I’ve talked before about my decade working in special education, mostly in the field of applied behavior analysis as an autism intervention tutor. I get a lot of guff from people in the field who like to pretend it’s evolved so far beyond Lovaas’ work that it’s a totally different animal now. Well, as someone who was working until last year, let me assure you that’s a crock of shit.

Let me tell you a story a behaviorist once told me, maybe five years ago.

She had an autistic client who was in his teens and had just started forming some solid friendships. He and this group of friends, presumably allistic peers, went out to McDonald’s after school once a week. They got food, talked, hung out. The therapist was happy and he was happy.

Then he read a book about animal rights and decided he wanted to be vegetarian and that he didn’t want to support McDonald’s anymore. The therapist was not happy. She told him that if he did that he would lose out on on a social opportunity and lose all his friends. She did not present this as a choice he could make, that he could use this new passion to find new friends, that he could even talk to his friends about it. He believed her and kept going to McDonald’s and stopped talking about animal rights.

She told me this as an example of successful social skills training.

People will say ABA is a lot of things in theory. This is what ABA is in the real world. It goes unchecked, it goes unquestioned, and that is why people are fighting it.

12:35 am • 13 January 2016 • 1,556 notes