Blog Post 1 (Feb 18, 2017) Eng.

Hello and welcome to my new Blog “ABA Reality Check.” I am starting this journey because I feel that it is important that people get to hear about modern Applied Behavior Analysis and ABA with Verbal Behavior as it is currently available in Germany. I particularly think it is important that this information be available from someone who is well-trained, experienced and appropriately credentialed to be an ABA provider. My name is Robert Schramm. I am a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) and I focus my ABA programs on helping to educate children with Autism and other related disorders through the Knospe-ABA GmbH. I was born in Germany but lived most of my life in the United States. Although a US citizen, I have been a resident of Germany with my wife Nadine (formerly Knospe) since December of 2003.

There currently seems to be a bit of an echo chamber happening in Autism circles from people who suggest that they do not like ABA or think it is not appropriate for children with Autism. These opinions are shared and read and copied and pasted and shared and read and pasted without any real alternative viewpoints allowed in to correct misunderstandings, deny false statements, or to answer complaints in a way that isn’t then immediately taken out of context and misrepresented. My hope in this blog is to give a clear and complete description of what ABA really is, and in doing so, help to counter much of the confusion and false ideas being shared on forums like rehakids.de and on other blogging sites. I am hoping to have a place for questions to be asked but, I am not looking for long diatribes of why people are against ABA. There is plenty of places for you to go and read those (the anti-ABA crowd is anything but shy). But, if someone has a simple question to ask me such as, “How important is it that you teach a child to use better Eye contact in an ABA program?” or, “In the video linked here, why are you asking this child to drink while he is playing a game?” or, “I heard that it is important to force children to be touched in ABA programs, is this true?” I will happily share those questions with you and answer them as simply and honestly as I can.

My opinion is that the current group of anti-ABA activists in Germany are, for the most part, good people trying to do something they think is right. But, because the information they have to work with is faulty, they have been led through a “group think” to approach every possible topic of interest in ABA from a negative perspective. This leaves no room for clarity or communication to take place. I think this is very unfortunate and I hope this blog offers people a place to get real information about modern ABA from an actual ABA provider in Germany.

I think it is important to start with my background. I moved to Germany at the age of 35 shortly after marrying my German wife, Nadine. We decided that we would live in Germany for a year a two while giving me the chance to get to experience European life and get to know her family. We thought it might be a good use of our time to try to help a few families set up ABA programs while we were here. The one thing we noticed when we first arrived was that Germany was almost completely unaware of modern ABA. It seems that all of the progress and development that has been made in the science since the 1960’s and 1970’s had passed Germany by as if they were in a time warp. As far as we could tell, there were only 3 small options for ABA in Germany at that time. All three were programs that were mostly based on early “Lovaas style” ABA interventions.

*First point of interest: Although Ivar Lovaas was one of the first to apply ABA to the needs of children with Autism. ABA is NOT synonymous with the Lovaas approach to intervention. Dr. Lovaas used his own interpretation of the ABA science and literature to develop what he felt was the most effective method of support at that time. Any goals or recommendations that he made in his program were HIS recommendations and not necessarily the recommendations of the science of ABA. Although he may have been first and his approach was then replicated by many across the US and around the world, his old recommendations and writings do not necessarily continue as modern ABA procedures. It would be completely inappropriate for someone to read a quote from Dr. Lovaas stated in 1975 and say that this is what all ABA believes or does. Even Dr. Lovaas’ study (1987) that showed that ABA can have life changing positive effects on the learning ability of people with autism needs to be looked at in the context of what ABA was at the time. His specific approach to ABA was tested but the principles of ABA can be used in many ways. In fact, some of Lovaas’ approach from that time has for many years been considered inappropriate and are no longer in use in modern ABA.

The 3 companies that we found in Germany were only working with a total of about 10 children. That was it. Approximately, 10 kids in the entire country of Germany receiving ABA services in 2003. Two of the service providers had experience in Lovaas Style ABA programs and the third had developed their own form of ABA based on old Lovaas writings that was called “Verhaltenstherapie” (Behavior Therapy). My approach to ABA is not based on (or even related to) the traditional Lovaas approach. What I have always taught is ABA with Verbal Behavior (VB). In future blog posts, I imagine I will be covering some of these differences and how and why VB developed as an approach within the ABA field.

As Nadine and I began presenting on the specifics of the VB approach to ABA in Germany, two things happened quickly. One, we were being met with disdain by the traditional autism professionals in Germany who had no training or experience in ABA. They seemed to be relying completely on small bits of information they had heard about original old form Lovaas programming. Secondly, we were being contacted by families from all over Germany, who had experienced what the school system, Autism Therapy Centers (ATZ) and other therapy options had offered. But, they were frustrated in the way their questions were answered and the lack of support they recieved in helping them raise and educate their kids in the home setting.

