Parent Education

Parents are an integral part of any successful ABA-based intervention protocol. The simple fact is, given a least restrictive level of services, parents should be enjoying a much greater amount of time with their children than the ABA provider is spending. Historically, this has seen a very necessary and natural evolution, moving from the idea of parent 'training' in ABA methods, to the more modern inception discussed here--parent education about ABA principles as they are actively included in all aspects of so-called intervention. More importantly, a constant flow of information on a variety of techniques, strategies and approaches, promoting a variety of actively desired contingencies, all supporting socially-significant behavior, should be ever present. All this is discussed in this installment of ABA on Tap.

Sit back and enjoy--and feel grateful for parents all around who strive to offer their children the best available in all aspects of life. Cheers!

*Please note we encountered some line 'noise' in this recording affecting the audio a bit--we apologize for this and will address the matter for future recordings.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Hey Mike, how do you feel about today? Feeling pretty good about it?

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

I think today's a great day, Dan.

SPEAKER_03: 0:06

I couldn't agree more. Like you say, any day that you wake up and your name's not in the obituary, you're off to a good start. Speaking of which, today's also a great day to start your own podcast. Whether you're looking for a new marketing channel, you have a message you want to share with the world, or just think it'd be fun to have your own talk show, like we did. Podcasting is an easy, inexpensive, and fun way to expand your reach online. Maybe learn something. Now, Buzzsprout is hands down the easiest and best way to launch, promote, and track your podcast. It's what we use. Your show can be online and listed at all of the major places podcasts can be found, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc., within minutes of you finishing your recording. You know, podcasting isn't hard when you have the right partners. And the team at Buzzsprout is passionate with helping you succeed. Join over 100,000 people just like us sharing their message, already using Buzzsprout as the conduit to get their message across the world.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08

We use Buzzsprout and we love it. Buzzsprout will give you a great looking podcast website, audio players that you can drop into other websites, detailed analytics to see how people are listening, tools to promote your episodes and much, much more. So here's what you'll do if you want to start your podcast today. Follow the link in the show notes. This lets Buzzsprout know we sent you. It gets you a$20 Amazon gift card if you sign up for a paid plan, and it helps support our show. So make it a great day today. Get on to Buzzsprout and start your podcast. Inform the world. And of course, always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_03: 1:46

Cheers. Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_01: 2:39

All right, all right, all right, and welcome yet again to ABA on Tap. I am your co-host, Mike Rubio, along with Daniel Lowry. Mr. Dan, good to see

SPEAKER_03: 2:51

you, sir. Good to see you. Good 2023, or happy 2023.

SPEAKER_01: 2:55

Yep, yep. Very happy and prosperous thus far. Very, very excited to be back for our fourth season of ABA on Tap. Can you believe it, man?

SPEAKER_03: 3:03

I can, man. Looking very forward to it. This is going to be our biggest season yet, for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 3:07

We've got a lot of good things planned for 2023. In fact, had a... impromptu guest appearance that we almost made happen today, but we're going to plan it right and postpone it. Somebody who's an active listener, so we look ahead to having active listeners and other colleagues in the field join us as you have ideas that come up, and hopefully you've been inspired by ABA on Tap. Today we're going to jump right in with a very, very simple, very parsimonious topic, something we've alluded to undoubtedly on countless occasions here on ABA on Tap, but we've never taken the time to examine individually. And that's the idea of parent education, sometimes referred to as parent training. And I'll let you discuss why we sort of changed our mind on that moniker a little bit later. It'll come up thematically, no doubt. And with our last episode in season three, talking about behavioral pediatrics, the idea of health education, the idea of parent education comes in here hand in hand very, very nicely. So without further ado, Mr. Dan, why don't you give us a further introduction here on this very, very basic but very important topic that whether this is a multi-part series that we do in sequence starting today or that we do in parts that are parsed out over many, many episodes, I know that this is something, a can of worms, if you will, that we're going to open today and we're never really going to close again because we should be talking about this idea of parent education, parent involvement parent participation as actively as we are able to

SPEAKER_03: 4:36

yes yes this is definitely my soapbox of ABA's parent involvement education training as you called it started at a previous company where one of our funding source mandated it it's kind of interesting because ABA has always been a very direct service method of somebody comes in and works with the kids and I just remember one day in my current company one of our therapists was really awesome and The dad was like, you know, my kid will do anything for this therapist. But as soon as I leave, he won't do anything for me. I got to know what this person has. I need the juice. You got to give me the sauce. You got to give me the sauce. That's right. So then I put my hat on and I went back to the office. And I was like, all right, well, let's make a curriculum to give these parents the sauce, which kind of goes well. Because if you think about it, I think something that's kind of forgotten about from the Lova study is, you know, he had his two groups. He had the more intensive group. And he had the less intensive group and the more intensive group showed much more promising results. But a key thing in there was the parent training. That much more intensive group got parent training where the other group didn't get parent training. And I think that's kind of left out when we talk about the 40 hours because that's the big caveat, right? The group that got the 40 hours of work or the 40 hours of therapy did better than the group that got the much less therapy. But then they just forget to leave out the whole parent training aspect. So I think that's something that's always been a big thing for me. And like you mentioned, too, it's gone through an evolution through my about six years of running a parent group in my current company from the day that that parent was like, give me the sauce that the therapist has to where it's at now. It started as parent training. I believe that's what Lobos called it in his study. That seemed to fit the mold. And then you brought up a really good point, Mike. You brought up the point of, well, we're not training anyone to be parents. In fact, I'm not a parent myself. So how can I train somebody to be a parent? Let's call it parent education. These kids are eating and sleeping and surviving just fine. I don't need to train these parents on how to be parents. I need to educate them on some ABA strategies. And I think the next frontier is probably going from parent training to parent education and then from parent education to parent collaboration. Because I know it sounds kind of cliche when I say it, but I can't. It's so true that we learn as much from these parents as they learn from us. Our services at our company have just drastically changed over the seven years that I've been here. As a director is all of the parent training and the parent education. And the director is all of saying, hey, I think if you ignored your kid, your kid would stop doing this. And hopefully the parents that are honest will say, yeah, I can't. I can't do that. So now we get into that dimension of ABA or science of pragmatism of is it pragmatic and practical for me to be giving suggestions that, like you said, are developed in the lab and transition them to the parents' living room. So I think more of that collaboration piece is where the next frontier will be because a lot of our parent training groups are us giving some lab strategies and giving them saying that that doesn't seem feasible or trying it and reporting back and then us changing our methodologies rather than having it be a school where, you know, you go to a school and they have their curriculum. It's a curriculum for every single student in that school short of maybe some of the IEP kids, but everybody's going to attend the same curriculum. And that's what ABA was for so long. Now it's like, okay, we've got a little bit of a curriculum, but we need to work with you on how we can implement this because we us beating our heads against the wall and saying to do this strategy, which will work in a lab, is not necessarily working for you and your family and grandma and all of the other dynamics, your one-year-old coming in and interrupting session and things like that. So really collaborating with parents has made us, again, what I think is the most premier ABA agency and probably sparked a lot of the sparks that have led to the fire of behavior pediatrics, of a lot of other things coming from How do we collaborate with parents?

