and it's what we were trained to do, so it must just be that your child isn't capable'.

zzzzzz you express yourself very well. ABAers probably have an advantage in this kind argument because they have spent months if not years fighting for ABA using the best logic they can.

I like your notion of being coached through sex and probably you're right. But with enough coaching you know what to do and can eventually do it spontaneously, and once secure variations on a theme. Some people do employ sex therapists after all.

But you know, I have explained ABA to a HV once as 'extreme good parenting with no let up, never (at the beginning anyway) can you say 'ds get down from that wall, - I said get down, oh never mind, I have a beer and I'm sitting down, I'll address the behaviour tomorrow' like you can with NT children - so I do get your point. I mean, you CAN be inconsistent, but then you can lose the gains you've worked hard to achieve. I suppose that is certainly a negative.

I think sometimes it is difficult as we are all talking about such VERY different children, who just happen to come under the umbrella "autism". But my son's list of things that ABA helped me change, which TEACCH or an eclectic approach wouldn't have even touched, is as follows. I think that, had I left him with all those behaviours in place as he went into adulthood, you might rightly have called me a neglectful parent. Which is why it is always so odd to me that people who are anti-ABA call it "cruel" or "harmful to family life". As Fedupandfuming said, leaving him with this lot in place as he grew to 6 ft 5 would be the really cruel, disruptive thing!

• spending whole day running taps , putting plug in, overflowing sinks

• spending all other parts of day making high pitched sceaming noise

• flapping and bouncing constantly , wherever and whenever, till after midnight every night

• biting, hitting or headbutting any adult or child who came into view, if he was not getting precisely his own way at every minute of day (eg if prevented from flooding the house)

• having zero sense of danger, so running out in front of cars, throwing water on electrics, not understanding windows etc

• drinking water from anywhere , however foul , and with whatever disgusting receptacle to hand

• spending hours banging two objects against each other, endlessly and noisily

• having zero speech, zero understanding, zero chance of reading or writing

• not knowing how to get help if in trouble, not even knowing that my name is "mummy"

• Living, in effect, a repetitive, solitary life.

And I think being coached through sex is not in the same ball park for comparison. Not when it comes to our DS anyhow. We have a delightful NT DD who I believe we have parented consistently, lovingly and well (all through intuition and instinct). But DS1 is a completely different kettle of fish. He didn't just need boundaries or consistency (extreme parenting, if you like), he needed systematic, intensive teaching to get him from nil receptive language to the hundreds of words he has now. And we needed someone who has studied behaviour analysis for years, and seen hundreds of different ASD children to show us the way to help him do that. DS isn't even close to high functioning and would have had no hope of ever picking up language any other way. It took hard, painstaking work from us and the tutors to motivate and reward him, and to present the information in the right way and in the right order for him to build the basic blocks that form communication and language. Nothing even vaguely woolly would have achieved a jot, in fact when we first met our consultant she said that DS1 was almost unprecedented in his zero receptive language and that even her usual protocols would not apply. So without a programme that was v intensive and almost completely unique to him, he would have failed to develop language.

I suppose what I wanted to say a bit more succinctly than I have is that intuition and love and acceptance and understanding would have got us nowhere. Not in terms of progress anyhow. And is DS a happier boy because he can ask for what he wants, eat with utensils, use a computer, understand what words mean? Hell yes. And are we happier and more content as a family because of all those things? By a million miles

Seems to me the more severe the Autism is the stronger the argument for ABA is......

Well people might argue that the higher functioning the child the more you can make a difference to their life chances, when lower functioning children like DS are unlikely to ever live independently anyway. But to suggest that I could have helped DS just by trusting my skills as a mother is quite offensive imo. You wouldn't say that if physios and doctors were helping your child to walk again following an accident, so why should I feel bad because I needed outside help to help with a severe learning disability?

I would argue it slightly differently Indigobell. It's not the case that only the more severe kids benefit from ABA - all kids can benefit from ABA as a style of teaching (in fact behaviour analysis is also used in many other areas, eg addiction treatment, depressive illness, corporate behaviour).

What I think is that the other methods of teaching autistic kids in this country are so flabby and ineffective, that only the higher-functioning kids can get anywhere at all with them.

So the TEACCH units and schools point to good results, but only with kids who imho would have turned out ok anway (like my v mild, almost "cured" DSD).

And kids who can make it in mainstream (not my DS, sadly) will probably learn well too, by definition, as they are mild enough to make it in mainstream (although I do know there are huge social problems: I don't see it as an easy ride even for those with hf kids).

In summary , a really robust teaching method will work whatever the starting intellect/disability of the child.

That's ABA for me, not TEACCH or the eclectic approach. And all the research backs that up.

It is constantly a mystery to me why this country is investing billions in TEACCH, when it has no research behind it at all. Why not put that money into ABA methods, as they do in the US and Canada?

ABA isn't 1-2-1 work with a tutor. It usually is in home-programmes because that is the nature of them, but it isn't the nature of ABA.

I think with pretty much any therapy, the more HF the better they'll likely do.

Compliance is essential to teach anything whatever the motivation for that compliance. If a child has got used to the idea that sometimes they can ignore a direct instruction then you'll not get them to stop in the street when you see danger ahead or come inside when the teacher asks.

The beer example might sound like lazy parenting but all parents let their children get away with behaviour unaddressed at times, except for ABA parent, because they worked so hard to get that behaviour into some form of acceptable level in the first place.

Yes agree Starlight - a kid who's high functioning will turn out high functioining.

But my experience suggests that, at the margin, ABA techniques will help even the hf more than TEACCH, esp. with behaviours, social norms etc.

And yes, zzzz, a lot of it is just like common-sense, consistent parenting.

I think there is a slight problem that ABA is now getting linked with only the severe kids, because those are the ones that the TEACCH system gives up on.

My big question is - how much better would the hf autistic kids do using ABA than at present?

Of course in the original Lovaas ABA research study, half of all kids who did ABA before the age of 5 turned out as near "normal" as possible (judged via IQ and "mainstreamability".)

What makes me weep is the thought of that 50 % in this country who don't get ABA before 5, whose lives could have turned out so very differently! A bit of portage and a singing club really don't cut it!

And as justa said, it's NOT all about modifying behaviour. It's about teaching specific skills, to children who start out not even knowing how to learn

as I said earlier - I wish there was a way of de-linking ABA and severe ASD.

sickof - you've met my dd2. she appears, to most on first meeting her, NT. She is as high functioning as they come (and then some, tbh). But for the past 18 months, whenever we have had our consultant down - it has been to consult re: dd2.

hell, most of our USA trip was to consult re: dd2.

shoving ABA over towards the severe ned of the spectrum is lazy thinking, imo.

agree with Star that ABA is not 1-2-1 permanently. even dd1, in her ABA school, with only 3 pupils, only has half her time 1-2-1, and that is mostly due to completely different curriculum/stages of learning.

'You would only be told you didn't do it properly, you had a crap practitioner, or your child wasn't really that bad anyway'

No, you wouldn't get told that. I can assure you. But you might get questions about how it was done, or what kind of practise was engaged in, because the nature of ABA is that you look and keep looking, never ever giving up until you find out why something isn't working.

I doubt too that anyone would suggest that your child wasn't really that bad. I use 'some' ABA techniques with my crazy bright 2.5 yr old (when I'm not shouting at her that is - grrrrrr)

Or to turn it round, if you believe ABA has changed your child's life you are an ineffective, inconsistent parent who has been brainwashed out of any objective assessment of your child's progress. Not to mention digustingly middle class and over-involved