If you want to upset a self-described Autism Mom, all you have to do is tell her that ABA is abusive.
This argument breaks out on social media so many times every single day.
Autism is an unusual condition because the community is so sharply divided.
On one side you have the neurotypical parents and families of autistic children, and on the other you have the online community of adult autistic people, many of whom are parents to autistic children.
The two sides disagree on virtually everything, but arguably the most contentious subject is Applied Behaviour Analysis Therapy.
ABA Therapists and many families of autistic people hail it as the most effective, most scientifically proven way to help autistic children develop life skills such as speech, potty training, and going to the grocery store without going into full meltdown mode.
Autistic adults– many of whom have been through ABA as children– say that it is abuse.
You can imagine how that statement sounds to loving parents whose children adore their ABA therapist and who would never knowingly abuse their beloved child.
You can imagine how it feels to be told that the gold-standard treatment which is bleeding your finances dry so that you can help your child is actually abuse.
The difficulty is that when people hear the word “abuse,” they think of pain and violence.
ABA has a big history of those things, too. Its founder, O. Ivar Lovaas, used electric shocks to stop children from engaging in their obsessive, repetitive behaviours. He systematically trained them with equal combinations of love and pain to behave more like non-autistic children.
He thought he was saving them, turning a raw bundle of nerve endings into something resembling a human being.
One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is you have to construct a person. You have the raw materials but you have to build the person.
-Lovaas
Whenever ABA comes up, so does Lovaas. Autists point out that he used these same techniques to pioneer gay conversion therapy, which, like ABA, has also been proven to be deeply harmful to the human psyche. They also point out that while fewer ABA therapists use things like electric shock, it is still used and considered important by several institutions.
“But ABA has changed,” people argue. “My ABA therapist never uses punishment. It’s all positive and reward-based.”
That is very true for many people. Most ABA therapists don’t set out to hurt children. And yet, despite making ABA therapy fun and positive, the underlying goals of ABA have not changed.
And it is these goals that, like gay conversion therapy, do long-term damage to the human psyche.
The reason parents and ABA therapists can’t see it as abusive is because they can’t see it from an autistic point of view.
Let’s take a moment to look at some ABA in progress.
So? Did you see any child abuse?
Probably not.
How about here?
Or here?
Sure, the child was unhappy in the first video but the teacher was patient and she recovered, right?
And in the second video, they’re trying to teach children not to be disruptive, but they aren’t punishing the child or anything.
In all of these videos the children are never yelled at, scolded, shamed, or injured. They are praised and rewarded when they get things right, and often the kids seem to be enjoying the games.
No electric shocks, no aversive, nothing to make the experience traumatic, right?
Wrong.
Allistic people can’t see it, because they don’t understand how it feels to be autistic.
Let’s go back to that first video.
While they do not address it in the voice-over, if you watched it again you would notice how often the therapists take the children’s hands and fold them into the children’s lap.
You would also notice how often the child’s feelings are ignored.
In the first video, several of the children begin rubbing their eyes and looking tired, but they do not address this.
In the video with the girl in the supermarket, an autistic person can spot that she was getting overstimulated, exhausted, and was increasingly desperate to escape this environment.
In the video with the crying child, an autistic person wonders why she is so unhappy. Is she exhausted? Overtired? Overwhelmed? And when she stops fussing and goes back to doing the work, we can see the resignation on her face.
She isn’t happier. She’s just accepted that her feelings don’t matter and the fastest way to escape the situation is by complying.
In the last, you can see that ABA therapists deliberately ignore attempts to communicate or produce behaviours that have not been demanded by the therapist.
The child wants his mother’s attention. Would I ignore my child while trying to listen to what his doctor was telling me? Probably. But I would “shhh” or pat his arm to let him know that he was heard, and I would be with him in a minute.
Notice that ABA doesn’t tell you to go back to the child after and find out what they needed or wanted.
And that is the problem with ABA.
Not the rewards, not the silly imitation games. The problem with ABA is that it addresses the child’s behaviours, not the child’s needs.