SPEAKER_01: 8:54

So something very interesting, we clearly were able to find behaviors for reduction, for example, to use that phrase loosely, and then we come in in this very linear fashion. We identify those a lot of times, and then we do an analysis, and then we kind of fall short on the applied part, meaning that historically, we've come in sort of as a one-trick pony. Hey, your child's crying in a prolonged fashion in a way that causes distress to you and your household, you're going to ignore because that's what extinction is. So right there, we're already way off course. The idea that that's the only way that you might apply or interpret the use of an extinction procedure would be to blanketly ignore. Something that historically, again, having been in the field now 26 years, I know that in the beginning was a very, very common thing, unfortunately something I still see once in a while and it's not to say that there isn't a time or place but one of those situations where you mentioned pragmatism are now or applied the applied part of our analysis fell so so short and so what we're saying now is that there's a dynamism to parenting yes there's the idea that we have procedures that we know are lab proven lab based they have been applied and in a certain way in certain journal studies, and now it's sort of our job to make some hypotheses, take those procedures out of the lab, again, back into the household now, and say, well, if you apply the procedure this way, from a pragmatic perspective, This could work. And the parent might say, well, that works for me or that doesn't work for me. Or our own analysis will go, wow, your follow through with this one isn't so good. So now I have to maybe devise a separate procedure, something else that might be a response. a reaction initially, now turning into a response to a certain behavior that we're trying to shape. Not necessarily reduce anymore, but shape and replace with one or many other behaviors that fit the household more aptly. That's huge. That's a huge task. given from where we've come in this sort of very linear model, very linear fashion of, say, something like apply extinction, which means you just ignore your child, whether it's an access function or a tension function, doesn't matter. This is now our one trick pony. So I'm very glad for the evolution of our field. At the same time, as we talk about that level of analysis, I wonder how many of us are up for it, how many of us are up for all the different parenting permutations, that's my phrase that I'm going to be using here, because that's what parenting is, right? And I can speak to that both personally and professionally. It's a set of permutations. It's the idea that I'm home. Maybe my wife arrived before I did, so she picked our baby up from school, our two-year-old. I get to live these things now, which is very nice. And I'm a little exhausted, she's a little exhausted, and our two-year-old is having a hard time at dinner. So I have a set of procedures that, you know what, today we're just going to go ahead and allow the goldfish and the peanut butter and jelly, because that... sufficiently satisfies our need to feed our child or but wait no we want to enforce something a little more healthy and eating at the table so we're going to take the long road today because we may or may not have the energy or even if we don't have the energy we're choosing to enact it in this moment to implement a set of procedures that we've sort of identified as optimal or ideal toward our child's healthy development and further education and etiquette and whatnot and And then there's some many middle ground procedures. And then there's some procedures that sometimes we're just cutting ourselves some slack. Like I said, the goldfish and the peanut butter and jelly are the high-level probability foods, the ones that are going to stick, right? Somewhere in there, and this is just to kind of throw this loosely in there from our old mastery criterion, as long as I'm taking the long road, the tough road, about 80% of the time or more, and I'm not cutting myself slack more than 20% of the time, Development says, I'm going to even out. I'm going to end up with a child who sits at the table and eats what we're eating a majority of the time, which now means we can have an average, somewhat risk-managed, trouble-free, if you will, existence and development for our child. And that's kind of all we're saying, but to go through all those permutations takes a lot of analysis, really ramps up the idea of how much contact we're supposed to be having with parents During session, outside of session, during groups like the ones you're alluding to. So it really, if people aren't out there actively doing that now, it really calls for a huge transformation. Not to mention whether or not funding sources are willing to fund this kind of grouping because now, what is this, group therapy and not ABA? And God forbid it doesn't look like this, right? So there's a lot of obstacles to discuss here, but... A great deal of, again, importance that needs to be placed on this based on how much now we can take individual parenting styles, honor those individual parenting styles, and put it on us to follow through with coming up with a myriad. of procedures and things that will work that'll be practical for their implementation for these families and households that'll also promote the desired change in development in these children's behavior. That's all in order, but I think one that we're ready to step up to and that again is of great importance and we almost have no choice.

