ABA and Pecs

[Hannah2705]

Hello, I am not a frequent poster although a silent reader most of the time and I would like everyone's opinion in this cause I really am torn, so my DD2 4.6 diagnosis of ASD has been recommended by SALT to be a part of a PECS workshop which lasts 6 weeks starting January, her school will be involved and they think my DD is a good candidate for pecs, the issue is that we'be started ABA just 2 months ago and my DD is responding well to it however SALT are recommending that I stop it cause they don't think the two work together! I really want to give ABA more chance than just 2 months and having a gap of 6 weeks if not more will be like stopping all together!
I must add that my DD is verbal but her functional language is kind of limited and subjected to her own agenda.
Can't ABA and PECS really not work together? I really can't decide and would appreciate any advice.
Thank you.

What made you want to do ABA?

I think your SALT team are trying to discourage you from it and its so controversial

Thank you Branleuse for the reply, to be honest I've thought about ABA for about a year while waiting around to get any kind of support from the NHS and in the end I decided that it seemed like my DD would benefit from it, I do know that the ABA is not very popular in the UK especially within the NHS so I guess SALT respond was kind of expected but still I was upset when she insisted we stop ABA before confirming our place in the workshop.

Hello,

I think that PECS was initially devised by a behavioural analyst working with a speech therapist - In any case PECS is based on ABA principles so there is absolutely no need to stop ABA.
Have you asked your consultant what they think about it all?

It seems bizarre that you are being asked to stop ABA - are school/speech therapists worried that you are going to be looking for LA funding for your ABA program?

If you think the PECS course will help then just lie and tell them you have stopped the ABA.

Hello boobybum, thank you for your reply, I have done some research on the matter and it does seem odd that I'm being pressured to stop ABA which can be quite as effective alongside Pecs! I really am considering lying to them about stopping ABA but the only problem is I usually pick up my DD from school early so she's not too tired during the ABA session, and if the school knows then so will SALT! I must add that we are applying for my DD's EHCP on January so maybe they really are afraid that I'll ask the LA to pay for ABA as you said !

ABA and pecs are totally compatible and any SLT that doesn't know pecs is based on aba doesn't know what they are doing. Aba has a much higher success rate in teaching language than pecs or eclectic methods. Does the aba consultant think pecs is required? If your child is coming on with their methods I would stick with that not drop the aba. If you are asking for funding then be careful about not following advice though as it will be interpreted as your being obstructive and used against you. If aba is controversial then so are pecs as both based on rewards. But I can't understand why a verbal child would need pecs. It sounds like you thet are fitting your child to the service that's avail instead of fitting the service to the child. It's about building the motivation to use her speech functionally and only aba is geared to help with that. Maybe ask to speak to the pecs tutor - check if properly accredited to teach pecs by Pyramid (most slts aren't and teach it badly) and ask whether it would be suitable for a verbal child. If the pecs tutor knows their stuff they will tell you pecs is not suitable for a verbal child. What are you supposed to do ignore her functional speech and only respond if she hands over a symbol? Nonsense.

PECS can certainly be valuable for verbal children. I teach a child who has quite a good vocabulary and clear speech however his functional speech is poor. For example he does not ‘ask’ for things just talks into mid air and gets angry when nobody responds. I do think this has in part been caused by initially poor PECS teaching but PECS can be valuable in supporting and developing speech. For example supporting making more complex sentences, supporting unclear speech so the communicative partner can model correct speech and supporting functional speech. It does depend on what specific areas you are working on.

Thank you both for replying, northernglam I have spoken to the tutor and she says she is accredited to teach Pecs by Pyramid and still insists my DD would benefit from it however I honestly think she really has no idea how ABA works because she keeps saying it teaches children how to label things and pictures while Pecs would bring on more "functional speech"!
Lorisparkle : my DD does request the things she wants using sentences so she does have "some" functional speech however she can't maintain a conversation or answer questions, which is why I thought ABA would be a better fit than Pecs in her case.
I have contacted SALT over and over again since my daughter was 18 months because I wanted support and all I was getting was an assessment after the other with no actual support, and when we were on the waiting list for ADOS we were discharged by SALT and we had a gap of a whole year with absolutely nothing till my DD was diagnosed now this is the first actual support SALT has ever offered us and I am afraid that by declining it I would be giving SALT a chance to use it against me when I apply for EHCP.

www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/AIA-08-2017-0016

autisticmama.com/big-deal-aba-therapy/

Branleuse thank you for the links, I have seen and read loads of different opinions on ABA as I said above it's taken me a whole year to decide and I didn't just jump into it, yes there is a big number of ABA therapists who use the therapy to "treat" autistic children ,to kill their nature and will, and to push them to act "neurotypical" which will cause trauma to these children with time. HOWEVER this does not apply to all kinds of ABA or all therapists, as parents it is our jobs not to follow blindly any therapist and to stop when we feel that this is causing any kind of harm to our children.
Our ABA consultant would never force my DD to do anything against her will and would stop immediately if my DD showed any kind of distress, and if you see my DD skipping happily when I tell her that it's time for the session you will think that she has a play date.
I also would like to add something else, whether it's pecs, box time or even SALT they all have lots of similarities with aba when it comes to teaching discipline or rewarding children for doing what's been asked, they just don't have the same label.

