ABA Therapy and Kid Crying

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HI

My SON is 4 years old , he is getting ABA therapy from last 7 months but every day he cries
a lot during ABA session especially when his mom does session with him. Is this normal or how we can overcome this issue.
Its very heart breaking for his mother when she is doin session with him.

Regards
Usman

As the expression goes the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So he needs to be pulled out since the therapy is traumatizing him. Many people on this board have been traumatized by ABA. The quality of ABA varies a lot. The original idea of ABA was to make the autistic person not autistic. A lot of that idea is still around even though it is couched in positive or politically correct terminology. Problem is ABA is the considered the "gold standard" of autism treatments and there are very little amount of alternative treatments offered.

As an autistic adult and ABA therapist, I think 4 years old is too young for anything resembling a formal, sit-down type ABA session. At four years old, kids learn mostly through play. Any therapy should be designed to fit most naturally with the receiving person's needs. Little kids need play to learn. So get down on his level and play with him/next to him. For verbal skills, narrate everything that he does and you do. Provide explanations for why stuff is done, for example, if he always picks up a certain toy, you say something like "People pick things they like. You pick up that toy a lot. Do you like that toy?" He may respond or he may not - doesn't matter. The point is interacting with him so he can learn but without forcing a response. In my experience, kids (autistic or other) understand more than they're given credit for. Not responding doesn't equal not learning/understanding. How well did you learn when you were forced to respond at four years old?
You also have to be able to recognize when he's done and needs time to be alone and do his own thing, playing or stimming, whatever. Then give him space (don't leave him unsupervised obviously but get up and do what you need to do around him or want to do like cook, clean, read a book, etc...)
Pushing him past his "enough is enough" point is a recipe for disaster and then nobody ends up happy.

It could be that he may need a new therapist. When I work with children, (especially young children) I make sure that I play with them a great deal before any serious demands are put on them. Since he is so young, the playing needs to continue throughout the session. He should know that after a little bit of work he will get a little bit of play. There may need to be an increase of reinforcements so that it feels more like the child is just getting attention and not necessarily having to do a lot of work. I am not sure the entire situation of what you are going through since I can't see a session, but maybe switching therapists may help.

Also, maybe leaving will help too. Sometimes when the parent sticks around the child thinks you will get him out of there, kind of like the first day of school). If they realize that they are not going to be rescued then this may also stop this behavior.

I've heard nothing but horror stories about ABA. If a child was blind, you wouldn't force them to start seeing and punish them when they couldn't, but that's what ABA does to autistic children when they act autistic.

The OP made her one and only wrong planet post in 2015.

That's too bad.