SPEAKER_03: 14:31

Yep, I agree. Covered a lot of ground there, so let me look back at some of the notes of things that you said that I think are very enlightening. You mentioned the myriad of options. I think that is very, very important to exemplify here that, like you mentioned, historically we will come in with one plan. And I think that's actually where, so obviously with our podcast sometimes there's the anti-ABA movement, right? So sometimes we get comments on our feed and things like that that aren't the friendliness or have the idea of ABA having a certain protocol. And Like I said, and we've talked about it a lot, there's a level of truth to that. But the myriad of options I think is very important, and that's where we start to differentiate ourselves. So I remember one of the parent groups that I run, one of the parents came in, I think you were actually at this group, and was very excited that... Her kid was tantruming and her husband was giving in a little bit. And then the therapist came in and from our company, who again, I think is one of the more progressive companies, came in and was like, nope, you need to ignore that. And that was actually working. And we were like, okay, well, that's working. And then I remember afterwards we talked and we were like, wow, like that works, but hopefully there's other options for that. And I think That's where it starts with us. Instead of saying, okay, your child's doing this. This is what you need to do. That's probably maybe where ABA has overstepped. And our position would be more like your child is doing this. This is one thing you could do. This is another thing you could do. This is another thing you can do. And based on our history in the field, this is going to be the result from your child based on your response. And this is going to be what happens for you based on this

SPEAKER_01: 16:19

response. Really quickly, so in this sense... your child's behavior is the antecedent to your behavior as opposed to always us looking at the child's behavior as the B. Really important shift in the contingency.

SPEAKER_03: 16:31

Yes, and I think that also will hopefully clarify and make ABA seem a little bit less harsh because at that point, it's the parent choosing what works best for them and their family. It's not us saying, you need to do something. Historically, that might have been an issue. We came in and said, you need to do something that naturally felt uncomfortable As you mentioned, ABA is great for parenting, but it's no way to parent, right? I do like to say that. It's very difficult. And some of our therapists struggle to implement the strategies with their own kids. Very, very challenging, right? So if we come in and we try to shove these strategies down parents' throats, and initially with extinction bursts, that's going to create some difficulties. Yes, there's probably a better way that we've learned over the last 30 years. uh... that could be more of presenting options here's your menu rather than this is the one dinner that we've chosen for you that you have to have to do that's going to be a little bit painful it'll work but it'll be a little bit painful that also leads to a lot of collateral damage uh... that i think the parent groups have really been able to highlight which is really really unique and there's a certain dynamism that we get from having these parents together that's is not even replicated in the one-on-one parent training environment, which is really unique and really cool and really been beneficial for ourselves as a company and hopefully eventually the field. It's kind of like at an IEP, right? A lot of parents feel really overwhelmed and really pressured because there's eight professionals and maybe two parents there, and they disagree to everything because they don't understand what's going on, and they go home and be frustrated with the results. Whereas if we have more parents than we do therapists, all of a sudden they can talk about situations. My kid did this. Oh yeah, my kid does that. This is what works for my kid. This is what works for so-and-so's kid. Let's talk about it. Let's make it more of a discussion between the clients and the practitioners rather than kind of an overwhelming experience where these people that are educated or supposedly have a plan come in and tell you what to do. So that's been really, really unique and very enlightening for us to say, What do you all think? Johnny, what do you think? Susie, what do you think? What works for your kid? What works for our kid? You know that that works for your kid, but maybe could we twist it a little bit? What do you think? Again, make it more of a collaborative discussion rather than somebody coming in and telling you what you need to do that might not even be apparent themselves.

SPEAKER_01: 19:00

You know, I never really thought of it that way until now. I've mentioned the synergy of the parent groups and the idea of sort of the energy that they take that we would never be able to conjure up on our own. But again, as I allude back to this idea of health education with behavioral pediatrics, one of the big things I'm looking at is being able to put out the information out there, for example, with tantrum behavior, quote-unquote tantrum behavior from ages 2 to 5. there's literature out there, there's meta-analyses on how typical that behavior is for any child of two to five. Autism or not doesn't really matter at that point in time. You know, with all due respect on that sort of normed idea, all kids ages two to five tantrum. And the real important takeaway message for me for that was to say you're not alone. And what you're describing here, again, what I've sort of in general known as the synergy in these parent groups, is that very feeling of I'm not alone. And then moreover, the idea, and this is what really struck me as you were talking, the idea that we've been one-trick ponies historically, but now by creating this synergistic environment, we get to throw, kick around a lot of different strategies, which really immediately takes us away from that one trick pony status. Because now we're saying, you could try this, you could try that. That worked for me. That didn't work for me. It's an active discussion. And again, really moving us away from this idea of this linear contingency. So I'm really excited. I've alluded to that before on our show, the idea we've been very, very linear in the way we apply our science. And now another opportunity to really break the contingency in terms of what that be in the ABC Well, it's usually the client or the child's behavior. Now what we're saying is, no, actually, it's our behavior. The child's behavior is the antecedent to our planful response now. Another phrase I like to use these days, we have a reaction to our less than desirable behavior of our children. And then we have to turn that reaction into a response. And that's what we're doing now, offering various responses, analyzing what the outcome of those responses might be for us as parents with regard to the optimization of our child's better behavior and their better development. Man, that changes the whole ballgame.