In my experience aba tutors will use visuals / written word prompts to support developing more sophisticated language and provided they are good aba therapists will be following a systematic curriculum to do so. You don't need to go on a pecs course to teach longer sentences you can find lots of worksheets, books, apps resources etc online The SALT should really be designing a programme for your child and her needs. Does she have 1.1 in school? Because pecs needs there to be a partner to hand over the pecs to. I did pay to go on a pyramid pecs course and thought it was very good but we then started aba and they advised they didn't think pecs would be necessary - which it wasn't. But we still use lots of visual prompts to teach language the advantage of not doing pecs though is that you can fade the visuals when they don't need them anymore. It doesn't sound like your child needs to be physically handing over symbol strips - which doesn't mean she can't use visuals of words to put sentences together. I don't think there's anything wrong on going on the course you may pick up useful info in the later stages of pecs - my concern is why the salt thinks pecs is the way to go over other methods of teaching given she sounds very verbal

I’m not sure why ABA and SaLT need to be mutually exclusive. My son has been on an ABA programme for 3 years and we have SaLT input - the ABA tutors work on targets that SaLT set. We see a private SaLT who is very pro ABA and the NHS SaLTs see my son so infrequently.
In our case the ABA and SaLT have really worked well in bringing on functional language. In particular our ABA tutor works wonders.

Northernglam our ABA consultant does use visuals/written words too and I think most tutors/consultant do considering it's quite common for autistic children to have a good visual memory. But whether it's ABA or Pecs I am not really looking into making my DD's sentences longer or in other words it's not a priority at the moment, what I really am hoping for is a more functional language.
As for your question, yes she does have 1.1 full time and her 1.1 is going to be a part of the Pecs course if we decided to go ahead with it.
What I'm thinking about now is to give both the school SENCO and our ABA Consultant a call tomorrow to find a way we can keep going with ABA alongside Pecs and convince SALT that this is what I believe is for my child's best interest.

Sausagepickle123 that seems brilliant, I have considered looking into private SALT but it will be more than we can afford unfortunately, our NHS SALT team saw my DD just once since the diagnosis so I found myself in defense mode when she asked me stop ABA , I mean you met my child ONCE and you say you know what works best for her! Yeah sure!

I think from my experience you are being offered what's freely available and not what is needed for your child. We had similar experience with NHS salt who advised a small group which would use resources to learn wh words. He was no where near the level of being able to use wh words and certainly not in a group. But the school already had the training and resources so it was easier for the salt to recommend that than provide something individual. That was 8 years ago and the group suggested is something that would be only just be suitable for him now. I would never stop something that's working. By all means play the game and go on the course but don't stop something that's not incompatible and where you are seeing progress

I can't thank you enough Northernglam, I believe it's us mums who should always have the final say when it comes to our children's best interest as no one knows them better that us especially a special needs child.
I have left a message for SALT to give me a call back and hopefully this time it will go smoothly.

I know an experienced ABA tutor who tried switching careers to be a SALT. She went back to ABA after a few months because the skill level for SALT was just so low compared to ABA professionals.

I would always value an a good ABA professional over a SALT, but the best is where they can work together, as they do in US.

The stuff about ABA being controversial is just so misinformed and damaging to our kids. It's the same intellectual laziness that allowed the whole autism/vaccine 'controversy' to take hold.

Hope you get it all sorted.

Hi OP, just to add another view in! It’s great that your DD has been responding well to ABA. My DS (4) has been doing ABA for a couple of years (not very intensively) and it’s helped massively in many areas (joint attention, turn taking, comprehension, imitation, toileting, dressing, safe walking along the road, etc, etc) but not so much in communication for him. He does have some words and is starting to join them together but I do feel he is a still quite prompt-dependent and will often say ‘raisins’ or ‘biscuit’ or something he wants into thin air. Which is why PECS has been helpful to us as it (hopefully) it is helping him make requests to another person and have more functional communication. I really don’t see why the two (ABA and PECS) can’t work together and they often do. Also I personally don’t see that the SaLT can demand you drop the ABA before offering you a place on the course! Surely it’s up to you how you spend your money and what you think is best for your DD. And your daughter has a right to help on the NHS.

Its generally autistic people who say there are big problems with ABA,rather than their parents tbf, although im sure you get results at times in making autistic people be able to pretend theyre not autistic better. Its just a shame about all the autistic people coming forward with post traumatic stress

Thank you all for responding, after many calls back and forth SALT have finally admitted that they can't deny my DD PECS because of ABA but they still insist the two don't work well together! It is what it is I guess! I feel like I was pressured to do PECS but I'll give it a try and if I didn't feel like it was a good match for my DD then I can say we tried!

Amunt : I would have loved for both SALT and ABA to work together, well our ABA consultant was telling me today to invite SALT to a session to give them an idea of how she works and convince them that it's not as different from Pecs as they would think, if they agreed it will be very interesting indeed!

Hurricane : that sounds brilliant! I think my DD have gotten better at communication since we started ABA but again I haven't tried PECS yet to compare the two, but if PECS did end up being useful and my DD's communication improved then I'll be more than happy to be proven wrong!

Branleuse : no one is trying to make their child NT, but as sad as it is this is a world that has been designed by and for neuroticals and we won't be around forever to protect our children so we are trying to do what we can to help them cope -not change- in this very confusing world.

They are talking crap. I have done an intensive pecs course which I paid for 1:1 with my dd and pyramid. It was vastly inferior to the aba that we also did. Stick with and. By all means try the pecs too. They are meant to work together anyway so I am not sure why they are pushing you to give up Aba. Aba got my dd started on learning language as it helped her to learn that objects had names. Pecs helped a bit later while her pronunciation improved.