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…
Tag: autism
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…
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: 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,…