SPEAKER_03: 21:16

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I've learned most from is it deals with parent readiness. And I've completely changed the way that my... Parent group went from jumping right into what ABA is and then talking about behavior, which some parents really resonate. Some parents come and they want the slides and they want the how-to, and they'll go implement it. To currently, or right before this current iteration, started more with kind of some ASD traits, so the parents can kind of bond and be like, yeah, my kid doesn't look at us in the eye, or my kid does some idiosyncratic play, my child does some stimming and things like that to kind of build the bonding. Even now, it's even more so talking about the first week. I just talk about resources that are available because a lot of the parents that we have that come to these parent groups, newly diagnosed child, sometimes multiple kids that they're dealing with, and everything's just new to them. And if they aren't in a place where they can implement the strategies effectively, it doesn't matter what I tell them, it's not going to be effective. So now I start talking more about the resources that are available for them. So IEP supports, some regional center supports, all sorts of things that are going to decrease their stress load outside of ABA, which in my experience actually has more of an impact on their ability to implement the ABA strategies than actually their understanding of the ABA strategy. Because if they come home and they're really tired or they don't understand, they've got the IEP, they've got the IPP, they've got all sorts of things going on and they don't know what's going on with any of that and it's just overwhelming, then they're kind of looking at us to like, you fixed my kid, this is all too much, I don't know what's going on. So being able to give them supports with other parents, resources in the community, things like that to kind of calm it down a little bit and give a little bit of guidance I found is really effective in the initial stages and then allows the parents to kind of bond and share their experiences. Because like you said, so many parents, almost all of the parents that come to our parent group, the kid that's in the group is their first child with autism. So it's all new to them and they don't know any of what's going on. So hearing it from another parent, hearing that, you know what, like my kid screams for a lot of nights and my husband and I really disagreed and It was very tumultuous, but we got through it. This is how we got through it. It's so much more valuable than hearing, when your kid screams, ignore your kid, because that's just going to cause it to be worse and cause a little bit more stress. So understanding that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I've heard the saying be used in other contexts, but you've got to give meaning in the suffering. And I think that's even relevant for this, right? There's a lot of suffering. If there's not meaning, if there's not like, oh, another parent got through it, But I'm hearing it from these professionals. Well, they don't understand. We don't live in a lab. So giving that camaraderie, understanding, and resources to get it started on the right page, I think is so much more important than any of the strategies that we talk about.

SPEAKER_01: 24:21

And the way it reframes it immediately, right? So again, looking at the idea of behavior. So my child's having this undesired or, to use an antiquated term, hopefully maladaptive behavior. Now I'm going to respond with this behavior intervention plan, which immediately tells you this is a behavior on my part. You're taking it a step back, overarchingly, and saying, there's a whole bunch of other resources, respite care, for example, where sometimes your behavior is to be able to step away from that behavior, to be able to move away from your child for a little while, even if it's to go grocery shopping without having to worry about them running into the parking lot or some other concern that a parent of a child with autism might be overarchingly experiencing day after day, minute after minute. So we're talking about behavior in a much different sense now with regard to the parent, not just in reaction and then further response to those undesired behaviors, not just in trying to help acquisition of new developmentally important and replacement behaviors, but now in terms of accessing resources and actively socializing with other people who might understand their circumstances in a way that they can lend support. Again, that synergy that I had seen before, but now that we're talking, I see how it's apparent in so many other ways.

SPEAKER_03: 25:46

So often I see these families box, proverbial box, get smaller and smaller and smaller and literally just becomes their home. They don't leave the because if they go out to a restaurant, the kid's gonna cause a scene and it's just not worth the battle. Or they can't go to a movie because what kid's gonna sit for two hours at a movie? Or can't go on vacation because the flight's gonna be too tumultuous. So going over some resources and saying like, hey, look, they do ASD-friendly movies. They do things like that. Look at these things out in the community that are gonna kind of open up your box. and introduce you to other parents, just make you feel a little bit more empowered, I think, has been super, super important. And again, this, like you said, might be a multi-part series because there's so many dynamics. And that's the other thing that I realized, too, is that there's so many dynamics at play that I would have never understood, right? There's a lot of parents that... And this is bringing in kind of more of the emotional side of things and maybe a little bit of... One of the criticisms of ABA is it's so robotic, and I think we want to acknowledge that we're trying to extend past that. So things like parents feeling guilty about upbringings or something like that with their kids, so they're giving in behaviorally because of their own guilt of, you know, I did this when I feel guilty because my child has autism, so I'm just going to give in to placate my child, which makes me feel a little bit better about myself because my child's in distress. about a lot of relationship issues and the divorce rate is something like 80 something percent for individuals with ASD because there's so much financial and emotional stress and how that can negatively affect intimacy and relationships and different co-parenting styles and a lot of the parents will come to us and more often than not it's moms in the parent groups because the dads are working And they'll come to us and say, well, my husband doesn't do it the exact way that you said. And that frustrates us. So that creates, you know, relationship dynamics. So now ABA has actually in some ways been counterproductive because it's creating more stress because they had a way of dealing with things. Now we come in and say, deal with it differently. One parent's willing to do it. The other parent isn't. Now all their parents are kind of fighting and the kid's just not, you know, the situation's not getting resolved as the parents are fighting. There's so many different dynamics, which, by the way, is why we started Dad's Groups, because a lot of the moms were like, well, my husbands will never listen to me, so we created Dad's Groups. There's so many other dynamics before you even get to the ABA strategies that ABA probably historically hasn't been good with, but are so important to implementing these strategies that have to be dealt with, acknowledged, and even just parents' emotional reaction to their kids. Sometimes parents might resent their kids or be... be struggling with how to interact with their kids and teaching the parents or getting the parents to look at their child and not be frustrated and want to interact with their child. There's so much beyond just responding to certain behaviors that these parent groups, I think, have enlightened all of us and made us a much more humane and comprehensive service.

