Forced to do ABA training before my daughter can get help

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I am getting really frustrated, as I have to do 20 hours of online ABA parent training to qualify for the 8 weeks next year that my AS daughter can have with a behaviourist and we can finally get some one on one help.

I have 10 weeks to complete the online training and I thought it would be a breeze, but it really isn't. I keep watching the videos, taking notes and then doing the quizzes and then I have to redo the videos because I keep on getting things wrong. I am really smart, graduated with the highest honours in college and run a law office for a living - why is this ABA training so hard? I am stuck on module 2 and I find that the quizzes ask questions that have nothing to do with the video or they see something different than I do.

For instance, one video showed a girl finally singing in her music class. The teacher praised her and then she didn't sing any longer. So I said it was positive reinforcement because she praised her, but that was wrong. So I rewatched the video and still see the teacher praising her, but I put that it was negative reinforcement because the praise stopped her from singing. But then it must be either positive punishment or negative punishment and I don't get why she would be punished for singing in music class when she is supposed to. Also the videos have nothing to do with autism - they show regular people doing all sorts of stuff like online dating, hanging out with friends etc. I figure when I finally see a behaviourist, we will look at what behaviours we want to change and then we will decide some strategies - they won't make me guess if I will be adding or deleting something and what concepts am I using.

I really am wanting to quit this ABA stuff because I will be spending all of my lunch hours for next couple months trying to get the training done. I wrote to the ABA program at the hospital and told them about my frustrations and how I feel punished as a parent. I doubt it will change things, but do they realize what they are putting parents through?

I think I see where you are confused.
The psychological definition of punishment is something that decreases the likelihood of a given behaviour (like singing in music class). Adversely, reinforcement is something that increases the likelihood of a given behavior. And the terms positive and negative mean adding something (like praise in this case) and subtracting something (like a desired object), respectively.
So for this girl, being praised was positive punishment because something was added (the praise) and the behaviour decreased. I would think that means the girl does not like being singled out for praise or even one-on-one after class because it makes her uncomfortable. Therefore, that teacher should find something the girl wants (most easily, a treat like candy) so she will exhibit the behaviour (singing) more often in order to get the positive reinforcement (leading to an increase in the desired behaviour).

I hope that helps.

Edited to add:
As my signature says, I am on the autism spectrum, but I also do ABA therapy for a severely autistic 11 year old. She is making progress and outwardly shows that she likes me. Probably because I don't do strict ABA; it's laid-back but we still get stuff done.

Yes thank you, I think I finally have it now - hope it helps with the other modules. I will print off what you wrote and see if that helps me from now on.

I'm not a parent, although I do live life on the spectrum myself comfortably self-diagnosed. I have attended three or four Saturday sessions at a local university where they use video to demonstrate ABA, and I have not been the least bit impressed. In one video, there was this enthusiastic ABA practitioner in her early 20s:

"Hi, I'm Erin. What's your name?"

"I'm Steve."

"Good Job! Give me Five!!"


"Hi, I'm Erin. What's your name?"

"I'm Steve. "

"Go-ood Job! Give me Five!!"


"Hi, I'm Erin. What's your name?"

"I'm Steve."

"Good Job!! Give me Fivvve!! !"

==============

It really was that bad. Yes, they repeated it at least three times in a row. And where the practitioner tries to give praise, she looms right in the child's face. And she gives the child's hand a soft to medium slap, which combined with the looming face might be too much. I raised my hand and asked, A lot of kids on the Spectrum have sensory issues, might an adult enthusiastically emoting right in your face combined with a medium hand slap just be too much? One of the ABA professors stood up and said, Not all autistic children have sensory issues. As if I was being prejudiced. wow. I'd say most kids on the autism spectrum have sensory issues, it's one of the defining characteristics, and certainly something which should be taken into account. (rather, sensory issues should be one of the defining characteristics if DSM-5 got it right).

And then, even if they succeed, even if they get the young boy to greet others as professionally as a presidential candidate when he has patchy skills following? That will be more confusing to other children than if the boy just had patchy skills throughout. Some children can accept other children who are different, some can't.

The ABA person should have done a single one hour or 45 minute play or activity session and kept it relatively natural.

