Health insurance. The one thing all providers in America can agree on. I’ve yet to meet a single provider in any field that has any kind words to spare for it. In the 10+ years I’ve been in the field, I’ve watched health insurance pull our hands farther and farther…
Tag: ABA
Raise your hand if you came out of grad school thinking ABA has all the answers. Have you ever scoffed at an occupational therapist’s report, with all of its mentalistic language and “poor measurement?” What about working with speech pathologists? How often have you tried to convince families to drop…
CW: ableism, suicide ABA with autistic children was literally created with the goal of making them “indistinguishable from their typically developing peers.” With the focus being only on observable and measurable behaviors to outsiders, the radical behaviorist roots of ABA as a therapy for autism becomes questionable at best. In…
This post is in response to the announcement shown below from ABA International’s Facebook page on 9/7/2021. The announcement came as a bit of a surprise, to me at least, considering how long the autistic and ABA Reform communities have been reaching out to them to say or do– well,…
This is the conclusion to a two-part series on Appropriate Play. Before continuing, please make sure you’ve read Part I. Play as a tool For the sake of argument, I will be discussing the benefits of symbolic play as it would pertain to a person who is living in society…
This one was a doozy, kids. I’ve spent over a week combing through research across psychology, general education, special education, and ABA, trying to answer this question: What is appropriate play and is it even important? There is no simple answer to any of it, but then again I think…
Featured picture credit: WCVB-TV CW: abuse, child abuse, restraint, torture, suicide, shock At this point, if you are in any way involved in the autistic community, there is no way you haven’t heard of the Judge Rotenberg Center and the #StopTheShock movement. For those of you coming to this issue…
CW: child abuse, ableism, torture Ivar Lovaas: The father of ABA. Lovaas’ 1987 study is an ABA grad student’s second most important resource other than the White Book. It’s the source of the “40-hour rule,” which is usually in the context of early intensive behavioral intervention (IEBI) meaning it is…
CW: Abuse, grooming, sexual assault What does it feel like when you tell a child to do something and they just don’t? When they look you dead in the eye and do the opposite? What about when they just flat out tell you “no” and stare back at you with…
This study has been making the rounds. Everything I was hearing about it was horrible and I was appalled right along with the rest of the crowd. How could such a study be published? How could it get past the IRB? They are literally torturing a teenager with sound sensitivities!…