Category Archives: ABA – Applied Behavioral Analysis

Managing Tantrums and Difficult Behaviors in Autism – When Consistency Doesn't Work…

Posted on by
Reply

For the podcast on this topic: part 1 and part 2

 

 

When dealing with tantrums and difficult behaviors in autism spectrum disorders, using behavioral approaches alone can sometimes fail. What is the missing piece to managing these behaviors that a behavioral approach alone may not address?

 

 

To start, we need to look at the reasons for behavior. According to behavioral approaches, most of the behavior we see results from one of three reasons: a request, seeking attention, or a sensory reason. Let’s look deeper at these three reasons for behavior and the ways we currently handle them.

 

 

 

Handling a request is fairly straightforward. To put it very simply, a request is usually something externally controlled by both reinforcing appropriate requests and not reinforcing inappropriate ones, such as a tantrum.

 

 

 

For negative attention-seeking behaviors, we can eliminate the behavior by not giving the negative behavior attention and give attention for desired behavior – very straightforward, and again, usually externally controlled. 

 

 

 

The sensory reasons arise from both the external and internal events that a child experiences through the five senses, and may or may not be externally controlled. 

 

 

 

In all of these situations, our internal responses – our feelings and thoughts about events fire us into action. In stressful situations, the resulting “knee jerk reactions, are often difficult to manage with a purely behavioral approach for a few reasons:

 

 

 

1. Thoughts and feelings are often lightning-fast, internally-controlled events, therefore difficult to manage through external behavioral modifications.

 

 

 

2. Thoughts and feelings can’t be measured, and as a result, behavioral approaches simply don’t address them. It doesn’t mean that these things don’t exist or aren’t important. It just means that they’re left out of the equation.  

 

 

 

3. Behavioral approaches address the cause and consequence of  behaviors – the beginning and the end. But internal responses (ie thoughts and feelings) happen in the moments between the cause and the consequence. By not dealing with thoughts, feelings and solutions at these moments, we leave a child to figure out solutions on his or her own.

 

 

 

4. Children on the autism spectrum have a limited ability to adapt to new or changing situations, solve problems, compare past to present, or see possibilities. Because of this, if a child never learns how to think through a challenging situation during the emotional moments, when faced with it again, the same behavior will probably repeat itself, no matter what the consequence, or how many times they’ve been through it before.

 

 

 

This situation calls for tools to deal with overwhelming thoughts, feelings and strategies in the moment before the tantrum, not just consequences after.

 

 

 

In the book The Explosive Child , Ross Greene talks about this situation. This book applies to any disorders that have limitations in problem solving and executive thought, including all PDD’s, including Asperger’s Syndrome, PDD-NOS, and all autism spectrum disorders, ADD, ADHD, and various other developmental disabilities.

 

 

In the book, first we pick our battles carefully, and then talk through our thought process out loud. This way our children can hear us think through situations before tantrums. This also creates a memory of how they triumphed in the situation without resorting to negative behaviors.

 

 

 

Progress is made in small increments, but as time goes on, tantrums should decrease, and you can even start to ask your child to contribute ideas about solving problems during those emotional moments. In doing this, you help your child learn how to solve problems and become confident about handling new, changing, or challenging situations. You’ll combine the best of all worlds, to the benefit of your child.

 

- Sandra Sinclair, www.autismvoice.com

 


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

What is ABA? – Applied Behavioral Analysis

Posted on by
Reply

ABA, or Applied Behavioral Analysis is the oldest, most established method of intervention for children on the autism spectrum.

ABA embraces the idea that we do everything in life to either get a positive outcome, or to avoid a negative outcome, and that all human behavior can be traced back to this root.

Good behavior analysis involves knowing what a child perceives as positive and negative to gradually shape a child's behavior and learning. A good ABA therapist can identify what works and what doesn't, and can flow with moment-to-moment changes in a child.

In ABA, skills are chunked down into smaller tasks, with each task taught individually. Then the tasks are tied together again, creating the larger skill. During a typical ABA session, a child can work on any number of different tasks and skills, from just a few to many, depending on the child's present level, abilities, and tolerance.

Most teaching is done one-to-one, in discrete trial form. Each discrete trial means one try at a task, and each task is repetitively taught a number of times. So if you teach a task say, 10 times, then you've done 10 discrete trials. Results are marked and scored to determine if a child has learned the task or not. Children are reinforced during trials for correct responses, thus motivating them to respond correctly.

Of course there's way more detail to this than what I'm writing here, but that's the basic idea. You can use ABA principles in everyday life too, but most of us think of discrete trials when we talk about traditional ABA.

ABA can be a good method for teaching concrete and procedural skills, such as focus on task, understanding directions, answering questions, some early language skills, self-help, behavioral problems, and academics. Many unfocused early learners start learning with ABA and can move on to other teaching methods as their focus and skills improve. When it's done with a skilled and fun teacher, ABA can serve children well in these areas, particularly early learners. 

Of course, no single intervention can do everything. The areas that persons with autism continue to struggle with, such as unscripted social skills, back-and-forth conversational skill, and flexibility are not addressed by ABA. These skills are much better served by RDI, or Relationship Development Intervention.

As parents, we're dealing with the whole child, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. Each intervention touches on different areas, and we select our interventions based on the needs of the individual child. In the hands of a great teacher, ABA offers some wonderful learning experiences for many children, specific to its strengths and limitations as a teaching method. – Sandra Sinclair, Autismvoice.com

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.