SPEAKER_01: 28:51

You unpack a lot there alluding to the divorce rate, which I think is about a coin toss for any given couple that enters a marriage, and then now you add maybe some unique challenges, for sure some unique challenges with an exceptional child, and that certainly increases. And then toward the betterment or progression of our services and how we might again, take the full scope of circumstances, antecedents, if you will, setting events, whatever we want to call them, that now become super relevant to what we're doing, not just so ASD intensive and focused, but taking into account so many other variables, and actually running into, not that we're trying to create discord and marriages, but really bringing us to a more important question, which is, we might now give a certain recommendation to mom, and then we might take into account a different parenting style for a father or a separate parent, if you will, and say, well, you're more prone to handle it this way, so do this, that, and the other. And you're more prone to handle it this way, you can do this, that, and the other. And as long as you're looking at this function in a similar way and looking at a similar resolution or set of resolutions to the problem, then you're still a unified front. There's no discrimination that can be made by the a child in learning one style or the other, but even for that, that's now taking us beyond our scope, right? And saying we used to be that one trick pony. Now we're really forcing the issue by creating these questions and saying, hey, you don't have to respond in the same way. In fact, it's up, again, back to us to be the analysts that we're supposed to be and come up with several different ways that you can address this behavior knowing that each one of them is going to have their unique set of consequences and hypothetically, one might work better than the other. Now, quick question, and I'm not sure how far this will take us, but in these groups suddenly, what we're saying is we kind of run the risk of preached into a little bit of talk therapy. And I think that's okay. I think that that's actually proven helpful in a lot of that self-identification for clients and saying, hey, I'm not alone. And then what we're saying is by providing a diversification of procedures and strategies that are paired with a very academically based and sound Training on ABA, meaning this is the nitty-gritty. This is what shaping means. This is what differential reinforcement means. You put those two things together, it's okay to trace into the tell us about your week and what happened. arena without feeling like we're not being true to our philosophy of science.

SPEAKER_03: 31:36

Absolutely. I think it goes beyond the A more into the setting event piece of how do we create, minimize the stressful setting events so when those antecedents are presented, we can give the parents the best behavioral responses which will lead to the most desired consequences. But like you said, oftentimes you will say, you know what, mom and dad, you're going to deal with it differently and that's okay. And even if that's not the ideal strategy, if both parents are bought in on a strategy and not fighting over it, then that's probably going to be more effective than if they're arguing about what's going on, even if the strategy that they're arguing over is potentially a better strategy. But if both parents aren't bought in, then it's not going to really get anywhere. They're stressful. There's a lot of other dynamics. They're going to be more tired when they implement the strategies and things like that. In fact, I remember one of my last parent groups, I have a family that has a three or four year old and a newborn, like a two month old. And I was doing a lot of suggesting of, hey, just give in. Because again, that wasn't, I didn't come in and say that, but I heard their story and I was like, well, it looks like you are trying to fight these battles and eventually you give in anyway. You all seem frustrated, the kid seems frustrated. Do you think this would be a better strategy? Knowing that you're not able to withstand that entire extinction burst, just give in right away. Again, I think it's better to offer options to parents rather than give specifics, this is what you need to do. And it turns out that that's what they're doing. And it's kind of a joke that we're talking about them coming to parent group and the strategy is just give in to your kid.

SPEAKER_02: 33:17

I

SPEAKER_03: 33:20

feel like somewhere low-cost Skinner would be turning around in their labs right now. But if that can decrease the stress level and increase more cooperation and just happy interactions with their kid, then later we can get into the strategies.

SPEAKER_01: 33:38

So it's interesting as you were speaking, as you were saying those words, I'm always actively trying to reframe these things. I often talk about how really at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is reduce the crying and the yelling. So this idea when you say just give in, another way to say that, that maybe wouldn't be taken as well given the distress, but it's the same thing, would be just be responsive to your child every time they need something, and then they won't cry.

SPEAKER_02: 34:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 34:05

But if we say it that way, then it can become a matter of, well, are you saying I'm not being responsive? Well, no, we're saying that you also have this other four-year-old, to use your example, who's dividing your time, who needs some of that attention, and therefore is making it difficult for you to attend to every man, if you will, from your toddler or your near newborn. So what you're actively saying there is because we're looking at it from a behavior reduction model still, and again, I know that we're actively going back and forth between those two models, We're just saying be responsive to your child every time. That will keep them from crying, which will reduce your stress. In this case, though, knowing that we're looking at it from the angle of it being problematic, then the idea is yes, give in. So I do like where all these discussions as of late are taking us closer and closer to just the idea of solid parenting. through ABA procedures and strategies and learning theory and further away from the idea of we just need to stop this behavior. Now it's a lot more about we need to teach a whole bunch of other behaviors that, in a collateral manner, will support the development of replacement behaviors as we also maybe preserve this behavior. So we're never going to want a kid not to hit. There's a time and a place for it. But what we're saying is that it might be at a rate that for that given household and circumstance and for that set of parents has become a problem given the other variables like siblings. I mean, again, just to highlight, that's a whole separate conversation from I know what was active, say, certainly 20 years ago and a much more inclusive conversation now because now it's the idea that we're talking about good parenting strategy, not ABA techniques to reduce the undesired behaviors of your autistic child. There's a big difference between those two camps there.