Think of those happy little children in that first video.
Now understand that sessions like this are not a couple of hours a week. ABA therapists recommend that small children between 2 and 5 go through 40 hours a week of this type of learning.
40 hours a week.
No WONDER those kids are rubbing their eyes.
My allistic eight year old doesn’t do 40 hours a week of school. He goes to school from nine to three and gets a half hour recess and a half hour lunch. That’s 5 hours a day five days a week. 25 hours of active learning. And much of his class time is actually quiet reading, playing with learning materials, gym, or talking in a circle with his peers. So make it less than 20 hours a week of being actively taught.
Imagine asking double that for a preschooler.
Now consider that ABA is designed to ignore any protests the child might make.
ABA is not designed to consider the child’s feelings or emotional needs.
I’m not making a jump when I say that. You can go to any ABA website and read what they say and you’ll see that there will be no discussion of the child’s emotional welfare or happiness, only behaviours.
To ABA, behaviour is the only thing that matters. ABA considers autistic children as unbalanced kids who need to be balanced out, and if you balance their behaviour, they are fixed.
“…what you need to do is reduce those excesses like the self stimulatory behavior, repetitive behaviors, and increase the skills. And then what will happen is after the child really learns a set of foundational skills; then they will start relating more to other people.”
— Deborah Fein PhD
As you can see from the above video, “self-stimulation”, one of the “excesses” of autism behaviours, is considered a kind of boredom fidget– something useless that replaces real learning and interaction.
When they are erased and replaced with “life skills,” then this is celebrated as a success.
Any autistic person will tell you is that this is NOT what stimming is.
Stimming isn’t just like doodling when you’re bored, or throwing a basketball.
Stimming is a comforting self-soothing behaviour which helps us reduce stress, feel more comfortable in uncomfortable environments, and regulate our emotions.
Many of us feel that our stims are a form of communication – just as a smile or a frown communicates something about our internal states, so do our stims, if you would just pay attention. Moreso, in fact, since many autistic people smile when they are anxious or frown when they are perfectly content. Studies show that non-autistic people are terrible at interpreting our facial expressions.
If my husband sees me stimming more than usual in the middle of the day, he frowns and asks if my day is going okay. But many times he mistakes my emotions based on my facial expressions. My stims are better at translating my emotions than my face is, unless I’m actively animating my face in an allistic way for the benefit of my allistic audience.
Which is exhausting, by the way.
40 hours a week is too much for me so I can’t imagine how a small child manages it.
Grabbing my hands when I stim the way ABA recommends would NOT help my day go better.
It would be an excellent way to piss me off and make me feel frustrated and anxious, though.
It’s one thing to stop a child from hurting themselves by banging their head. It’s another to stop a harmless stim like hand flapping. You’re causing the child emotional discomfort just because the behaviour strikes you as weird.
Go back and watch some of those videos again, noting how often the autistic children are interrupted from hand-waving, making noise, crying, or otherwise trying to express and relieve their emotions.
Notice how often they get the child to make eye contact. Many autistic people find eye contact extremely uncomfortable. The way the children’s bodies are touched and manipulated so frequently, in corrective redirection, is upsetting the children. Their faces reflect confusion and sometimes distress.
But learning to tolerate discomfort is what ABA is all about.
Watch that child enter the grocery store. See how she looks all around? The noise and the lights are stressful and distracting. She wants to please her family and get the cookie pieces so she goes along with the act of putting food in the cart, but after a while she is worn out and can’t stand it anymore.
The mother comments that if they relented at this point and took the child out of the store, her daughter would be rewarded for behaving this way.
That is probably true. If you are in pain, and you scream “Ouch!” and someone comes running and relieves your pain, you’ll probably yell “Ouch” again the next time something hurts you.
Is that… bad?
The parents say the ABA really helped their daughter.
Did it really help the child, though? Or the parents?
