What is ABA like?

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I've noticed that in many threads it seems that people are either strongly for or strongly against ABA. I'm curious about the reason. I've tried reading about ABA but it seems like reading about something isn't always as informative as experiencing it.

ABA is a science of behaviour and behavioural change. What people call ABA as applied to Autistic children is actually a teaching method based on behavioural modification principles from ABA. It uses the students motivation and breaks what is to be taught into very small pieces. Like any form of teaching it depends a lot on the implementation and the teacher(s).
People's criticism of it seems to me to be around two things; firstly originally 'aversives' were part of the repetoire so that included smacking and other horrible stuff. Thats not done these days of course. Secondly some of the behaviour some people try to change with ABA is controversial, including supressing stimming and changing kids social behaviour.
To my mind perhaps those criticisms are more valid when applied to Aspies.
We do ABA with my son, he is NV Autistic. Just teaching him things like following instructions and making eye contact. It's been quite useful. Have taught him the PECS system and to look at our eyes, to follow instructions to a level. And some foundations he will need for going to school like matching and discriminating and labelling. I reckon it's great when applied properly.

It seems like glorified child abuse to me. The child gets 40 hours of therapy of week. Imagine going to school for 40 hours a day and than doing that for 40 hours, because your parents want to change who you are. No wonder so many people here who are in their 20s are so angry. If they had 40 hours of freedom instead, they would be happier. Imagine having it pounded in your head all your childhood years that you're wrong, you're not good enough and your parents will not love you until you're cured. Now imagine that you're an aspie and you don't really need it in the first place. This answers the question as to why there's a number of young hippies with AS. They had their freedom taken away from them as children in the 80s and 90s because their parents wanted to cure them with ABA and now they're living the life of freedom that they never knew as children. I grew up to be a respectable person because I had that freedom as a child and I wasn't put through 40 hours of therapy a week. I got to experience freedom as a child so that I can be more cultured and refined, today.

The other extreme to 40 hours/week of behavioral "adjustments" is no intervention at all. Many of us DX'd late in life had absolutely no help. Functional enough to get through, passive enough to not be a "bad kid", but completely ignored. This does not lead to good outcomes.

That would be me too. I was a bright kid, easy to please (no real behavior problems), also went to a different school every year (military family). I wish I had some training. I'm 38 so that has a lot to do with it to. I am happy with myself, but life was hard growing up.

40 hours a week is ridiculous, I don't even work that much in a full time job. Half that is fine.
It's nice you grew up the way you did, but if my son was treated the same way and left to be he would not talk or be able to care for himself, his ASD is more severe than yours, and he needs more help. People like him aren't represented much on here and tend to get overlooked. Just my opinion.

There are in fact people like him around here, although perhaps not many. They seem to get erased for rhetorical purposes quite frequently.

My son is doing ABA too.
It's a teaching method. If you need speech therapy, you can have it with ABA method. The content is the same. ABA doesn't include slaps but the child is allowed to do something he likes if he gives the right answer. It's an old thing. I think today no ABA therapist slaps children. We have to remember that in the past some teachers slapped children and considered it normal.
I think that an aspies should not need ABA because they function well, my son is autistic.

It is unfortunate that we do not get the privilege to read these posts.

I am not aware of any research that supports the notion that ABA results in better outcomes than other methodologies. The research on ABA seems to focus on small samples sizes and case studies.

Some of the ABA people arrive at some brilliant insights about nonverbal kids with autism. I recall reading about how an ABA specialist figured out how to stop a child from grinding teeth. Some ABA experts give parents some good tips on how not to feed into children's self abusive behavior.

What gets called ABA varies a whole whole lot to the point that you wouldn't call them all one thing if you looked at what they were instead of what they were called.

Some of it really is wrong. And I don't just mean the kind with aversives (which yes, still exists, it's not just in the past).

Like... there's forms of ABA where they teach an autistic person in a systematic manner, using rewards and doing everything the supposedly "nice" kind of ABA, and what they teach the person is to ignore the signals their body sends them. I have had a form of behavior modification that worked like that. The behavior they wanted to change was when I hid out in my room. So they gave me rewards if I would come out of my room, even more rewards if I spent time around people, and so forth. What they didn't understand, was that I needed that time alone in my room just as much as I needed sleep. It was a way of dealing with overload, and with some of my visual processing difficulties as well. After being taught to ignore these things, I became overloaded to the point of serious crashing far more often than I used to, and yet even as I was shutting down, I would go out around lots of people. It was horrible. Really, truly, horrible.

