Read about it and felt like I would be training my son as if he were a dog.
The whole thing was insane....but his therapist....who did nothing for him kept raking in the dough!!
He's in high school and top of his class.
P.S. The parents finally wised up and told the therapist to stick it.
There weren’t many options.
therapies go in and out of style.
In the 90s and 00s sending out of control teens away to programs often escorted by two guards was not unusual. Back then parents were considered responsible for their children and in many places out of control sexual or substance abuse was considered to be risky behavior to end immediately. This is no longer the case and those people who now evaluate it, consider the treatment to be a negative.
In the 1800s and 1900s sending a pregnant girl away to a home for the duration of the pregnancy was considered a kind thing, since the previous option was to kick the girl out of the house, and have her and the child die or find work in the flesh trades. Now those homes are considered abominations.
Removing native children from their culture was considered a good thing in the 1900s for many reservations and towns run by natives were drunken, uneducated, ghettos. It was felt that the children would have a better chance brought up in a less toxic environment. It is no longer seen that way.
ECT was seen as a miracle for depression in midcentury. As it started to come into its own it was disparaged as drugs came into the market that addressed depression. Now both drugs and ECT are used to good effect with the profoundly depressed.
Spanking was considered a child management technique. In todays environment it is considered child abuse.
Water therapy was considered helpful treatment for the mentally ill. It actually has a good short term effect for some, however it is now considered abuse.
I’m in the spectrum and ABA therapy has allowed me to live a more or less normal life and, more importantly, a life without a constant flow of prescription drugs.
Which is the actual problem with ABA is that pharmaceutical companies don’t make any money when autistic kids don’t get drugged.
I guess these kids wish they had grown up like the Good Doctor and spoke and behaved like poorly programmed robots.
We really have to look at this article in light of the grand cabal of people who fervently believe that carrying a baby to term and going through childbirth is abuse.
Once you’ve succeeded in making people regard the most normal, routine, important human events as “abuse” you can construe anything as “abuse” no matter how good, right, or valid it is.
But the article was tedious to read because the writing was sub-par, repetitive, and disorganized—badly in need of a good editor. That's a shame, because the content provides many good ideas to build upon.
Two issues.
1. The spectrum has been expanded to include kids who are severely disabled, i.e., non-verbal, self-injurious, violent, truly mentally and emotionally deficient all the way to high functioning individuals who only tells are they are a little quirky and asocial.
2. In answer to the second post, yes, it is like training your puppy when you’re working with a severely disabled child. Often times you are dealing with a child who may be a teenage or older physically, but 2-3 years old mentally. I have a friend who has two Autistic children. One is a 20-year-old son who is totally non-verbal, not potty trained and prone to violent outbursts. Her daughter who is 19 has some limited verbal skills but is extremely self-injurious and also prone to violence against others. She is institutionalized for her own safety and has been through ABA. Trying to say these two need the same care as another young woman I know who is high functioning and is in college and gainfully employed, is absurd. They have nothing in common except the diagnosis. Would she find ABA to be cruel and counter-productive, probably. Would the other two benefit from that type of training if it helped to lessen their undesirable behavior, maybe. It helped my friend’s daughter to a point, but it wasn’t effective long term.
My best friend’s son has level 2 Autism. He will never live alone and will always depend on my best ladyfriend and her husband for everything. He’s seven and is still potty training, on top of communication issues thanks to having had hearing difficulty until he was a toddler. He still speaks his own language (which we call, “Axican”), although with speech therapy he’s getting a lot better.
Maybe high-functioning kids can benefit from some form of this, but we reward and punish children for their behaviors every day to varying degrees and results. It’s how people learn, but kids who are farther into the spectrum won’t really get a lot out of the intense version of this, I don’t think. My friends’ son has benefitted more widely from longer-term, patient reinforcement of preferred behaviors.
Autism literally translates to, “Abnormal condition of oneself”, leaving some unable to understand hardly anything beyond their own needs and desires, although it depends on the person. It’s why level 3 kids tend to isolate and don’t like social interaction - it’s just overwhelming.