For Autism Awareness Day, let's be aware that ABA therapy was invented by the same guy who invented gay conversion "therapy."
Look into play therapy, speech therapy, or occupational therapy instead, which see an autistic person as a person, and not just a vessel to be molded into your preferred traits. Find a provider who is "neuroaffirming."
If you can understand that introverts & extroverts unwind in different ways, or that a distance runner & a piano player are restored by their hobby but stressed by the others, then you can understand that autistic people regulate their nervous systems different than allistic people.
Any therapy should be helping autistic people self soothe and regulate, perhaps in less disruptive ways. But forcing them to pretend to be NT, does not "cure" the autism. Instead it teaches kids to ignore their bodies cues or be punished, setting them up for a higher chance of being abused, decades of mental illness and inevitable burnout. .........................................................................................................................
If you separate ABA therapy from reward and punishment, you don't have any ABA left because the entire structure of ABA is based on that.
"Ole Ivar Lovaas promised parents that they’d be able to keep their kids out of these hellish institutions, but the only way to do that was by using ABA. the irony, of course, is that he just copied everything they were doing in the institution. He just copied all of the token systems of rewards and punishment, even physical punishment, even electrocution as punishment.
You can’t really have an operant conditioning system that’s nice, or that fits in with our modern ideas of how children should be treated. There might not be physical punishments in those cases, but "planned ignoring" and withholding food as punishment/reward, removal of comfort items, strict rules around how a young kid can play - it’s psychologically destroying to have these special things be taken away from you. Autistic people need downtime, and they need comfort spaces, comfort zones.
It’s also very destroying psychologically for a small child to have to spend 35 or 40 hours a week in a therapeutic setting just being drilled on life skills in a way that’s not kind. They’re not being allowed to have a childhood. “Hands down, feet on floor, quiet voice.” Joy is postponed as a reward.
ABA compliance goes way beyond what we might do as parents or what might happen in a typical classroom. What happens is they’re never allowed to say no, and they get punished if they ever say no. Meanwhile, in our elementary school classrooms for non-autistic kids, they’re learning about consent.
If an autistic child was stimming or scripting or rocking back and forth or needing to pace, those are the kinds of things that for an autistic child that would be functional, as a stress release, while ABA sees them as "garbage behaviors" to be extinguished. It ignores the existence of autistic traits and coping methods, focusing on non-autistic priorities like "molding" or stopping autistic kids from self-soothing stimming.
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You may know that ABA is a questionable therapy. But since not every parent can avoid ABA, what can those parents do to protect their kids?
We can support autistic kids in joyous, obsessive, atypical play. We can support them in play that NTs might not recognize as “play” at all. We can look at the sensorimotor, language, cognitive, emotional, and social experiences and skill building that play can provide, and we can find ways to make sure that autistic kids are getting that practice in ways that work for them. And we can back off and let autistic kids be autistic kids. -Julia Bascom