And sometimes ABA is used like that, to teach a person to behave in nonautistic ways even if their autistic behavior has reason and purpose. It is used to force children to make eye contact even though it hurts them. It is used to stop children from stimming in ways that allow them to understand their environment and deal with overload. I've heard from several parents who ABAed their children out of stimming and their children developed self-injurious behavior as a result. So even the "good kind" of ABA can be used in ways that are frankly just as bad if not worse in the long run than some of the aversive kinds are.

I actually know several families whose children lost their toilet training due to certain kinds of ABA. These kinds didn't use what's normally called aversives or anything. But they involved things like physically forcing an autistic child to sit or stand in a particular place. If that place was the bathroom, they became so afraid of bathrooms that they wet their pants rather than use one. If that place was a chair at a table, some of them lost the ability to sit in chairs.

Plus there are autistic people where this sort of directness is incredibly aversive all on its own. Temple Grandin wrote about how she benefited from having people grab her chin and turn her head towards them, but Donna Williams wrote that if someone did that to her it would have been total emotional and sensory overload. Some autistic people are exceedingly sensitive or high-strung and just can't handle the directness involved in many kinds of ABA, even the "good" kinds.

Then there are kinds of ABA that are just kind of... meh. They supposedly teach people functional skills like dressing and bathing, but this kind can often result in situations where the autistic person cannot generalize what they have learned in ABA, to actual real life situations. So all this effort spent, and yet the kid is either completely prompt-dependent, or unable to do it at all in situations other than the exact situation they were taught in. So this kind isn't exactly awful, but it's not exactly useful, either.

And then you sometimes get something calling itself ABA that is just teaching things in a way that actually helps an autistic person learn. This only works with some kinds of autistic people, even at best, though. I know an autistic guy with an autistic son who just totally clicks with whatever form of ABA was used on him, and his learning just completely took off when given this kind of ABA.

It's hard to describe the differences between all the different types, though. And people doing every kind will swear up and down that they're doing the really good, useful kind. Whether or not that's true. And now I'm going to make a separate post about me personally as opposed to ABA in general, just to break this up into parts so it's not so long.

Anbuend posted in this thread.

I mean, there are nonverbal posters here who would be considered to be "low functioning" if you believe in functioning labels (I don't), or "severely autistic" (if you take some traits into account and ignore others). I can think of two right offhand, and I think there may be a third but I forget for certain.

Okay.

So I'm both the sort of person that some people on this thread would doubtless say "really needs" ABA. I'm also someone where there is literally no kind of ABA that could possibly work for me. Even the ones that I have seen work for other people. And I'm not alone in the traits that I have that make this true, I'm told they're quite common traits among autistic people in general.

My diagnosis is autism, not AS. Not that I think that makes a difference, I know plenty of people with AS who could potentially benefit from ABA and who have at least some of the difficulties I have. So the idea that "aspies don't need ABA" is silly. But just to mention my actual diagnosis, since so many people on here assume any autistic person capable of posting here has AS. Not true at all. I had a severe receptive delay causing highly atypical language development, and had other cognitive and self-help delays that were pretty serious, so I don't fit AS as currently thought of.

I have a lot of trouble with daily living skills, from the basic to the complex ones. I need either partial or total help with (or can't do properly whether I get help or not, or need help "starting me off"): Bathing, washing hands, cleaning private parts, brushing teeth, eating, cooking, shopping, cleaning up clutter, actually cleaning/washing surfaces in the house, organizing just about anything, other housework, crossing the street, dressing, undressing, using the bathroom, mobility, using the phone, taking my medications, budgeting, transferring, etc. And there are times with each of those that I need total help even on the ones that I normally need only a certain amount of help with.

Which would make me supposedly a wonderful candidate for ABA and other "skills training" type things.

Except I'm not. Really, really, not. Seriously not. (And I do know how I respond to behavior mod, including the "good" kind, because I've been through it many times.)

Here's why. On several levels.

First off, I'm unteachable using any direct and deliberate method of teaching. Whatever i learn from the experience is never what the person teaching me (including when it's me trying to teach myself) is trying to teach me. I always end up learning something else unrelated.

It's very hard to describe why this is so. It's as if there are two parts of me, learning-wise.

There's a part that deals with something that is being taught directly. It takes in the information. It fiddles around with the information. It may even appear to be learning the information. But it doesn't retain just about any information consciously taught or consciously learned. Not in the long run. It's like it goes in one ear, into my brain, then out the other. I somehow see this part as being sort of "up front" in my head.

The part of me that actually learns... it's more like "in the back" in my head, or deep down somewhere. It doesn't take in information consciously or directly. It's more like sensory information will slowly filter into it, and then the information trickles down, forms real connections to other information, and that is the information I end up learning. I'm not capable of consciously directing this process in any way.