Oh goodness you made me laugh Aarvark - with the "greet others as professinally as a presidential candidate" - that was hilarious!
Yes I can see what you mean about the video and young children ABA services. I am certainly hoping that since my daughter will be 14 and needs help with coping skills, that they will actually give her some and that the person helping her sister and I will give us actual strategies to use too.

I actually got an email back from the ABA program at our children's hospital and she told me that they will look into having videos that are more parent centred in the future. She suggested I try attending the in person training which parents really seem to like - I just don't have the time to do two full Saturdays or 3 evenings. She also said my marks didn't matter and I just had to complete the training, but it isn't true. The online training makes you get 88% or you have to go back and rewatch until you get them all right. It is only 8 to 10 questions , so if you get two wrong, you are forced to redo the videos. I find most of the questions on the quiz weren't really covered in the videos or the notes I take or the notes you can print off. You watch a 3 to 6 minute video and an example or two and then they feel you know everything about it.

If I thought this was going to be worth it and help my daugther, I would just suck it up and do it, but I just don't want this to be a total waste of time. I know getting my daughter to attend for the 8 weeks in a row will be an agony in itself. So really do I quit this frustrating endeavour?

I'm glad you liked it. I kind of liked it, too!

14 is a tough age, or certainly can be. The other kids can be very clique-ish. Looking back on it, we lived on the edge of a school boundary line and both my boy scout troop and judo club were in other districts, and that turned out very lucky because then not all my social eggs were in the one basket of school.

Academically, I've recently decided I'm primarily a story / narrative type of thinker. And this explains why I do very well in classes like world history, as long as I start early on papers, and give myself permission not to fall in the trap of perfectionism. With math, I can do well if I really can put in the time into it and things are going reasonably well in the here and now so that I'm not eaten up with worries. And I tend to do a smaller number of homework problems but do them more thorough and/or do them a second or third time like I might watch a good movie a second or third time. In most college math classes, that's fine. In high school, I can be serious docked for 'not doing all the homework' and it can be a constant struggle to keep up.

This idea of different preferred intellectual styles and the specific of the story / narrative type I got from a speech from Temple Grandin. I will try and find a link to this and post it.

In another speech she said, see what the speech therapist or other professional does, and then hire a college student to do the same thing for 20 hours a week. Although that might be too much for an adolescent. And she also said, for God's sake don't try and do it yourself or it will drive you crazy. Will also try and post this.

This is where Temple is talking about getting some students and volunteers to duplicate the methods of professionals. Again, this is for much younger kids.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5487847.html&highlight= //post and good discussion

http://www.booktv.org/Program/14536/The ... ctrum.aspx //Book TV

Thanks Aardvark, I don't think my daughter would do anything for 20 hours, no matter how much it is supposed to help her. It will be extremely hard to get her to do the 2 hours a week for 8 weeks.

How about we help you with the quizzes? I don't mean cheating, but there is a huge body of knowledge here, both of the actual right answers and the "right" answers that the quiz probably wants.

You might want to start a new thread with the specific request for help with specific questions in the title.

Where are you (in the world, e.g. country and province or state) that you're required to do the ABA training online without anyone to help you with the quizzes? I wonder if that is a misreading of the requirement by whoever is making you do it; while I suppose it seems reasonable for them to ask you to have parent training, it doesn't seem at all reasonable that they're making you do it with no support and expecting you to pass the assessments successfully. Usually these requirements are set by the school board at the state or provincial level, that's a good place to start asking questions.

Thanks momsparky - I likely will ask WP for help when I don't get the concepts. The problem is the training in not geared to parents, but acts like I am a behaviourist. Today I managed to complete a module on my lunch hour and I realized that I have to finish it all at once or I forget whatever I learned earlier in the week and I also figured out how to fast forward through the videos if they make me rewatch them. So I did it! 3 modules out of 10!

I am in Ontario, Canada and you can't get a behaviourist to help unless you do the training. I am not even sure that I want ABA help because I cannot imagine my daughter having a tantrum and me observing her and sitting with her twin sister to do a functional behavioural analysis. We kind of do those naturally when we go on walks and are trying to get her AS sister to behave differently. It seems far too complicated, but maybe it will be helpful. I hate charts and stuff - prefer just talking things through.

