http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/2007514/ap_on...psychiatry
I hear the quack/overreactor parade getting louder....
Seriously, even aside from the "autism etc. = horrible mental illnesses" garbage, how many kids are going to be misdiagnosed as
infants
because their doctors don't realize there's a lot of variation in developmental rate and temperament, even among NTs?
And the genocide progresses...
Aw, hell -
Forget the direct links which refuse to cooperate. Just go to
http://news.yahoo.com/ and scroll down a little to "Most Popular" and you'll see it.
I wouldn't keep trying to reference it if it wasn't so disturbing....
(and this is under "Most Popular"? *shudder*)
"Jacob's sessions involve lots of repetition, and rewards, including
praise and treats, for a job well done."
It's like training a dog....
How do they know that he's learning
why he should do an action, rather than just "if i do this, i get this"?
"Jacob's sessions involve lots of repetition, and rewards, including
praise and treats, for a job well done."
It's like training a dog....
How do they know that he's learning
why he should do an action, rather than just "if i do this, i get this"?
I have yet to hear a downside with behavior training programs that does not include punishment, except from what it doesn't do. I want more discussion at the "Fear the ABA" thread in the parents' forum to get more views about it. AFF is apparently against this kind of ABA, but I'm rather skeptic to dismiss this kind of ABA simply because it is "immoral".
Yet another article worded to imply that without treatment, autistics will not progress, can't hold jobs, won't have families, don't feel affection, ect.
"Jacob's sessions involve lots of repetition, and rewards, including praise and treats, for a job well done."
It's like training a dog....
Or school.
Or a job.
from the article: "The report emphasized the plasticity of babies' brains. It also explained how interacting with babies can change their brain wiring."
Maybe some people are just bad parents. -- When a child or baby does not look at you or seem to respond to a voice --it does not mean that the child should be ignored. Babies need to be talked to and played with. Some parents do not know this. They will buy "educational toys" for their children, put them on elaborate schedules, take them to classes but they don't talk to their babies one-on-one very often. They just say that the baby would not understand what they are saying.
Any child -- autistic or not -- benefits from good parenting skills.
Well, many people don't seem to understand, and this includes the popular media, that "People with Asperger’s may have behaviors that are odd and unusual, but it is due only because of their neurological function and is not the result of rudeness, bad behavior and not the result of improper parenting.
So, I don't see how you can change a baby's wiring by the way you treat it. I can see how interaction can stimulate the growth of certain neurons and links, but you cannot change the overall "design" because it is pervasive.
This is probably just another "bunk" theory or quackery, and given that it is on Yahoo news I don't think you should place too much importance on it, other than to warn others to beware of any claims about a "cure" or "prevention" that they found. Typically companies, especially the pharmaceutical ones, will go out of their way in an effort to sell their drugs (they are already successful with ADD and ADHD).
BTW, ABA is a very effective treatment. I don't see how it is immoral in any way. The goal is not to make a person "normal' but to help them with obsessive compulsive behaviors and some social skills.
In case people aren't finding the article:
Doctors look for early autism signs
By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Mon May 14, 2:14 PM ET
Within days of their birth, healthy babies will look you in the eye. By 4 months, they will delight in others. And by 9 months, they will exchange smiles.
Jacob Day did none of those things.
"We used to say it was like it burned his eyes to look at you," said his mother, Tamie Day of Antelope, Calif. "It was like a physically painful thing for him. It wasn't just that he wasn't looking at us; he was purposefully looking away."
Day, who has a psychology degree, suspected her son might have autism. She enrolled him in a study, published in April, that found that babies like Jacob are indeed at high risk for autism if they do not respond to their names by 12 months of age.
At 18 months, he was formally diagnosed with autism, about a year earlier than usual. Before he turned 2, Jacob began daily intensive behavior treatment designed to help him lead a more normal life.
He is part of a growing field in psychiatry called infant mental health. Doctors and scientists are increasingly looking for early signs in babies of autism, attention deficit disorder and other mental problems that just a generation ago, scarcely anyone thought could appear in children so young.
Some scientists even believe that intensive treatment in some susceptible babies can actually prevent autism, attention deficit disorder and other problems.
An influential Institute of Medicine report in 2000 helped energize this idea. The report emphasized the plasticity of babies' brains. It also explained how interacting with babies can change their brain wiring.
"We used to say `nature versus nurture,' but now people really think it's 'nature through nurture,'" said the University of Chicago's Dr. Lawrence Gray.
Tamie Day noticed the first ominous clue the night she and her husband, Chris, brought Jacob home after his birth.
"We walked in the door and he wouldn't stop looking at our ceiling fan," she said. "The next day, that's all he would look at."
