ABA: One Method for Teaching Children with Autism and other Severe Behavior Disorders
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is very commonly recommended for children with autism, severe mental retardation and other severe disabilities. In short, ABA identifies a specific behavior we want the child to learn, breaks it down into small steps and reinforces each step. For example, if we want the child to learn to put on her own clothes, we might start with giving her a stick of gum when she puts on her own shirt. After she has learned that, we might require that she put on her own pants and shirt before getting a stick of gum, etc.
As each individual behavior must be directly taught, e.g., put on your socks, put on your shirt, put on your pants are all taught individually, ABA can be very time consuming and take a lot of effort from caregivers. SO… the lesson is to choose the behavior to be learned carefully. Is it really important that the child learn to tie his own shoes or can you just have him wear slip-on shoes or shoes with Velcro and spend the time teaching him how to feed himself?
Still, Applied Behavior Analysis is not the simple answer to all the problems of a child with autism. Nothing is. Blastland describes their experiences with his son, Joe. His example demonstrates both the benefits and weaknesses of ABA.
"We spent several years teaching Joe intensively using a technique known as applied behavioral analysis, increasingly popular with the parents of children with autism, but relentless and exhausting, taking anything up to forty hours a week of one-to-one instruction. The child’s attention is directed wherever possible by an adult – no childish curiosity can be depended on for motivation – and there are strict rules about the management of behavior. The main educating principle of ABA is that everything to be learned is broken down into component parts and the lesson repeated innumerable times until, it is hoped, an idea sinks in. For example, we taught Joe prepositions – in, on, under, next to – by repeated demonstration with toy animals. The program did bring certain benefits and there are reports of dramatic improvement in some children, but our biggest problem was that he found great difficulty in carrying these detailed lessons into any wider, more general context. It was as if what he learned at the tabletop was a particular that applied nowhere else.”
And speaking of language, we turn next to another area that is also an area of significant disability for children with autism, language development.
Next: Language Development