Because of this, i also retain virtually no information I was taught in school. Yet I retain a lot of things I learned about, say, the power dynamics of the classroom, because nobody was trying to teach me that and it had a chance to filter down deep into the back of my head where it sticks.

Apparently all that is actually ... like there's neurological explanations for all that, and even autistic people who can learn in direct/ABA-type ways, usually learn better in the indirect "trickling down in the back of the head" ways. It's just that it's virtually impossible for either the person or other people to control what they learn in this way. So it gets totally ignored.

But there are other reasons that ABA would not help me.

For most people, the process of learning a skill seems to work like a set of stairs. They start out, say, on level 5, and then they climb to level 6, which takes them to level 7, and up and up and up until they can't climb anymore. But with each step that they are learning, they are climbing up, and they stay more or less at the top of whatever they learned.

I don't work like that. At all. There's basically two major ways that I differ from that way of learning.

First off, I don't start off at level 5. I start off at or near level 0. Except since everyone thinks of level 4 or 5 as "the most basic possible", they literally don't know that a level 0 exists.

Jim Sinclair describes it better than I can:

"Simple, basic skills such as recognizing people and things presuppose even simpler, more basic skills such as knowing how to attach meaning to visual stimuli. Understanding speech requires knowing how to process sounds--which first requires recognizing sounds as things that can be processed, and recognizing processing as a way to extract order from chaos. Producing speech (or producing any other kind of motor behavior) requires keeping track of all the body parts involved, and coordinating all their movements. Producing any behavior in response to any perception requires monitoring and coordinating all the inputs and outputs at once, and doing it fast enough to keep up with changing inputs that may call for changing outputs. Do you have to remember to plug in your eyes in order to make sense of what you're seeing? Do you have to find your legs before you can walk? Autistic children may be born not knowing how to eat. Are these normally skills that must be acquired through learning?"

The part that's really important to what I'm saying is the "even simpler, more basic skills". That's the "level 0" that nobody knows exists, because they could always do these things so it doesn't even cross their mind that other people have to learn them consciously.

So in order to do a task, I don't start out where most people do. I don't start out with my senses automatically processing information, my brain filtering that information and categorizing it for me, my body already ready for me to use it. Not at all. My sensory processing starts out as just raw, unfiltered sensory input. It has no connection to meaning. My mind's default state is sensory rather than conceptual. Meaning, all that I am "thinking" most of the time is... no ideas, no concepts, just sensory information that isn't even being processed in any standard way at all. My body's default state is just a whole lot of different pieces of the world outside of me, all input from it is processed the same as my view of the ceiling is processed (except I see colors, not a ceiling, and feel sensations, not a body). My motor skills default to no ability to find or move anything. Then I have to connect to my senses, attaching even "simple" concepts to what I sense is difficult for me, like separating objects from each other and identifying them, that's very hard and a conscious effort for me. Using concepts in my thoughts is also a conscious effort. Connecting to my body is a conscious effort. Etc.

Which brings me to the other issue. Not only do I start on level 0. I start on level 0 every single time. Every time. I don't climb a set of stairs that take me higher and higher each time I am learning something. I climb a cliff. The moment I let go, I fall back to level 0. The moment I deliberately stop whatever I'm doing, I go back to level 0. So every time I have to do a task, I have to make all those "basic" connections all over again as if it is the first time. No amount of teaching makes this go away. And this leaves the vast majority of daily living tasks completely impossible for me.

Which brings me to another Jim Sinclair quote that sums a lot of this up (including my inability to retain stuff consciously learned/taught):

"I taught myself to read at three, and I had to learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-one, and at twenty-six. The words that it took me twelve years to find have been lost again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way back to where I can be reasonably confident they'll be there when I need them. It wasn't enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes and ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I've lost track of them and had to find them over and over again."

I can't count the number of things that have gone like that for me. I learn them over, and over, and over, and they're gone again. Or even when I've actually learned them fairly well, I still have to start from the most basic level to get to them, every time.

The following is what I said in more detail about this on another thread recently, better to just cut/paste it than to write it all over again:

***

One, perception of the world. First off, my body is just perceived as one more part of the room or wherever else I am. It's not perceived as internal to me, nor separate from my surroundings. So any sensory information coming in from my body is pretty much not going to be easy to sift through to understand anything. Then there's the fact that any information I get from anywhere is pretty close to raw sensory data, a lot of it kind of jumbled up in certain ways. A lot of people here don't have this issue, so it's foreign to them, but it's like ... I don't even know the words at the moment. It's just almost entirely uninterpreted, and interpreting it expends energy. And in order to interpret it, you have to know that it's there to be interpreted, then hope that you have the mental energy to interpret it, and so on. And if I'm in any new place, and haven't had time to build at least a rudimentary map of my surroundings to place all the information in, then often it can just literally turn into a totally incomprehensible jumble. I mean it does that even in familiar places, but new places almost guarantee it. And that includes any data I get from my body.