Babies typically begin making eye contact soon after birth, and "understand at a basic, perhaps hardwired level, that eyes are special — they look more at eyes than at other parts of the face," said Sally Ozonoff, an autism specialist at the University of California at Davis' MIND Institute.
When his mother expressed her autism concerns at Jacob's 6-month checkup, the doctor said "we were being a little overzealous," Day said.
Still, there was no pointing, no clapping, no shared smiles, and when Jacob would laugh, it seemed like his own private joke. So his parents sought out UC-Davis specialists, who gave them the heartbreaking diagnosis.
Jacob, now 3 1/2, has made meaningful progress thanks to treatment, his mother said, including a breakthrough moment at age 2. It still makes her cry to recall it.
She was giving Jacob a bath, playing the "itsy bitsy spider" finger game, when he looked up and really gazed into her eyes. "He was smiling up at me and I realized that was the first time he had done that," she said. "He has gorgeous blue eyes, and I was like, `My God, your eyes are so beautiful.'"
Interest in infant mental health has been boosted by awareness of the prevalence of attention deficit disorders and autism, which government officials said in February affects 1 in 150 U.S. children and may be more common than previously thought.
In April, researchers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders presented a report emphasizing earlier diagnosis and treatment.
The report said that about 17 percent of U.S. children have a developmental disability such as autism, mental retardation and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, but that fewer than half are diagnosed before starting school.
The authors say warning signs include failure to:
_focus on sights and sounds by 2 months.
_initiate joyful behavior with parents by 4 months.
_exchange smiles and sounds with parents by 8 to 9 months.
_take a parent's hand to find a toy and point to objects by 12 to 16 months.
Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that pediatricians routinely evaluate children for developmental problems such as autism starting in infancy, and begin testing at age 9 months.
"Waiting until a young child misses a major milestone such as walking or talking may result in late rather than early recognition ... depriving the child and family of the benefits of early identification and intervention," the academy said.
Some critics worry that the trend will trigger needless diagnoses in children with normal variations in behavior.
Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, a London physician, said that while early recognition and treatment of true disorders are important, "the extension of these categories to include 20 to 30 percent of all children reflects a social trend of pathologizing and medicalizing children's lives, which seems to reflect difficulties of parents and teachers in dealing with familiar problems of childhood development."
Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a psychiatry professor at George Washington University who co-authored the CDC-Interdisciplinary group report, said the idea is not to slap a label on babies and give them medication. Greenspan said the goal is to raise awareness about early warning signs and to encourage treatment to increase the chances that children can develop normally.
Research on identifying early clues and testing treatments is booming. For example:
_Dr. Fred Volkmar at Yale University is studying potential ways to diagnose autism in the first months of life, including whether looking at objects rather than people is a sign. "I think we're on the verge of being able to do a much better job" of diagnosing autism in infancy, Volkmar said.
_Researcher Stephen Porges at the University of Illinois at Chicago is starting a five-year study of whether excessive crying past 6 months of age might be an early sign of autism, attention deficit or other behavior problems.
_Greenspan is launching a multimillion-dollar study involving parents and babies at risk for autism or attention deficit disorder. One group will receive intensive behavior training, the other will not; both will be compared through age 5.
While rigorous scientific evidence is needed to prove that early intervention succeeds, Greenspan said his work with patients has shown promise.
Jacob didn't say his first word, "more," until he was in treatment and almost 2 — about a year later than normal. He didn't say "mama" until he was 3.
He gets 33 hours of weekly home treatment with trained college students, including six hours most days. The tab is $70,000 yearly, paid for by California, one of the few states that pay, through state and federal funds, for early intensive autism treatment.
Jacob's sessions involve lots of repetition, and rewards, including praise and treats, for a job well done. For example, to improve eye contact, teachers bounce him on a favorite giant ball, then stop. If he turns to look at them, he gets praise, maybe a piece of candy, and more bouncing.
To teach language, they use activities like swinging that get him excited enough to make sounds, then offer rewards for sounds like vowels or consonants rather than humming. Then they name objects, encourage mimicking, and offer more rewards.
Now he knows the alphabet, understands commands like "Bring me the cow and the horse toy," and can say simple sentences like "I want juice," his mother said.
"We definitely hope to mainstream him. We hope that he will have a job and have a life where he can take care of himself and be happy," Day said. "Everyone has given us reason to believe that's not an outlandish expectation."
