Autism and ABA - A Realistic Picture (Video)

Across North America parents of autistic children continue to fight for ABA services for their autistic children whether it be American parents seeking to have private health insurers provide coverage of ABA treatment or parents in Ontario seeking to have ABA introduced in the school system or get their pre-school children off waiting lists for early ABA intervention. Yet the anti-ABA activists would have you believe that these parents are gullible, stupid people who have been misled by an evil ABA industry into believing that ABA will turn their autistic children into "normal" children.

Very few of the anti-ABA activists ever describe any personal experiences they have had with ABA. (There are exceptions, some determined anti-ABA activists are parents whose children apparently did not receive ABA from competent ABA therapists). Even Michelle Dawson, who intervened in the Supreme Court of Canada proceedings in Auton to offer an "autistic" perspective and to oppose government funding of ABA treatment for other people's autistic children, did not describe any personal experiences that she had with ABA. Nothing I have read in the writings of most anti-ABA activists refers to any personal ABA experiences on which they based their opinions. Nor do their descriptions of ABA reflect any real first hand knowledge of ABA.

The absurd rhetoric of the anti-ABA activists often paints a false picture of ABA as being abusive. Some resort to an old video clip of an aversive (hand slapping) being used in an ABA session to portray ABA as abusive. ( Such commentaries invariably ignore the once widespread use of a particular aversive "the strap" that was once used on ALL school children, including me in Grade 1, when I was strapped for kicking a soccer ball around the classroom during a brief absence by the teacher. I never did it again).

Parents really should ignore the ill informed, prejudiced, anti-ABA activists and check out for themselves how ABA is being provided today to autistic children in their area. I have said many times that my son enjoys receiving ABA. The following video from the NJ Star Ledge site presents a realistic picture of modern, non-aversive, ABA methods being used with an autistic child:

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Autism's Worst Anti-ABA Rhetoric Award 2007

The anti-ABA ideologues who lobby incessantly to keep parents from gaining access to proven effective Applied Behavior Analysis intervention for their autistic children have produced some incredible excesses over the years. Particularly noteworthy is the ludicrous claim that helping autistic children by ABA methods infringes the civil rights of autistic persons. According to the anti-ABA internet crowd helping a child make the gains reported in the recent American Academy of Pediatrics autism reports is actually a violation of the human rights of autistic persons; an imposition of the values of the Neurologically Typical on autistic children. A comment today on Ed's Autism Page is so outrageous it deserves a new award "Autism's Worst Anti-ABA Rhetoric Award, 2007".

In Behavioral Reformation the host of Ed's Autism Page actually equates behavior modification with some of the major acts of oppression and aggression committed by European and American powers in the last 400 years including the aggression against the native inhabitants of the American continents, enslavement of African people, and the violence against those accused of withcraft. Ed, an autistic adult, makes it clear that this authoritarian based behavior modification is exactly what is being used today to oppress autistic persons:

Rather than accept public responsibility, overcomers of what are considered afflictions of thought, perception, or behavior, are glorified and if the one whose behavior is seen as "abnormal" cannot be punished in a way that society will readily agree with, the force that dictates the person's behavior must be seen as either demonic, provoked by disease, or promoted by genetic defect that must be eliminated.

What is important to remember is that once a behavior can be described to the public as wrong instead of different, it can and does lead to the worst and most savage methods of the behavior modificationists. Those who modify behavior that is different in the justified name of "correcting what is wrong" go unpunished and their methods (once justified in this way) are not only accepted, they are promoted. These are the REAL wrongs that need to be researched, investigated, and fixed!

It takes a lot to beat the rhetorical excesses of those who ascribe all manner of evil to allegedly misbehaving behaviorists but the host of Ed's Autism Page seems to have pulled it off. Is it possible to talk to the host of Ed's Autism Page and suggest that using behavior modification to eliminate self aggressive behavior by an autistic child is not really oppressing the autistic child ?

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