Two, thinking. Or not thinking. Or something. When I'm not actively putting effort into it, what I call "thinking" is not what a lot of people would call thinking. It's like people have asked me what I was thinking, and I'll describe what was happening, and they'll say "No, what were you thinking about", and I'll describe what was happening, and it goes around in circles, because the bulk of my "thought" is simply the things that are happening around me as interpreted by my brain. But my brain doesn't automatically interpret as many things as a lot of people's brains automatically interpret. Like I was saying earlier about sensory input, often I get more the raw data, like visually I'll get the colors and stuff, like colors in specific shapes and formations, but I won't identify the type of object it is, nor will I necessarily know where one thing starts and another ends. I generally, unless putting huge amounts of effort into it, think and navigate the world almost entirely using more sensory than conceptual information. Conceptual stuff is for when I need to communicate with people or something, and it's not always possible even then. It fritzes out on me pretty regularly, or does other weird things to my brain. So when I'm going through the day, I'm not really able to use concepts to guide what I'm doing, as much as most people can. So I won't easily be able to use ideas about the world to order what to do when, or how to do things. (The things I can do, I do a lot by sensory stuff and motor memory and things like that all chained together in the right ways. As much as possible. So that I have to use as little conceptualization as possible. When I do use concepts, I can sometimes use them quite well, but it's again a "sprinting" situation where they are there and then gone, I can't use them over the long haul.)

Then there's doing the actual actions themselves. I have an autism-related movement disorder, usually compared to Parkinson's and catatonia as far as the general "family" of conditions. It's basically an amplification of the way autism already affected movement when I was growing up before it became a progressive thing (it's part of the reason I lost speech a second time, for instance, although another part was that the speech wasn't very connected to communication, so it's complex). Anyway. So this affects starting movements, stopping movements, switching movements, combining movements, etc. All of these things either can't happen at all, or take a large amount of effort. Because of this and other physical conditions I have, I normally use a motorized wheelchair to get around. It reduces the amount of movements I have to do in order to get places. The big thing is that if a movement is triggered by something (internal or external), I may be able to do it perfectly (typing is triggered by the presence of a keyboard, so except when exhausted I retain the ability to touch-type quite fast), but without that trigger it's either difficult and slow, or impossible. When such a thing is difficult... it's almost like putting in a large amount of effort to push through an invisible rubber wall, and after I've pushed through, the wall breaks apart and I can move normally for a bit before I hit another wall. (Also, all of these things affecting movement, also affect thinking, memory, and language, among other things.) If I can't get through that kind of "wall", all the effort in the world will just result in a meltdown or shutdown, nothing useful.

In practice, though, the world isn't tidily divided into sensory processing, thought, and movement. In the real world, you have to be constantly combining and switching back and forth between these things. (Keeping in mind combining and switching anything for me is hard.) More than that, there isn't just one task that has to be dealt with throughout the day, but many. And that adds unbelievable complications, including things about having to know what to pay attention to. Remember that I don't automatically interpret just about any sensory input so things like notes don't work because they just look like white things with scribbly lines on them and don't register as having an identity or meaning of their own. (And even if I left notes, I can't really follow most of the directions...). Most of my abilities are also sort of propped up on stilts. My "default" state is no or barely any concepts, not voluntarily moving, and not much if any interpretation of sensory information. I can "climb out of" that for limited amounts of time in limited ways, but the moment I stop concentrating, or the moment I do too much, everything goes crashing back to that default state. It's a mess. Also the more times I come crashing back in a really large, catastrophic sort of way (like from long-built-up overdoing things culminating in a massive spectacular shutdown), the harder it is permanently to get out of that default state. (So this has become harder throughout my life. When young, I had a stretch where I really gave it a run for its money, but I've been paying for that ever since. See the burnout thread.)

***

All of that likewise gets in the way of ABA being useful for me.

And I'm far from the only autistic person who has this problem. So just because an autistic person has significant problems doing things, doesn't automatically mean ABA is good for them.

No one has 40 hours of freedom. Well except for me.

