ABA Monopoly leaves parents with bad choices

Post Reply New Topic

Before you read this post please know this post will leave many of you quite upset.

If you read my posts you know I do not like Applied Behavioral Analysis based therapies. I do not like any therapy that forces kids to do something 25 to 40 hours per week. I think even the positive rewards based "good ABA" can lead to mental health problems and people too eager to please. This has been argued about over and over and argued better than I ever could. This thread is about the title and thus why it is bad to browbeat ABA parents.

I am going to summarize how we got here. In the mid 60's Ivor Lovass brought ABA into the fore. Because of the aversives of slapping and giving kids electric shocks we rightly look back in horror. At the time he argued that his was actually the humane treatment. While it in no way was humane, a case could be made it was less evil than the standard "treatments" of the "refrigerator mother" era of lifetime institutionalization which also involved shocking, sedating, and shackling of "mental cripples" who "acted up". The electric shocks have been controversial from the get go but corporal punishment was still a common parental disciplinary technique. Bernard Rimland was the guy who helped break up the refrigerator mother consensus and help found the Autism Society the first American parental Autism Advocacy and first overall American Autism Advocacy organization. He was a supporter of Lovass's work. This is the roots of the "warrior mother" ABA support. Societal views on parenting have been very different than it was in the 1960's for awhile, now we are in the helicopter parenting, my kid is a "snowflake" era. ABA or at least the public face of ABA had to change with the times to emphasize politically correct positivity.

10 or 15 years ago parents mostly had to pay out of pocket for Autism therapies. ABA because in part it involves so many hours to "work" was and is prohibitively expensive. Due to heavy Autism Speaks lobbying insurance companies are now mandated to pay for Autism therapies in 48 of the 50 states and that is mostly ABA for the core Autism traits also because of Autism Speaks lobbying.

Flame wars have broken out between neurodiversity movement supporting adults and ABA supporting parents. Opponents often criticize "warrior" parents for torturing their kids for their own egos and to enforce conformity. They tell them that what they are seeing when the see the desired results are kids doing what the therapists want them to do just to get the therapists to leave them alone. They are often not wrong and they are often basing it on the own ABA experiences. John Donvan and Carol Zucker in their book " In a Different Key: The Story of Autism" note that ND shaming of parents mirrors the parental shaming of the "Refrigerator Mother" era psychiatrists. ND supporters not only often get nowhere the opposite occurs. Most parents gut reaction to an outsider criticizing their parenting is to get very defensive. They will say I am with my kid 24/7 for years who the f**k are you to criticize and you are too high functioning to understand my kid with "real autism" anyway. The parents like the ABA critics are not completely wrong. They are not completely right either. In life sometimes we do get too close to a situation and outsider perspective is often helpful. While "Aspies" have significant differences with LFA we are closer in many respects than most neurotypicals because we have the same core traits.

While Lovass was wrong and is causing lasting and continuing damage in the context of the times it was not so black and white. Some parents are controlling curabees who hate their kids or what they think are the Autism doppelganger that has captured their nice cute kid. While a decision IMHO to give a child ABA will cause damage, in the context of 2017 and the ABA monopoly that decision is not so black and white.

The ABA monopoly has stifled research and availability of other therapies. Researchers need money and often want prestige. To get these things it is a lot easier when they go with the mainstream. ABA supporters say ABA is the only "evidence-based" therapy that has been proven to work. Assuming it really is working the monopoly leaves less opportunity to prove that less expensive and time-consuming therapies work. ABA supporters often say the bad therapies are quacks pretending to be real ABA. While they are correct they caused this situation. Quacks are going to "follow the money" and the money lies with "gold standard" ABA.

The above means today's stressed super busy parents will often not get a message that will conflict with the consensus. Even if they are suspicious of ABA where do they go? Often it means having to pay out of pocket and paying to move far away. Moving far away means quitting their jobs, being far away families and friends. If that is stressful for parents what damage will that do to a very change averse autistic kid? After all that the bad thing is there is a decent chance they will end up giving their kid therapy from a money grubbing quack. Most parents can not afford "alternative" therapies so that leaves them with the choice of giving into the ABA consensus or homeschooling and autism therapy by parental instinct. So as much as it kills me to say it, in many cases maybe ABA is the right choice because it causes the least damage.