ABA Therapy. Does it work?

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Ultimately, no one can tell you with 100% accuracy what ABA is because the values and details will depend on the people who are implementing it.

I.e. below is an excerpt from a blog entry by a young woman who interned one summer at a school for autistic kids. The whole entry is pretty long, but it's a good read.

http://adeepercountry.blogspot.com/2009 ... s-you.html

I have... Some are grateful, some said it didn't help much, some think back on it with horror, and some still have PTSD and can't talk about it because it'll put them straight into flashbacks.

Those "misconceptions" come from first-hand accounts of people who have seen, or even experienced, these therapies. Therefore they cannot be misconceptions, because they are not conceptions.

So excuse me if I put little faith in the claims on some pro-ABA website.

My impression is it's a therapy designed by people who are fundamentally unable or unwilling to relate directly to people. I'm pretty sure even the most 'low-functioning' autistic could be related to on their own terms. That takes a lot of courage and intelligence though.

How come?

I mean, why would you need to be courageous and smart to figure out how to talk back and forth with a non verbal child? I think you would probably need to be creative, and you would need to be careful to get rid of assumptions that could create static and block up real communication; but I don't think you'd have to be particularly smart or courageous. I don't think it's particularly extraordinary to learn to communicate with someone who is very different from you; it's just something we're taught is not possible, so I guess many people don't try.

N.O. NO. This is the kind of "therapy" that all it does is opress the child. Cherry-picking which behaviors you do and don't want in your kid will put him in even more silence.

So what? A kid screams at church, a concert, or a college football game? "No computor for a week!" He acts placid and like a nobody? "Here's that new video game you've wanted."

See anything wrong with this picture?

Too me that seems a little harsh......especially at a concert of college football game, everyone screams at those things so it would be ridiculous to expect a child with autism not to especially if they are screaming in enjoyment like all those other people. Otherwise maybe all the noise is overwhelming them and it causes a meltdown..in which case no computer for a week would not help.

I tend to agree ABA therapy is crap though.

I was saying if the child is screaming because it's too loud, a sensory issue, or somehow upsetting. And the really sad thing is that no computor for a week (or some other reward or punishment) might get the parents the result that they want because the child would give in out of fear, especially if the parents were persistant enough. But what you'd end up with is a child who is even worse off than before. I personally can't get over the fact that parents think ABA would break a child's silence...

I was saying if the child screams because it is too loud, a sensory issue, or somehow upsetting. And the really sad thing is that it might get the parents the result that they want in that the child would give in out of fear of being punished, especially if the parents were persistant enough. But what you'd end up with is a child who is traumatized and even worse off than before.

EDIT: I apologize for making two copies of the same post. My computor acted up and I did not realize that my first post went through.

Last edited by AspieAshley on 19 Jan 2012, 7:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well yeah in my experience when parents or teachers tried to punish me for things I did not directly control, such as maybe having a meltdown involving screaming if the surroundings overwhelmed me too much it made the situation worse and caused me more pain.

Like one time was especially horrible, I think I was about 5 and going to this place kind of like a pre-school but before pre-school. Anyways one day the fire alarm went of and I would not stop screaming and crying about it because it scared and upset me so much. So the teacher took my socks and put them out of my reach but where I could see them and said I could not have them back till I stopped crying, of course that made it worse and caused something else for me to be upset about.

She should have maybe tried to comfort me and explained why a very loud painful noise went off out of nowhere.....but she tried to punish me into not having a reaction to something that disturbed me. And to this day I hate not having socks on and if anyone tries to take them even as a joke I get pissed off. Since I figure ABA therapy probably resembles that experience there is no way in hell I'd ever support it.

Sweetleaf, that sounds like a horrible experience. I hated fire drills so much when I was in school that after the first one the staff actually recognized how bad it was and started telling me when there was going to be a fire drill (if they themselves knew about it). I would dread fire drills so much that I would cover my ears 15 minutes before they were scheduled. (I hope no one looks at this and thinks for a moment that it's better not to tell kids than it is to have tham be preocupied with it before the fire drill.)

I didn't even know what a fire drill was at the time.

There is such a thing as overdoing it.

If you can, try to look into Positive Behavior Support instead of Applied Behavior Analysis. I'm sure you can find PBS teachers near your area. Positive Behavior Support is derived from ABA. As summarized from the URL below, traditional ABA incorporates punishment in which PBS does not. http://appliedbehavioranalysis.blogspot ... stive.html

You must understand their are two different mindsets going on in this thread: one of the concerned parent who can only interpret the world in their own way, especially if they have no problem with social communication, and you have the autistic adult who understands what these behaviours are really about and feels kind of threatened by people trying to stop them, as if they are trying to take them away from them. And they can't see things how you see them. I think for some unknown reason that I can see why someone would want to put their children through intervention therapy. I was once an autistic child and I know how much my parents struggled. I didn't know back then but now I realise their worries and frustrations. By their I mean her. Mum. My dad was hardly in my life.

I know that parents of autistic kids just want the best for them and want them to learn to interact with others and grow and one day become independent. It just tears you apart when you look at your child now and can't see that happening in their future, right?

It would depend on certain ABA clinics too. Some may be forceful but others might not be. We've had autism support workers come in here and actually ask us if it was a good or bad thing to stop a child from stimming.

My type of autism, pathological demand avoidance syndrome (PDA) actually do not respond well to ABA therapy so I can just see these workers at a loss to treat certain autistic children who just refuse to do anything. This might be when the harsh methods come in, not that I condone them.

I believe that people can lose enough autistic symptoms to not meet the criteria. I think I'm alone in thinking that. But I don't care, I study enough on neuroscience and psychology to come to that conclusion. It's difficult work and a very rare occurrence that someone would lose their diagnosis but it does happen.

As for stimming, I think it's important. It can be changed to a less obvious behaviour though.

Fourty hours sounds a lot. Thats more than I work, and I wish I worked less! I would seriously be worried that the child gets lots of downtime, and enjoys what they are doing..otherwise whats the point? Don't get the idea that its something that you need to do for 40 hours or it won't work, and that somehow by doing more and more hours it will..

My son does ABA but its more like 15 hours a week. Its an appropriate therapy for young low functioning children like ours and it works if done properly with care and consideration for the child. I'm not sure if it will help make your child verbal, it might, but I wouldn't worry about that or pin your hopes on it, but certainly they can learn to communicate, and that helps them, my son can use PECS now. Thats the whole point of what we do with him, to develop reciprocal communication, and some skills like toileting. I feel that things like this will come from the communication, we tried to teach him toileting all day for 10 days straight he just didn't get it - yet, probably I feel because he simply didn't understand what we wanted from him.

There seems to be some ignorance around ABA, I think people watch a vid of Ivar Lovaas doing his horrible thing, read an opinion piece or two, and without themselves ever having cared for a low functioning disabled child, feel they know something. What they 'know' is akin to Chinese whispers.