A great way to make a quick observation of how your child is developing is...
1. Do a quick research of a timeline and understand the developmental milestones that your child should be meeting. At what age should my child be babbling sounds and trying to mimic words? Engaging in joint attention and be interested in playing with other children? Crawling? Playing with toys? Etc.
2. Immediately set up those peer dates with anyone and everyone that you can possibly expose your child to. Seeing your child in the same environment as their peers will help you to see what is typical and what is not.
If you are in a place of thinking your child may need help but maybe you're afraid, confused, and unsure. I hear you. I may not have directly experienced what it’s felt like to receive the news that my child has an autism diagnosis and that they won’t develop like their neuro-typical peers, but what I do know is what can lie on the flip side of the timeline once your child begins receiving treatment. Every parent that I have worked with has experienced the same type of fear and uncertainty, but I have yet to have met a family that has EVER regretted their decision to get their child’s autism diagnosis treated.
ABA treatment: Why is it the most effective? We cover research proving the effectiveness of ABA treatment. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a therapy treatment based on the science of learning and behavior. What we do as behavior analysts is take a look at an individual’s specific behavior and determine if this is this a behavior that we need to increase or decrease? If a child is aggressive or engages in excessive tantrums, that’s a behavior we want to decrease. Eye contact, functional language, social skills are all behaviors we want to increase in our children. This is where we begin to evaluate the environments that the child is in and determine what the child’s main motivators are in order for us to create a controlled environment that will also us to most successfully teach a child various skill sets and decrease undesired behaviors.
ABA has been proven in over 20 different research studies that intensive and long-term therapy using ABA principles improves outcomes for many children diagnosed with autism. The Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore Maryland is an internationally recognized institution dedicated to improving the lives of children and young adults with pediatric developmental disabilities through patient care, special education, research, and professional training. I’ll be linking you to their website that discusses their stance on ABA treatment on our facebook page. But over the past 40 years, an extensive amount of research has documented the success of ABA-based treatment to reduce problem behavior and increase appropriate skills for individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID), autism, and related disorders.
Another study to note was published in September 2017. E Linstead, D R Dixon, E Hong, C O Burns, R French, M N Novack, and D Granpeesheh conducted a study to investigate how treatment intensity and duration impact learning across different treatment domains, including academic, adaptive, cognitive, executive function, language, motor, play, and social. The results indicated that treatment intensity and duration were both significant predictors of mastered learning objectives across all treatment domains .
So why ABA? Why and how is it effective in treating autism. In ABA, we study the child’s environments and determine how we can best increase and decrease behaviors. And this means everything and anything, and this can also include skills sets that involve speech and occupational therapy. It’s not to say that one treatment trumps over the others, but it’s to say that ABA can many times be the most effective in showing significant progress across areas that are more than just treating maladaptive behaviors. We focus on providing our children with foundational life skills, in adaptive, social, language, and cognitive skills, so that we can naturally see a decrease in their need to communicate with us through inappropriate behaviors such as aggression, self injurious behaviors, tantrums, and so much more.
Please note that there are tons of ABA service providers that are out there providing services and treatment to children that are not providing good effective ABA. This means that you NEED to do your research on the different ABA providers around you. If you go to our facebook page @whattheautism, I’ll be posting a list of questions you be asking potential providers prior to deciding on your ABA provider. Ask your ABA provider questions and see if your child can benefit under their care. If you disagree with their perspectives or treatment, ask them specific questions on the whys and hows of their treatment, and if you come across a great ABA provider, you’ll be amazed by what you can learn about the field of ABA.
Another advice I want to provide to those that will be or are working with a specific ABA provider is to understand the clinical reasoning behind the BCBA clinician’s recommendation. If your child is noticeably behind in social, language, play skills, and cognitive skills and your ABA provider is recommending anything less than 15-20 hours/week of ABA therapy, please speak to the clinician about their rationale of their recommendation. I’ll be covering the topic of clinical recommendations within the next couple episodes where I’ll be discussing what goes on in the mind’s of a BCBA clinician when we provide you with the clinical recommendation of the number of hours your child should be receiving ABA therapy; however, in the mean time, I’ll be posting some resources that may help you better understand the intensity of services your child should be receiving.
Regardless of what treatment your child is receiving, whether that is ABA, Occupational therapy, speech therapy, various treatments through medication, or even a combination of any of these, it’s important that you always question the information and fall back onto the research that’s been conducted for each of these treatments.