I've seen the results of ABA therapy on autistic kids. These parents keep saying their kids have HFA but they are doing much better than I was doing when I was twice their age. I'm actually a bit jealous. Kids these days are having more of an opportunity to gain skills and have an easier life.
I don't even have severe autism but I can see how much parents are struggling. In fact I remember being that kid with barely any skills or knowledge about the world. I wouldn't wish that on any child. What's so wrong with parents trying to give their child every opportunity to succeed? You've got to face it, this is a social world we live in and good communication skills are necessary to make it out in this world. And that's something I haven't got. I can only communicate through articles and blog posts that I write, or I speak a mile a minute on Ritalin about God knows what.

I guess what I'm trying to say is don't knock ABA or intervention therapies unless you are that parent of a severely autistic child. And if you can raise that child without it then good for you.

There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I would say that a good education is Priority Number One for any autistic child (other than the basics that every child needs). Only, ABA is one of the worst ways to educate many autistics.

There are much better ways to teach an autistic child. You assume that ABA actually gives us opportunities; I say it doesn't.

Personally, I was never subjected to anything called "ABA", but what my parents did do to me has some of the same features. Systematically removing things I liked, or using star charts or small rewards to try to shape my behavior, was a very common strategy for them (when they weren't outright yelling at me, or in the case of my various stepfathers, hitting me.)

This didn't work because it frightened me. I felt trapped, like a cornered animal. When they used punishments or very desirable rewards, I felt like I was losing control over my own behavior, and that made me feel a sort of panic, a feeling like I was losing my identity. When I really, really wanted something, I felt like I had no choice but to do whatever thing would either prevent me from losing it or allow me to gain that thing; and those were some of the worst experiences I had as a child. I rebelled almost as a sort of self-preservation.

In some environments, I obeyed the rules near-perfectly, and these environments all had two things in common: They did not use, or almost never used, a reward/punishment system (except in the form of simply informing you when you had broken a rule or done a desirable thing); and they explained the reasons for the rules. When I was in that kind of environment, I gleefully went along with what was wanted because I could understand why and decide for myself whether to obey or not obey. I could see how the system worked and how I fit into it. And when the rules made sense, I obeyed them.

I don't know what caused my instinctive fear reaction when being forced to do something by means of threat, reward, or punishment. I think maybe I wasn't exactly sure about the self/other distinction nearly as early as other people figure it out, and once I knew the difference, it was more tenuous for me than for most people. I was just desperate to be who I was, rather than someone that other people wanted me to be.

There's no knowing whether this kind of thing would work for someone who is not a conceptual thinker like I am. I think in ideas and connections--each thing is connected to a thousand other concepts and partly defined by what it is connected to. So knowing "why" allows me to integrate a thing into my web of concepts by connecting it to other things. Just knowing "what" is almost psychologically threatening to me because it's a fact floating in the ether, unconnected. I need those connections to make sense of the world; otherwise, my brain just refuses to deal with the information and I get frustrated or even go into meltdown.

I am not a conceptual thinker and things like this work very badly on me.

I also find the idea that you have to be a parent of a profoundly impaired child in order to criticize a teaching method, both strange and wrong. Surely a person who has been taught by these methods and found them wanting (at best), has a total right to say whatever they want about them, even if it treads on some people's sensibilities. I've been through a lot of attempts to teach me life skills, some using ABA-type principles, some not, and none of them have worked. Surely that's of interest to anyone considering ABA for a person with a similar way of perceiving the world to mine. It's just not accurate to assume that ABA will give everyone a better chance at learning these life skills.

In my case, ABA-type techniques actually interfere with learning. They use the "up front in my head" learning that I am very bad at (and, more importantly, that never "takes" in the long term), and confound the "further back in my head" type learning that I excel at. I don't know the technical terms for these two types of learning, but I do know from talking to researchers that it's incredibly common for this discrepancy to exist in autistic people. So my experiences are quite relevant to any autistic person who shares these traits.

I'll never say that nobody benefits from ABA, but there are a whole lot of people who not only don't benefit, but who find that ABA actually impairs our ability to learn. This is highly relevant to anyone thinking about choosing ABA, for themselves or for their children.

And that's besides the issues of feeling controlled or put on the spot that can stress out autistic people so much that I know children who have literal PTSD from ABA. Not from aversives, but from things like being physically forced to sit in a chair. As I said, some of them have lost their toilet training, others have lost the ability to sit in a chair. Not all ABA involves physical force, but even the less forceful kinds involve being controlled to a degree, and many autistic people (including many young children with severe cognitive and self-care delays) find this so terrifying that they cannot possibly learn. Being aware that all the attention is on you can also be terrifying for many people.

None of this is to say that ABA is universally bad or anything, but there are serious problems for a lot of people and these are very real, not just made up in the imagination of people who want to trash ABA for no reason. There should be no restrictions on who is allowed to talk about such problems.