SPEAKER_03: 36:03

Yeah, absolutely. And you talk about replacement behaviors, both for the kid and the parents, I think is another important thing. We get hyper-focused on the kid. Oh, well, we want the kid to use their words instead of hit or whatever. But if behavior is a product of the environment and the parents are the kid's environment, we've got to fix their behavior first. And the other thing that you made me think of when you were talking, too, is that ABA, again, doesn't really tell you what to do. ABA says, if there's a behavior occurring, let's look at it. And based on the data that we're taking, if you like the results of that behavior, let's increase it. Or let's keep doing it, i.e. reinforcement. And if you don't like the results of that behavior, let's stop doing it, i.e. extinction or... create an aversive, i.e. punishment. But ABA, our strength isn't necessarily saying what the replacement behavior should necessarily be. It's saying you figure out the replacement behavior and let's look at how it's working in the environment because we can provide a level of objectivity. And from that, we can say, do you want that replacement behavior to keep happening or do you want it to change to a different replacement behavior? And I think that's where the pairing group is so, so effective because so often a parent of you use the hitting example, right? A parent will say, my kid's hitting. And I'll say, okay, other parents, what suggestions do you have? And some will say, you know, I ignored my kid. I gave them a punching bag. I took them to Taekwondo class. All sorts of different possible suggestions. And then we might kind of tweak them a little bit and say, well, in our experience, maybe we found this to be effective or that to be effective. Try it all and let us know and we can provide the data, which just I think has been really, really integral in our implementation of ABA strategies where we're not necessarily as much telling parents what they need to do because we don't know what they need to do, but we're telling them, okay, let's figure out what you want to do. We'll try to identify things in the environment that you're not aware of because it's so much easier. It's like watching somebody play chess. When you're watching them play, you can figure out every move, but when you're in there, it's very difficult. So we'll kind of watch and observe and maybe give some critiques here and there. But again, they're the ones coming up with the plan and implementing it based on either other parent suggestions that have been in similar boats or their own suggestion of what they think is going to work best in their environment.

SPEAKER_01: 38:31

Help me out here so I get this right. I think what I hear you saying, and I agree, traditionally we've approached behavior and specifically we're the undesired behavior people as opposed to every other behavior that we could be cultivating. We'll be looking at it often from the idea differentially of an incompatible behavior toward replacement.

SPEAKER_02: 38:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 38:53

We seldom look at the alternative or the other. Yes. And that's what we're talking about here is all of those other alternatives toward the development of a certain behavior, meaning that we're often not talking about stopping behavior anymore. We're often talking about allowing it within reason. Absolutely. So my child's writing on the walls. okay, how can we allow that, or why is that happening? How can we allow that in a way that developmentally allows for that gross mortar exploration as we get it down to the 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper? Well, you can get an easel. That's why easels are upright and they're so big. You can cover certain sections of your wall. You're still going to have to allow for writing on those sections. I often send our RBTs out with large chunks of that roll of paper that we have in the group rooms for that very reason. Now, does that mean that that writing on the wall is going to go away. No, they're still going to want to see what it is like where it's not covered. But now at least you can point them to a place where you can allow that behavioral exploration, knowing that we talk so much about satiety toward deprivation, but we tend to impose the deprivation first and foremost.

SPEAKER_03: 40:03

Exactly. Yep. Or even back to your hitting example, right? So often we do look at the incompatible instead of the alternative and figuring out the replacement behavior in order for us to be successful. We have to have a behavior occur and then reinforce that to increase and become its replacement. That's one of the difficulties with talking, because we can't physically get inside a kid and prompt them to talk. Or we could theoretically, with pecs or signs or something, prompt them, get the behavior to access reinforcement, which would then increase. So in your hitting example, parents are going to be on different areas of what they're OK with. So that's why it's important that we allow them to represent the menu and allow them to choose what's most effective, right? So maybe they're hitting to get access to something and they're like, why won't my kid use their words? Okay, that's one potential suggestion or one potential option. That seems like that's like five steps down the road. But if that's the one that you're the only one you're willing to accept, then we'll work on it. But we want to let you know that as we talk about shaping, that's a huge jump. What about hitting, you know, a punching bag or a pillow instead of hitting you just to start? Or what about you holding your hand out and they hit your hand instead of hitting your face? Again, what things are you okay with doing that will allow this child to access reinforcement, we call that shaping, and then build it into the, using their language or whatever it is. But every parent's kind of different with, another one, you know, we talked about masturbation with some of our older kids. Some parents are like, absolutely not, my kid can do it. Other parents are like, it's fine if my kid does it just in a private area and various different levels of in-between. But for us to come and say, this is what you need to do for this behavior is pretty, you know, almost ignorant on our behalf and pretty overstepping our bounds. So I do think we've found a really good sweet spot in presenting discussions for parents, having them offer options, also having other parents relate. And the relating, I can't just overstate that enough. It's so important for other parents to hear parents say, yeah, man, it was tough. Like, I've been in Target. And my kid's been crying and I've seen the other parents look at me and I've just felt like crap and have parents just talk about how that felt. Again, that's not necessarily what we do from our perspective, but we do offer that floor for parents or to say, you know, my kids cried for five hours a night and I go to work just like a zombie and like, yeah, that's terrible. And other parents talking about how that felt and how they got through it so that we can then use our strategies. But just going back, Again, us figuring out what strategies they want to work and what's going to get them the reinforcement. Because once the parents get the payoff, then they'll start implementing the strategies. One client that I have working with right now, his son is four, said his first couple words the other day. And in the early parts of parent training, you could see his dad literally get emotional about my kid not talking. And I wanted to reassure them that his kid would hopefully talk or communicate. Obviously, I can't ever guarantee that. But hearing this parent just talk about my kids saying their first words and now being more receptive to the strategies that we're talking about and other parents are talking about because they're now motivated and see it being successful and their behavior has gotten reinforced. Not only just the kid's behavior getting reinforced, but their behavior getting reinforced. Because again, so often we focus on the kid and we say, come in and you need to do this strategy. And it takes a long time for their behavior to get reinforced because the extinction burst is so long. they might be checked out by that time or frustrated or stressed out. So whatever we can do to get immediately or close to immediately parents' behavior to get reinforced will just go so far in our strategies.