___
i saw that the mother said the child was looking at the fan when he was just a few days old. i hope this will quiet the anti-vax saying that it's caused by vaccines. it's genetic.
but still, callling autism a problem and putting negative connations to it is a bad thing. it will just make people think that we're incomplete, etc and say prevention is a good thing, when it's not. but saying that if a child doesn't talk or walk at exactly a certian point doesn't mean they won't be able to do it. children develop diffrently. i wasn't talking at age one, but now i can pretty much talk very well (to a point where you can almost not see any speech problems, although i do have minor prounciaton issues still). development is fluid, not rigid, but if a child is way behind, you should check on it to make sure it's not serious (like an actual disease).
and if you start diagonising kids too early, we could be having false postivies like what we're seeing today with too many children diagoised with add when they really aren't. those kids are messed up for years with those drugs, and some of them have their lives destroyed with those drugs, when they really didn't have to have the drugs. just look up drugging of children and you may see a two hour long movie on the subject. in 10 years, it could be the aba or cheleation of children that don't really need it.
Whatever happened to enjoying your baby and letting it develop at its own pace?
BTW, if the infant/toddler checklist had been applied when I was a baby, I seriously doubt if the autism would have been picked up. Mum said I smiled and looked people in the eye and would show her things.
It only seemed to be later on that the autistic symptoms really started to take hold. It would not surprise me if others with borderline autism or very high functioning autism would have not been diagnosed easily because their symptoms could be quite subtle.
I have yet to hear a downside with behavior training programs that does not include punishment, except from what it doesn't do. I want more discussion at the "Fear the ABA" thread in the parents' forum to get more views about it. AFF is apparently against this kind of ABA, but I'm rather skeptic to dismiss this kind of ABA simply because it is "immoral".
More like "ineffective". If you don't teach a child why he's doing something--other than to get a treat--then he won't understand the purpose of that behavior. Those treats are only external motivation; and if external motivation isn't eventually replaced by internal motivation--such as a child's own sense of accomplishment--then the behavior gets extinguished as soon as you're no longer rewarding it.
An NT child could easily move from external to internal motivation. But that NT child can do that because he knows WHY... He makes eye contact because he gains information from it; he shakes hands because he likes the physical contact; he asks for something rather than screaming because he understands that his mother doesn't know what he wants if he just screams. An autistic child isn't socially motivated like that; and until he can learn WHY... external motivation will be temporary.
All you create with ABA--even punishment-less ABA--is a child who performs meaningless tricks in exchange for treats. That knowledge is totally useless to him because he doesn't understand that it has any other purpose than getting him treats.
Better to establish communication before trying to regulate behavior... better to find a way for the autistic child to express himself, and for the people around him to understand him. Then the WHY can be taught, and the behavior becomes a tool the child can use for its actual purpose, rather than just a way of getting a treat.
We use behaviorist strategies on our children every day, when we reward them for doing things we want them to do. That's normal parental discipline; and that's OK to use on any child, autistic or not. But it won't specifically help an autistic child cope with his autism; because it's the very nature of autism that blocks him from being motivated to do the things ABA is supposed to teach him. ABA is only a band-aid... it produces a robotic imitation of "normal behavior", devoid of any understanding, rather than a real connection between the autistic and the society around him.
I'm definitely against ABA, but I do wonder about the idea that the expression of autism could be modified or altered by the degree of interaction between that parent/mother and an "at risk" baby. I'd never advocate going back to the days of the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, and I'm also very sceptical about the present-day zealots who tell parents that they can mould every aspect of their baby's intellectual and emotional development by doing stuff to their baby, genes are clearly very important, but I also can't believe that the apparent differences between mothering and parenting styles does not have a lasting effect in the baby.
My husband and I pretty much discovered the "attachment parenting" style of parenting ourselves, as a natural growth from our committment to breastfeeding. We don't follow the extreme forms of this parenting style. We feel that this style of parenting, which is very different from the way most babies are treated in most Western countries, is better for the baby's emotional, physical and psychological well-being.
What is the result of our efforts? So far our kids have many definite autistic and associated neurological traits, such as having "special interests", subtle stimming behaviour, short tempers, fairly inflexible attitudes, sensory hypersensitivity, subclinical Tourettes episodes, "hyperactivity", very uneven cognitive skills profiles (ranging from average to exceptional skills), and synaesthesia. But interestingly, our kids do have many friends, and their social lives are important to them, and they have not been bullied or socially excluded to a moderate or severe degree. Our kids have been labelled as intellectually gifted, but no one else in the family has been included in any school gifted programme, despite high IQs. It appears that with every generation in one side of our family, the social side of autism keeps decreasing, while the hard-wired neurological manifestations remain. I believe that better conditions for raising children, and more sensitive, involved and happy parenting resulting from those improved conditions, may be the reason why our kids are much more socially and emotionally connected than some of their ancestors. I'm not 100% percent sure that this is a clear improvement, though. In many ways our kids seem inferior to their elders, but time will tell.