i would like to hear from anyone whose family has experience of A.B.A...all i can find at the moment is horror stories....are there any positive responses to this.
i work in a unit for children with ASD and are currently experiencing an A.B.A shadow in our classroom observing a child....
thanx...dancer
The theory behind ABA is majorly flawed:
They train autistics to act NT 24/7 for life and then say "it's a miracle, they're cured".
Later on these same autistics suffer from PTSD, low self-esteem and depression.
The horror stories are normally about the more extreme aversives, but even if no aversives are used, ABA is often done by therapists who have the belief that autism is something negative to remove.
Is ABA like "operant conditioning"? Can somebody explain a bit more about it?
Essentially it is the same, it was a B.F. Skinner
Check out this link,
What is ABA?
Here is another
link.
Wiki entry for ABA ->
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_Behavior_Analysis
You will also sometimes see mention of AVB (Applied Verbal Behavior), it is a variation of ABA used to teach a child use of language.
There are several others little things that you will find in reference to ABA: DTT (Discrete Trial Teaching), NET (Natural Environment Teaching) and a few others, you can find them through Google.
I've read that ABA is sometimes used to try to get rid of autistic-looking stim behaviour. This is a very, very stupid thing to do. Stimming isn't a form of insanity, it is a way of preventing insanity, believe me! Stimming is a natural behaviour for many people (even for some people who appear to be very neurotypical and very sociable). It may be done as a response to stress or as an effective method of focusing the powers of concentration. I believe a lot of stim behaviour is simply called "a nervous habit" when done by people who don't appear to be autistic.
If you think it's a good idea to try to get rid of autistic stims, consider this. I'm sure that if you extinguish one kind of stim behaviour then another one will pop up to replace it. Some stims are plainly autistic-looking behaviours such as rocking or pacing or repetitive body movements. But some other stims just resemble disgusting habits that neurotypical people might have, such as nose-picking or compulsive masturbating. All of these stims can persist right through to adulthood. Which kind of stim would you prefer that someone keep for the rest of their life, an autistic-looking stim or a stim that does not look like autism but is even more disturbing and offensive? I'd rather have a granddad who rocks than a granddad who picks his nose whenever he gets nervous!
Yes, or one who keeps touching his crotch. I wonder if Michael Jackson has a bit of autism as he used to do that all the time in his film clips. I liked the singing but found it embarrassing to look at the clips of him.
On a more serious note, I think ABA is probably quite cruel and misguided. There are a lot more things in life worse than stimming. If I wanted to modify any behaviour, I'd rather tackle the screaming.
I think the Michael Jackson crotch-grabbing thing could either be a Tourette's tic or just some African-American pop culture thing. I once watched a concert on TV by the Jacksons and I thought the way they all danced was very sleazy. I've seen a list of famous people thought to have autistic traits that included Jackson. Tourette's is apparently often comorbid with AS, and Tourette's behaviours often have a particularly offensive or provocative quality. Touretters can have copropraxia which is "the acting out of explicitly sexual gestires or displays". Perhaps the Jackson brothers are imitating a Tourette's tic of Michael's. Art imitates neuropathology?
I didn't notice the other Jacksons dancing much, except when they were little and it seemed fairly tame then. Michael seemed to start doing it around 1980 or so and I suppose a bit meanly, I used to think "now look Michael, it isn't about to drop off".
It could also have been that his pants were too tight and he was feeling uncomfortable and trying to adjust the crotch so it wouldn't be so uncomfortable.
Madonna has some videos where she is grabbing "parts of anatomy". She is definitely not autistic. As for Michael Jackson's crotch grabbing, unless it is a live broadcast, it would be edited out. The grabbing is intentional and I might add, vulgar.
And it makes for very uncomfortable viewing, too.
The Jackson concert that I was referring to was only a few years ago, a farwell concert I think, so it was a lot different to the stuff they were doing in the 1970s. It isn't true that Jackson's crotch-grabbing is edited out from his clips or concerts. He's been doing it for years in clips and I've seen him do it heaps in video of concerts (repetitively, when he is excited, like a tic). He does it very quickly (like a tic) so it isn't always noticeable.
I still reckon Jackson could be a closet Touretter, and an aspie. He does the most frantic leg jiggling when he is angry/tense. This was plain to see in the infamous interview documentary when he was asked questions that he did not like. He's impulsive, we know that from the baby over the balcony incident. He's also seriously naive and truthful to a fault, demonstrated in his revealations in the interview that got him into so much trouble. He has a serious sleeping disorder, based on accounts of his private lifestyle. That's common in aspies. He is often reported to be in serious pain and on pain relief drugs. He often wears dark sunglasses, and has some guy shielding him from sunlight with an umbrella. Hypersensitive senses? He finds the company of children more comfortable than the company of adults, like a lot of aspies. Lewis Carroll was thought to have possibly been an aspie. Children were his closest friends, and like Jackson he has been accused of being a paedophile, based on no evidence at all. Jackson was a child star with considerable talent, and lots of aspies show unusual talent at an unusually young age.
I believe Jackson's unique dancing style, sharp, quick, aggressive, confronting, unusual and very emotional, is due to a touch of Tourettes. One of my own kids has a similar dancing style, and gets very mild episodes of Tourettes.
I don't believe Jackson was a child star and turned out strange because of an abusive father, and I don't believe the exact same popular myth about David Helfgott either. Both men are aspies, in my opinion, and they were precocious, very clever and strange as adults simply because they are both fundamentally unusual people of the same general type. It isn't unusual for aspies to have poor relationships with parents or come from dysfunctional families, in fact it seems to be the norm.
For a positive take on ABA read Overcoming Autism. ABA has changed a lot over the years and is much more humane, but a major problem with ABA is that it tends to ignore or brush off causes of behaviors. I wouldn't overlook ABA as a possible teaching technique, but I would warn against using nothing but ABA.
I'm certainly no expert on ABA, but I do believe it is based on behaviourist psychology, which has been rejected by many as a methodology to be used to treat or understand humans, because many people see it as an affront to human dignity, because it appears to ignore people's minds, intentions, beliefs and all the stuff that we think of as essentially human characteristics, in favour of treating people as though they are just a collection of behaviours. In general, this is how people tend to regard animals, as things that behave but don't feel or think. So it appears that when behaviourist psychology is applied to autistic people but not to neurotypical people, the autists are being treated like animals or regarded as animals, rather than humans. This I find offensive.