SPEAKER_01: 43:49

Interesting parallel you pitched there, again, going back to how much more open-ended our service has become in many, many regards. The idea of quick buy-in is important, and I think that a lot of our conventional procedures actually went toward that piece, the idea of PECs, right? Also the idea that we have to see the behavior occur in our vicinity immediately and then reinforce it or otherwise it's not gonna stick. But now what we're saying is that there's a much greater array of things that you're actively modeling. So yes, PECs are fantastic, PECs are valuable, but the idea that you're gonna expect that repetitive linear communication just from the child to the parent to receive that reinforcer sometimes leaves the rest of the communication environment a little bit devoid. So now we're also telling parents, you have to actively communicate despite that overture not happening directly to you all the time. So we're providing reinforcement sort of on the long term, the long play of reinforcement, the I've got to do this work before I get my parenting abs, and it's going to take a lot of reps, and I may not see the six-pack right away. But I can also do this quick procedure here to get that quick reinforcement. And we alluded to this at the beginning of the show. It's a little bit of everything, that variety you're talking about. And we're saying if you do these strenuous exercises, if you're actively linguistically mapping, contingently imitating, communicating with your child, and then you're finding those opportunities for that direct line of picture communication or what have you, you're going to have long-term and short-play reinforcement in a way that keeps you active as a parent and no longer just limited to these really awkward, decontextualized, discrete trial training procedures that we initially came in with that oftentimes we were saying, you know, I remember back where, and you remember this, where is there an isolated room in your house because we need to contain the child such that we have a chance to do all this prompting And that means that at that point in time, the parent wasn't even part of actively observing our sessions. Long, long ways away from those dark days of ABA, very thankful to say. So it's changed. It's really changed the way we regard parent education, much less parent training. So not just teaching them our procedures, but teaching about development, child, human, or otherwise. teaching about how domains of development are intertwined and how they exchange for one another, while still preserving our better task analysis to say if and when this particular behavior of high impaction occurs, this is the way you can respond. You can also respond in this way. Mom, dad, or other parent, you can respond according to your parenting style in this way And then as you're doing all this, let us also tell you about all these other resources that can help you keep your wits about you because parenting is hard. Absolutely. Parenting is a challenge. No matter, you have children, regardless of their profile, your hands are full, or they should be. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 47:06

Even, like I mentioned, the people at our company that have kids like yourself, talk about how difficult it is being a parent and implementing strategies with your own kids. Theoretically, you'd be the best practitioners of that. I really like the analogy you said you're parenting abs. That's what I'm going to keep because I feel like whenever we get these kids, even if they're three or they're 33, there's been a lot of parenting fat that's been built on of ways of placating your kids, which you have to do, right? You literally, as a parent, can't have your kid crying all day. You will go insane. So you have to find ways of... placating your kids and historically we've said all right well we can get you this really nice six pack this is what you got to do to get the six pack um but they're so far away from that they don't even have one pack right so finding a way to reinforce and be like hey look you don't have six pack you don't even have a one pack but look you lost a little bit of that that parenting fat on your waistline like let's find let's find ways so that you're motivated to Because the more days that you go and you're like, well, I don't have a six-pack yet. Well, that's way down the road. And if that's your only metric of success, then you're not going to want to partake in, you know, whatever the parenting therapy that we're talking about. I guess the last thing I'll say, because I see that we are getting towards the end of this episode, is I do want to acknowledge, you know, some of the criticisms of ABA and how it could be, you know, It's much less parenting education. It's much less our parent training. It's much less us telling parents what they need to do. And so much more collaboration. Because one of the biggest critiques of ABA is we're not listening to the people that we serve. And I think in some ways that's valid. I think that's more nuanced. But I do think there's a lot of validity to that as individuals with ASD are sometimes speaking up against ABA. Again, I think there's a lot more nuances to that argument, which we've discussed a lot in our quote, everyone. But I also think that's very relevant to parents as well and giving parents voices in this and productive voices as well. Not just, you know, like some of the trolls and some of the, you know, anti-ABA, you know, like, oh, this sucks or stuff like that. Well, why does it suck? Being the ABA is still considered the gold standard of treatment. So that's probably what your child is going to be able to get access to. How can we make it better as a community, as practitioners, as clients, but most importantly, as parents, how do we make it better and more relatable so that we can use all of our powers together? Parenting superpower and ABA is very powerful as well. How do we collaborate and use those together? And that's what I think has been just so effective of parents not coming in a parent group and saying ABA sucks, even though we have had parents come from that mind frame and by the end be very supportive of it, but come to say, this is what sucks, this is what I would recommend doing differently, and us saying, okay, yeah, let's take that and figure out how we can accommodate that more appropriately. So everybody's working much more collaboratively than it'd be a one-street training. So it's not parent training, parent collaboration. They're training us, we're training them.

