ABA vs. Neurodiversity

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I learned communication not through ABA, but through being taught language explicitly when I was eight years old.
Some parents have taught their children language explicitly at similar or later ages.
Teaching explicitly means teaching reading and writing or typing and not depending on autistic children to develop language through social interaction or ABA methods.
I was classic autistic as a child and had no ABA, but my parents and teachers did teach me skills for future independence from a young age, so I did become independent and high-functioning as an adult.

Did your parents teach you first to communicate with single words and reward you for that then two word phrases and reward and so on until you could speak full sentences without prompting? That's essentially ABA - breaking tasks down into easier components and rewarding each consecutive step as it happens.

No, it was not like that.
There were no tangible reward for learning things.
I learned to read words on my own when I was two, I could match written words with pictures of the things the words stood for.
But I did not speak or understand the idea of what speaking was for until teachers taught me language.
I learned other skills for independent living through doing them early, such as learning to wash dishes when I was 8 or 9, there was no reward for that either, my parents taught me that I should help to clean up after dinner.
Going out on my own by age 18 was easy, because I knew how to do independent life tasks, and my parents had also pushed me to communicate for myself often, so I was prepared in that area too.

Rewards don't have to be tangible. Verbal praise is a reward. Your parents or teachers being happy with you is a reward. Especially in younger ages, there are kids whose learning is motivated primarily by pleasing their parents/teachers. That's why kids look to them when they've done something they think is right - to get confirmation from their parents or teachers.

ABA is such a broad concept that it's hard to have a particular opinion about it. I read one description of ABA that just sounded like normal healthy parenting (the kind that modern knowledgeable respectful parents do assuming they haven't read too many Alfie Kohn books), almost exactly how I think people should raise any child regardless of neurotype or special needs. Besides that, everything in the article is depressingly true.

The divide is real. I often find myself disagreeing with both sides. The curebies want to make us "normal," which might be nice if they didn't have such a sick and twisted definition of "normal." They don't care if you have horrible life-ruining sensory issues, as long as you don't stim. They don't care if you can live independently as an adult, as long as you can obey your parents when you're a kid and get good grades. The neurodiversity camp is definitely my preference of the two, but they act like we're not disabled at all and everything would be swell if only everyone else would stop being a jerk. I've got a lot of problems typical of autistic people such as executive dysfunction, hypersensitivity, inertia, and so on, and gosh dangit, I want those things cured.

By analogy, it's like there are a bunch of sick cats, and some veterinarians are trying to cure them, but their basis for comparison is a bunch of healthy dogs. So they feel like step one is to turn the cats into dogs. Cat sympathizers are understandably outraged and want the veterinarians to leave the cats alone, but they also want the cats to stay sick. Why is there no call for the sick cats to be turned into healthy cats?!

Maybe I feel like this middle ground is possible and desirable because I live in a place where BAP traits are pretty common. I see plenty of people who have the good or neutral autism traits without having any kind of ASD. People are generally nice to me, even when they think I'm weird, but I have problems caused by my own traits.

As an autistic child, I did not give any indication of understanding verbal praise or pleasing people.
Parents and teachers giving verbal praise is still not the same as sending a child to do repetitive trials of activities for some food reward with a therapist for many hours per week.
Some parents I know rejected ABA because it did not teach their non-verbal, classic autistic children communication or other skills in years of practice, and made their act out from having to repeat things many times.
Once they got away from ABA, they were able to teach reading and writing at home, and their children did not act out anymore.

I agree. There are some things that are unpleasant like sensory overload, but at the same time there are things that are fundamentally the way I am.

I looked up operant conditioning and this does seem to be the wrong way to go about things. Interactions should be more about relating to each other rather than manipulating each other. More of an aim at understanding the other's condition rather than control.

I hope that happens. I think there is still a lot of pressure and fear surrounding a child with autism. But perhaps those things will dissipate when more becomes widely known.

From parents of classic autistic children, I learned that the course of ABA usually goes like this:
*Child is diagnosed with autism at 2-3 years old, professionals recommend 40 hours per week of therapy, mostly ABA
*Parents listen to therapists and place child in recommended therapies
*Child does therapies for several years, they may become toilet trained (or not), but they don't learn to speak or communicate alternatively from ABA or speech therapy, develop minimally in self-help and social areas, don't develop generalizable skills even if they increase some numbers in specific ABA activity repeated tens of thousands of times, act out a lot
*Around age 8, therapists tell the parents that the child has reached a plateau and is too ret*d to learn anything, this is given as reason why child did not develop much since toddler years
*When child started school around age 5, they were placed in special ed aka babysitting and didn't learn anything academic
*Around age 10, therapists recommend the child be institutionalized for the rest of their life

People are irrationally scared of and angered by difference. Unfortunately, it is an aspect of human nature (although I think of it as an atavistic trait that is best left in the past because we've outgrown it and our species is too varied to make it practical anymore). As is it, we are stuck with it because it still effects most of us to some extent.