We did find doing the FBA was really helpful for us, critical even - but I am also not a keep-track-of-things sort of a person, so I made a point to make a mental note every time I came across something to write down, and then I wrote it all down at the end of the week just before we were supposed to hand it in. Turns out, we did find patterns of behavior that were helpful.

I've always been this way: in school, I used to keep different color pens for "journal" assignments so they would think I did it daily. Not sure if they actually fell for it or if they just let it go because I did the same amount of work.

Is the program you are in the IBI program? Looks like there is a parent training program, but they don't specify much about the actual training other than that you need to understand ABA enough to follow through with it at home.

I can't access videos in Canada from the US, but I found this provider: http://www.cheo.on.ca/en/autismparenttraining If it isn't the one you are already doing and it makes more sense to you, you might bring it to your caseworker and ask if you can switch.

From what I gathered, the IBI parents take the same ABA training, plus the IBI training too. They aren't likelly to allow me to switch to different videos, just allow me to attend the in person training.

Good to hear that the FBA helped you out in finding patterns of behaviour. I will likely be filling out my forms just before handing them in too. Do you still use the FBA now?

My son no longer displays critical behaviors and has learned to advocate for himself pretty well, so we haven't used it in a long time. Essentially, we used the FBA to figure out all the stuff that he wasn't able to articulate (he is very verbal, but was almost totally unable to express his own needs.) Then, we basically came up with strategies to make sure those needs got met and to encourage him/explain to him that communicating his needs was the best way to get them met.

Then we had to go backwards a little bit (which I think is natural) because he of course took that to mean that if he said something, he should get it , but that was a hiccup in comparison.

He's still not perfectly able to articulate his needs, but he can let us know when he needs to troubleshoot a problem and can usually give us enough information now so that we can help him solve it.

So, we didn't do the sort of "operant/classical conditioning" in the dog-training sense that many of our members are justifiably angry at, and which you need to look out for. ABA should not be giving someone an M&M every time they successfully perform an action, for instance - although you can start there if you need to have your child perform the action in order to learn what it means...but the end result you want is the understanding, not the compliance.

For example, we did use a token system for a while to encourage my son to get ready for school on time. Once he figured out that the day is less stressful when you complete your morning routine on time, he didn't need it any more and we phased it out. The reason we used a token system is that it was difficult to communicate the benefits and reasons for getting ready until he'd tried it for a while. Does that make sense?

That said, the token part is a very small part of the whole picture: we had to troubleshoot the whole morning routine to make sure we addressed all the things that were causing him to fail. We finally turned a corner when we realized we had to deal with his anxiety about starting the day, and we struggled with that until a member here suggested giving him a sheet of bubble wrap to pop in the car on the way to school, which alleviated the perseverating and anxiety. It took a lot of detective work, questions and suggestions to finally figure that out. (Also, addressing the problems in school that caused him to dread it was a big thing, but that was a long-term thing that was finally solved by going to middle school, where the staff had a clue.) The FBA helped us pinpoint the act of leaving the house and getting into the car as the place where we needed an intervention.

Sorry, this is turning into a sermon! IIRC, your daughter is struggling in much the same way that my son did years ago.

Well first off are you sure this is even the right approach for your daughter...and by 'seeing the behaviorist and and looking at behaviors we want to change...do you mean behaviors you and your daughter would like to work on or behaviors strictly you and the behaviorist want her to change? I mean it would be good to keep in mind your daughter is not going to become a normal neurotypical through behavioral training...so hopefully your goal is not to force her to be 'normal'. For instance there is a thing called stimming while if the stimming is harmful in some way it likely needs to be redirected to something that's not....but to stop the stimming altogether might make them look more 'normal' outside but can cause major distress on the inside since stimming is part of how people on the spectrum handle stress and its an outlet of sorts. So I suppose I'd say it is important to be careful about what behaviors you focus on 'changing' and keep in mind autistic behavior is not the same thing as wrong behavior....so helping with harmful behavior that could hurt them or others is important but trying to train the autism out of them on account of 'being autistic is wrong' is a disservice to people with autism.

I mean if thus far the approach doesn't even make sense to you, perhaps it would be better to look into some other approaches...also depends on what exactly your goal is with all this.