SPEAKER_01: 50:11

Yeah, so the parent education part being ABA science, ABA philosophy, the analysis now coming in into our active effort to look at any given circumstance, family home, family child's school, what behaviors are being emitted that are impactful, where are there areas of development that have maybe fallen behind a little bit, to use that phrasing loosely, and taking all of those variables now, not just this behavior reduction model, which by and large used to be the one thing, and we even had labels for it, right? Protests, elopement, you know, again, not being facetious or trying to be disparaging of those phrases, but really indicative of how how singular, how one-angled we were being. We were looking at it from a very, very singular perspective. This really opens up the array much wider, empowering parents, right? I like to tell parents the idea that, yes, it's got to be parent empowerment. The idea that, you know, even if we go to a basic ABC analysis, this is what we observe happening. This is what you're doing in consequence. It's maintaining the behavior. Oh, that's my fault then. No, quite the contrary. We're saying is that you have high influence over two-thirds of this contingency. And so we're saying that through these various strategies that we can brainstorm and collaborate with you on, we can we can almost guarantee watching we can guarantee some level of change whether or not that's the desired change is what we continue to analyze with you as part of this dynamic service again far cry from the beginning when we were trying to say yeah you know you're going to set up this visual schedule and that's going to be a discrete trial time for your child Now we're saying you're going to set up a routine and you're going to make a concerted effort to spend some time with your child engaging in these various different activities, knowing that a discrete trial, you know, trial types and parenting are really, really far apart sometimes if you look at it from that technical basis. But now we're allowing for the power of repetitive exposure toward learning and to be a part of a very open-ended, much wider array of the idea of parent education and parent collaboration toward finding the answers that work, not one answer that we've come up with in the lab. Parent

SPEAKER_03: 52:38

empowerment. I really, really like that. It's interesting because I've been dealing with some risk issues and stuff like that. I was talking to my doctor buddy who was saying that I should have taken more ownership of my situation. And at first I was kind of like, wait, what do you mean? They're the doctor. They know everything. I should just listen to them blindly. But at the end of the day, it's my risk. So yeah, somebody else could be at fault. But at the end of the day, I'm the one that has to deal with the repercussions. Same thing with parents. At the end of the day, it's your kid. So feeling that you're empowered enough to express your whatever you want to happen, I think is really, really important because we deal with three kinds of parents that we work with. We deal with parents that Ask us or parents that get a strategy and go and implement it to the best that they can. We deal with parents that ask us for a strategy and then don't implement it at all. But they want to kind of save face. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll ignore my kid or yeah, I'll do this just because they want to save face. And then we deal with the parents that get our strategy and are like, nope, this isn't going to work. And they're honest with us and trying to either have it be group one or group three. I think it's the most effective for parents. for our clients. If we're getting those parents in group two that say they'll do it, but won't do it, that probably goes back to not being empowered. And we want to be able to work a little bit more collaboratively and not feel like they have to save face for us, because that's only going to hurt their kid in the long run. Take that ownership and feel like they can advocate and feel that empowerment. And as there's more information and as ABA goes on longer and longer, Hopefully there is enough information out there that parents feel like they can advocate for their kids. Because again, at the end of the day, it's their kid that's going to reap the benefits in their life. So no matter how good of a job we did or bad of a job we did, it still comes down to their kids. So hopefully through these parent groups and things like that, they know the questions they can ask. They have the resources, the people, the sounding board that they all can use. work with their kids so they don't, you know, end up 15 years into a therapy and feel like, I don't know what went on and now my kid didn't progress as much as I wanted them

SPEAKER_01: 54:53

to. So it's a lot more than just behavior management, certainly a lot more than just behavior reduction, both phrases that were used commonly in our field, you know, years, now decades ago hopefully, things that we should start looking beyond. And the idea of parent education, parent collaboration, Parent empowerment, the idea that just because you didn't implement the exact, precise, lab-based procedure that I told you to, and now the undesired behavior is omitted again, that a parent might feel like, oh, I got it wrong or it's my fault. We like to say, well, you didn't necessarily get it wrong, you just saw behavior omitted that's still undesired. which means what are you gonna do next time, right? And I think we had that so wrong for so many years and always having a lot of templated cookie cutter approaches, again, going back to blanket ignoring for extinction, things that we've alluded to in this show and in other episodes. Yeah, we're moving in the right direction for sure and looking at parents as active collaborators, active influences in their dynamic homes, knowing that they should be spending much more time than we are, even in most high-impact treatment models, they should be spending a lot more time with their children than we are in intervention, and therefore should have many, many different responses to any given behavioral circumstance, and not just toward addressing undesired behaviors and replacing them, but developing a whole bunch of other behaviors around that toward the whole child.

SPEAKER_03: 56:27

Yeah, you mentioned my fault. One question that always catches me a little bit off guard is when parents will come to me and they'll say, my kid did this and this is what I did. Is that okay? Or did I do that wrong? And I'm like, why are you asking me? I'm not a parent. And that just shows that's, you know, another level of kind of disempowerment. My response now is always, well, what happened? Are you happy with the um response are you happy with the result of that situation or not if you're not happy let's look at another option and i don't know if i'll be able to give you the rest the best option i'll be able to give you a different one if you are happy then then good who am i to tell you if what you did is right or wrong as a parent

SPEAKER_01: 57:07

well sir we've covered a lot of ground we're near the end here we want to say actively reach out to the parents of those children you might be providing treatment with I would say, we would say, make sure that they're active parts of so-called ABA sessions, that you're actively meeting with them outside of those sessions as much as possible where they're less distracted. And then we're looking at their behavior in this whole treatment or intervention milieu as well and saying things that you do actively and collaboratively with your child, with us, are going to have perhaps the biggest impact in all of this.

SPEAKER_03: 57:42

Absolutely. And in California, there's resources that can help with co-pays. There's ways of the state paying you to work with your kids. There's all sorts of resources in various different cities that are available for you. And then parent groups and things like that. So like Mike said, please, please, please be your kid's biggest advocate. Feel empowered. And if your ABA provider is telling you what to do, you feel like they're not working with you, Find one that will work with you and not tell you what you

SPEAKER_01: 58:12

need to do. So, if you're a parent, you're a teacher, you're an ABA professional, you're an autistic adult, always analyze responsibly. Cheers.

SPEAKER_00: 58:25

ABA on Tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for today. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.