(Emphasis added by me)

I agree; I think educating the general public about autism is the key to getting rid of harmful "treatments" for autism like ABA can be when misapplied, as I think it all-too-commonly is. It's the societal shift of people generally accepting the idea that neurodiversity can be an asset to a community and that variation and difference presents opportunities when we are willing to embrace new perspectives rather than trying to produce a society of clone-like automatons; that's what needs to happen.

I think we are seeing changes to this behaviour. Slowly, but in a positive direction.

Much like the average NT's tendency to blindly follow social hierarchies and compete for their place in the pecking order.

From my experience as an ABA therapist for a profoundly autistic child (ages 10-12)
Age 10
*Child had already been diagnosed
*Child in self-contained autism class at school
*Able to say a few single word answers "Yes", "Want", "Please".
*Counts to 10
*Minimal grasp of pronouns
By 11
*Child can say phrases to describe location and simple sentences for wants and physical descriptions i.e. "In the box", "I want chocolate please." "He [Elmo toy] is red."
*Child writes alphabet and name
*Child counts to 20+
*Proficient with basic pronouns
*Learning possessive pronouns
By 12
*Child can say complete and compound sentences
*Child can understand and use reasoning
*Proficient with basic and possessive pronouns
*Child can add and subtract with visual representations (adding and removing bears)
*Child can use sequential statements "I give you bear then you give me chocolate chip."
*Begins understanding the concept of symbolic money (colorful plastic bears - red = 1 chocolate chip, blue = 2, green = 3, etc...)
*Will choose color with higher worth when asked between two choices, "Do you want to give me the red bear or the blue bear?" and as an open question "Which bear do you want to give me?" Changing the color values did not impede her ability to choose the higher value color.
*Child could answer how many chocolate chips she would get for each color and explain why "2 chips." Why? "Because I gave you blue bear."
*Child begins learning and using past, present, and future tenses appropriately.
*Able to answer questions about things that happened in the past "Where did you go for dinner yesterday?"
*Child begins learning time descriptions - days, months. Can answer "What day is today?" "What day was yesterday?" etc...

I worked with her for 1-2 hours at a time twice a week. I agree 40 hours of any therapy for a child is ridiculous. But ABA can be extremely helpful when it is done appropriately and not excessively. I never discouraged her stimming unless it was obvious that it was distracting her (very rarely) or it was destructive. I gave alternatives for destructive stims such as table tapping/keeping beats instead of hitting the table as hard as she could. She responded well with the alternatives.

While educating the public is important, the public being more knowledgeable about autism doesn't help an autistic person communicate. We need to approach this from both angles, teaching autistic people communication and independence skills as well as teaching the general public about autism.

ABA is simplistic and false in its underlying premise that autism can be reduced to a set of behaviours, which can be eradicated and replaced with another set of behaviours. In that schema, neurology is of no consequence, neurodiversity is just a word to them. This is the reductionist mindset of all behaviourists - mind doesn't matter and is of no consequence to the hardline behaviourists. Their work has a sordid history from the beginning. You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig, and ABA is the most recent makeup on the same old mind-challenged pig. It seems to attract young females in their 20s who promote themselves as "professional behaviour technicians" all over the net, including WP. I recall a recent one who was pushing the line that bullying had good outcomes for autistic children. There is a smug glibness to those self promoters whose self-interest is anything but consistent with the practice of a profession in a professional manner. As I have written before, I had the misfortune to see Lovaas in action, tormenting and physically assaulting an autistic boy, and the forefathers of behaviourism in the early 20th century like Watson also tormented children to demonstrate power over helpless human infant victims, by torturing them with sudden very loud noises. Why do people foolishly believe that this was some value-free scientific breakthrough? Beats me. We all know you can coerce others to do things by making their lives intolerable. That isn't science. That's bullying.

This piece is very interesting and IMO insightful:
https://sociallyanxiousadvocate.wordpre ... -left-aba/

I apologize for the fact that you have only ever had bad experiences with ABA. Things have changed a great deal since Lovaas pioneered it. There are no aversives, only absence of a reward (be it verbal praise or a tangible thing like candy) when an incorrect or no response is given. As for the person who said bullying was good, that's just ridiculous. Bullying is never good for anyone, autistic or not. I can't speak for every ABA therapist, but for me and the other behavior therapists I've spoken to, our focus is what's in the best interest of the child, which is why a primary aspect of ABA is teaching some form of communication and also replacing violent/destructive stims with safe alternatives. Independence skills can be taught with ABA such as going to the store, getting what you want, coping with excessive sensory input (covering your ears/wearing headphones, wearing a baseball cap for bright lights, small stimming movements like hand-tapping or rocking a bit), going to the register/self-scan, paying, putting it in bags if necessary, riding public transportation, putting it away when you get home, making a meal, etc...
ABA is basically breaking tasks down into smaller, easier components and rewarding each step as they learn it until they can complete the task independently.