You cannot maintain conservative political leanings and be an ethical BCBA. I said what I said. “Unity” and “respecting opinions” have been buzzwords since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It sparked a lot of us to think, potentially for the first time in our lives, that maybe some opinions are…
Author: Inappropriate Opossum
CW: Offensive terms Language is always evolving. As attitudes shift and societal norms alter in response, so then does our verbal behavior. As such, our vocabulary is in constant flux, with changing meanings, cultural contexts, and corresponding changes in what is acceptable versus what is not. Each time, there is…
BCBAs are all about dissemination. We want the world to listen to us because we have the secrets of the universe! OK, yes, that’s a little sarcastic, but an understanding of behavior is definitely useful and interesting to talk about. ABA can offer solutions to a lot of world problems,…
It’s been an ongoing debate on the ABA boards of the social media world: What the Function? (you see what I did there?) “All behavior serves a function and it’s one of the Big Four: Attention, Escape/Avoidance, Access to tangibles, and Automatic.” “No, no, there are 5 functions of behavior!…
First, I want to thank Not Another Autistic Advocate for taking the time to talk and listen to me with patience, and for all of the emotional labor they put into educating the world. They inspired this post by teaching me and helping me see the autistic perspective on this…
CW: child abuse, suicide, transphobia, ableism, trauma, sexism Behavior (bee-HAY-vyer). noun 1. An interaction between an organism and its environment. 2. Anything a person does. When practicing behavior analysis, what are the two most important components we require to define a behavior? Observable and Measurable. This has been drilled into…
CW: abuse, supremacy, ableism, offensive images and descriptions of disability The core of all of ABA’s issues is supremacy. Supremacy is the belief that one group is inherently better than another. This term is most often associated with white supremacy, the belief that people with light skin are inherently better…
CW: ableism Sometimes a client’s biggest barriers are their caregivers. For younger clients, it’s often grandparents who are stuck in their ways and have toxic beliefs such as “they will grow out of it” or “when I was a kid, there was none of this autism stuff.” For older clients,…
CW: discussions of abuse, criticism of autistic experiences Alright, I’m going to cool it for a minute and actually offer some sympathy. Chances are, when you first read criticisms of ABA, you were pissed. I get it. When I first encountered it, I was very pissed — I mean perseverating-on-it-all-day,…
One rotten apple spoils the bunch The “one rotten apple” argument has been really popular these days, especially with the right. It’s probably the number 1 argument I see against dismantling the police. Well, there are also calls to dismantle ABA, which means this same argument is also popular among…