Nadine and I tried to communicate with the established players in the field. We contacted “Hilfe für das autistische Kind.” We contacted ATZ’s and Autism groups but, were told nobody was interested in ABA because ABA was either “experimental,” “unethical,” or they just didn’t believe it worked. This was surprising news to me as I had seen, and even participated in, the sometimes remarkable work of caring and dedicated ABA providers in my time as a special education instructor and inclusion specialist in the States. These were people who consistently put the needs of the child and family ahead of their own and lived with the struggles of the families they dedicated to help. These examples were what made me decide to go back to school and get my certification in Behavior Analysis after having already finished my Master’s degree in Special Education.

However, as we received little interest from the traditional autism services for what we were doing, we focused on teaching modern ABA to the families who were searching for something better and had contacted us through our website (www.knospe-aba.com). These families were generally tired of seeing their kids falling further behind their peers. They grew frustrated as their children developed more severe and sometimes dangerous behavior issues. Sometimes these families felt their kids were being mistreated by the school and therapy system. I remember “Holding” therapy was a big thing at the time as was pushing children with Autism immediately into special schools with almost no expectations to learn.

As it turns out there were a lot of these families who were unhappy with how they were being supported in Germany. Within our first year we had more than 20 families who were asking us for ABA services. That number more than doubled in our second year. It didn’t take long for Nadine and I to realize that leaving these children and their families without support was never going to be an option and we committed that our lives were going to be spent supporting families of children with Autism and other disorders in Germany.

With many of the new families we began supporting, we would hear about all of the negative comments about ABA online that they had to wade through before finding us. They were reading things like, “ABA providers are just hear to take your money and bring it back to the States?” “ABA is too expensive and will never be paid for in Germany” “ABA providers force families to sign long-term contracts and sue families if they don’t want to continue with services.” It was actually quite surreal to me. I can’t even imagine where these ideas came from and why anyone would willingly believe that these would be our goals. How was it so easy for people who have never met us, never spoken to us, never seen our work, to automatically assume the worst. I’ll never understand this. People who had no personal knowledge of our approach or philosophy of education were online telling others not to trust us.

At first we tried to communicate with the anti-ABA community. But, they ended up being some of the most aggressive and unreasonable people I have ever dealt with in my life. I would spend hours writing a very detailed and explanatory email or post about the positive aspects of ABA and how what they were saying was not true about anything we did. But, they had this ability to completely ignore every single thing in my writing that didn’t agree with what they already wanted to believe. Then, rather than trying to understand and consider where they might have been mistaken about us, they would instead highlight a single word or sentence out of the email. They would take that word out of context, rewrite it in their responses offering a completely alternate explanation of what that word supposedly meant. Then others would jump in and respond to their post agreeing with how horrible I was based on what that person said I meant rather than what I actually said. It was disheartening. Even though they weren’t even explaining what I had said the correct way, what I actually wrote was quickly lost under 30 more posts about how bad ABA was. It was absolutely ridiculous, nonsensical and eventually became an obviously pointless endeavor.

God forbid if a parent who was engaging in an ABA program dared to mention that they disagreed with the anti-ABA activists. Whenever this happened, that parent would be attacked and shamed tirelessly until it made no sense for them to continue engaging in any way. So for the most part, those forums have sat for years as an unchallenged festering ground for mistaken impressions, misrepresentations, and condemnations of ABA based on outdated and inappropriate procedural recommendations of the 1970’s. To this day, we receive amazing videos and stories about families who have done quite impressive things with their children’s education but are afraid to say they based their kids programming on ABA for fear of scorn and ridicule.

So, Nadine and I simply turned our focus to just doing the best work we could with the families who came to us for help. We spent our first years in Germany driving around the entire country working long days and writing program recommendations deep into the night. We were constantly looking for the answers to questions like, “Why is my child hitting himself, what can we do to get him to stop making his nose bleed.” “How can I teach my child to ask for things he wants instead of grabbing or tantruming until we give it to him.” “Can you please help us potty train our 11 year old daughter?” We absolutely loved our work and were so motivated by the children and families that we got to know while spending as many as 25 days a month living and working on the road.

We were able to work out a system of service that cost families (or the Government agencies responsible) the same, or less, per year than they were already paying for traditional therapy options at the time. To get cost coverage from any landkreiss or jugendamt (German government agencies), we had to prove to them that we were able to demonstrate similar or better learning outcomes than what the child had been showing previously. In all honesty this wasn’t very hard. In just about every single case we clearly out performed traditional German therapy. Sometimes kids had made more progress with us in 6 months than they had the 6 years prior in their lives. Can you imagine the honor of helping a family teach their 16 year old boy how to say his first words? Additionally, we have never signed a single contract with any family and have always had a policy that if a family receives services that they don’t think were of value, they don’t have to pay for their last visit. And the fact is, Knospe-ABA has been here now for 13 years and we are still going strong. We have roots in Germany and are responsible for the working lives of approximately 16 Behavior Analysts, 3 office staff and a financial adviser. More importantly we are responsible for the happiness and welfare of over 300 children totaling well over a 1,000 children supported since January 2004.

Please feel free to send me a question and I will try to use your questions to help inform future blog posts as we go on this journey of discovering the truth about Modern ABA in Germany. Robert@knospe-aba.com

Check out my next post: https://medium.com/@robertschramm_29825/aba-reality-check-addd8fd97af3