ABA 101 Part 1
I’m really excited for today’s episode because this is an episode that will benefit listeners of all backgrounds. So whether you are a parent (you don’t have to have an autistic child for ABA strategies to be beneficial to your parenting), a treatment provider, or even someone who’s just curious about ABA. I’ll tell you from the start, ABA does NOT always equate to autism therapy. ABA can be used for anything and anyone that engages in behavior...which is basically all living and breathing organisms. ABA has been proven to be an effective method of treatment for children with autism, but ABA has been an effective method for those that struggle with substance abuse, fitness coaches, nutritionists, life coaches, organizational behavior management (which focuses of the behavior of a company’s employees and the company itself).
What is ABA? ABA is a therapy based on the science of an individual’s behaviors and how they learn. So in other words, behavior analysis helps us to understand how behavior works, how a person’s behavior is affected by the environment, and how their learning takes place.
The main goal of ABA is to increase behaviors that are helpful to an individual and decrease behaviors that are harmful or that can negatively impact learning. Ways that ABA therapy programs can help...is 1. Increase language and communication skills. 2. Improve attention, focus, social skills, memory, and academics 3. Decrease problem behaviors, such as intense tantrums, aggression, non-compliance, property destruction, and many more. ABA has been existing as a therapy treatment since the 1960s and since then the research behind ABA and its effectiveness has been thoroughly investigated and proven time and time again. During the last 3 episodes, I’ve touched on various research that proves the effectiveness of ABA and some common myths that have been debunked by research. Tune into episode 5 if you’re curious to hear more about other common myths on the topic of the autism diagnosis.
But to dive into the topic of ABA treatment, I’m going to simply breakdown some very basic foundational principles of ABA. This is going to be extremely helpful to know for future episodes when we dive further into research that has more complex concepts and scientific terminology.
In ABA, the surrounding environment is extremely important. When we first start services for our patients, what’s most important is that we control this environment to ensure that we create as successful of a learning opportunity as possible. In order to do this, we first need to understand how these environments are studied and how to effectively utilize these variables to control the environment.
First, we need to define what the word BEHAVIOR means. We define behavior as anything a person says or does that involves movement and has an impact on the environment. A behavior needs to be able to be observed, described and recorded. It needs to be able to pass what we call the dead man’s test. Basically, the concept is that If a dead man can do it, then it is NOT a behavior! So for example, a child not paying attention, not a behavior. Why? Because a dead man can do that. A child being non-responsive is not a behavior. Why? Because a dead man can do that. A child working on their homework, running, playing with their friends are all examples of a behavior.
Another common mistake that many people make is what we call circular reasoning. For example, some parents will come to me and say "Johnny doesn’t do his homework because he’s lazy?" So if I ask, "Why is Johnny lazy?" The parents will say "Because he doesn’t do his homework." There is no end to this circular reasoning. And this results in a behavior that can’t be observed. I can’t observe Johnny being lazy. What does lazy look like? How it looks for me might be different for someone else. If we can’t observe it, we can’t measure the behavior. And a behavior has to be observable and measurable in order to be identified as a behavior. So, why is this important? Why are we nit-picking at the definition of behavior. Because when people make general observations, there are a lot of opinions and biases that are included. Classic examples I get is, my child is hitting other people because he’s being a troublemaker. My child doesn’t like playing with other kids because he’s just being shy. How do we observe and measure when a person is being a trouble maker or being shy? We need to break these labels into observable behaviors in order to weed these opinions out of the observation and measurement. So instead of labeling a child as being a trouble maker, we want to come up with concrete observable and measurable behaviors such as, when other children don’t play with my child, he runs up to the children and hits them or when his friends don’t want to play by his rules of the game, he hits them. These scenarios are all examples of observable and measurable behaviors. We covered the definition of behavior as something a person says or does that involves movement, has an impact on the environment, and is observable and measurable. If you need a couple seconds to process that, I recommend you pause the podcast here before we move onto the next concept.
Another very basic terminology that we use is called the “ABC’s” of ABA.
- A is for Antecedent. This refers to anything and whatever occurs right before the target behavior. It can be verbal, such as an instruction or a request. It can also be physical such as the presentation of a toy/object or a sound that comes from the laundry or a doorbell. An antecedent can come from the environment, from another person, or can also be an internal thought or feeling.
- B is for behavior. This is the person’s response or lack of response to the antecedent. It can be an action or a verbal response. When we look at the behavior, we want to be very specific about what this behavior looks like. We call this the topography of the behavior. So when we say that a child is aggressive...what does that mean? Because Johnny being aggressive might look different from how Sally is being aggressive. So we want to be specific about the appearances of the behavior, along with the duration, and the intensity of the behavior.
- C is for consequence. This is what comes directly after the behavior. In the typical English language, we refer to consequences as a negative punishment, such as time outs and reprimands, but in ABA, we refer to consequence as anything that comes directly after the behavior occurs. And dependent on what type of consequences are presented, this can increase or decrease the specified behavior.
Studying the ABCs of a situation can help us better understand why a behavior may be happening and how different consequences could affect whether the behavior will happen again.
Examples:
Child is waiting at the register with her mom at a grocery store. She asks mom for candy, mom says no, child starts to cry because she wants a candy
A: Mom and the child are at the register and mom says “no” to the child’s request for a candy
B: The child throws a 15 minute tantrum by screaming and dropping to the floor while kicking her legs
C: A parent can make 2 decisions…
- Put up a fight but end up giving in and buying the candy because they don’t want to deal with the tantrum and the embarrassment of everyone starting at them.
- Despite the long tantrum episode, the parent doesn’t buy the candy and they walk out of the store empty-handed.
When a child cries for the candy after being told “no,” and the parent purchases the item for the child...what does that teach the child? When they want something, regardless of the approval/disapproval, the child will cry.
Example 2:
Student that doesn’t want to do homework
A: Parent instructs their child to do their homework
B: Student throws their pencil and book across the living room
C: Parent is busy taking care of dinner and doesn’t want to put up a fight with the child. Puts the child on time out for not listening. What has that taught the child? Every time they don’t want to do something, throw things and get upset and they’ll be placed into a time out to get out of doing the non-preferred activity. So in this situation, what we think is a punishment like a time out, is actually serving as a motivation to the child to continue engaging in these inappropriate behaviors to get out doing non-preferred tasks.
These are just a few examples of what the ABC of a behavior may look like. The types of information that the ABCs collect for us is what we need to identify the function of behavior, which we’ll be going over in next week’s episode! Understanding the function of a behavior or why someone engages in a specific behavior will help you to better understand how to react to those behaviors to increase or decrease those behaviors. Let me remind you, this works on anyone!!...this includes any child (autism diagnosis or not) this also includes any adult (autism diagnosis or not). And between us, let me tell you, I’ve definitely used this on my family and friends before and it works spot on EVERY TIME! So I hope you can join us next week to talk about the functions of behavior.