The grocery store isn’t any less noisy or bright or overwhelming. And the child obviously still finds it difficult to go in. Instead, she has learned to keep her feelings to herself, to try and focus on pleasing her family, and bottle up her stress inside until she can’t take it any more.
That’s a healthy thing to teach a child, right?
With time she may become excellent at this. She may be able to go to the store, put items in the cart, and go home without a meltdown.
But the meltdown WILL come.
It will come over something minor, some silly thing that seems like nothing and pushes her over the edge where she was already teetering. And they will wonder where it came from. They’ll talk about how unpredictable her meltdowns can be.
It isn’t unpredictable to us.
We can see it coming. We can see that her autism hasn’t been treated to improve her life so much as to improve her family’s life. And while that is important too, wouldn’t it be better to find a solution that works for everyone?
Did they try ear defenders, and dark glasses?
Did they try encouraging her to stim if stressed?
Did they teach her a polite way to let them know when she has had enough and needs to leave the situation?
I don’t know. I don’t know them. I don’t know their child.
But I do know what autism feels like.
I know that ear defenders are not part of standard ABA protocols. Instead of teaching them to understand their sensory needs and self-advocate for having their needs met, they are taught to ignore them.
I know that ABA demands the child’s attention but refuses to give attention back when the child demands it.
I know that ABA aims to be positive and rewarding for the child, but doesn’t allow the child to tap out whenever they need to.
I know that ABA considers vital emotional regulation tools to be problems that must be extinguished.
I know that neurotypical pre-schoolers are not usually expected to learn for 40 hours a week.
I know that neurotypical children are encouraged to express their emotions, not smother them.
I know that ABA believes in removing a child’s language tool like the iPad when they are naughty. I notice that the ABA therapist working with the 8-year-old boy only handed him his communication tool in between “discrete trials.”
I know from activists like Cal Montgomery that even adult autistic people have their communication tools routinely taken away from them if they don’t “comply” to the demands of their therapists and caregivers.
I know that if I ask someone if they think it is abusive to remove a child’s only way of contacting their parents, or to ignore a child in distress, or to force a child into a situation that they find uncomfortable/painful, or refuse to help a child when they are suffering and overwhelmed, they will say yes.
As long as I don’t mention that the child is autistic, anyway.
Autistic kids are different, apparently.
Whenever autistic people protest ABA, we are told that we don’t understand, that we don’t know how hard autistic children are to live with. They talk about improving the child’s independence and argue that it isn’t cruel to teach a child to write or play with toys.
They don’t see how weird it is to try to systematically shape a child’s behaviour to teach them to play with a toy the “right” way.
They don’t see that 40 hours a week of brainwashing a child to put up with stress and discomfort without expressing their feelings might be a bad idea in the long run.
They don’t see how wrong it is to teach a child that their way of feeling comfortable and soothed is wrong and that ignoring your feelings and physical needs is good and gets you approval from your teachers and parents.
They don’t see that it is abusive to ignore a child’s attempts to communicate because they aren’t “complying” with a demand that makes them uncomfortable.
They don’t see how dangerous it is to teach a child to do whatever they are ordered to do, no questions asked, and to never object or say “no.”
They don’t think about the fact that 70% of people with ASD have experienced sexual abuse by the time they are college age.
They don’t think about how this person will learn to stand up for themselves or advocate for their needs when they were systematically trained in preschool never to disagree, speak up, or disobey.
Do what I say.
Put your hands in your lap.
Don’t cry. Don’t complain.
Listen to me.
I won’t listen to you.
This is not abuse.
…But, you know, the kid gets bubbles and tickles so it’s obviously safe and totally okay.
What do we know?
Our feelings don’t matter anyway.
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492 Responses
I guess I am a horrible mom. I am doing everything in my power to help my nonverbal son with autism find his voice. When he wants something, even though as a mom I know what he wants, I make him “communicate” what he wants. This might be a point or a vocalization. So I guess I am an abusive parent for forcing him to do something he does not want to. I understand that this was written by someone with autism and a lot of people are commenting have autism but clearly you can function in the world. What about those individuals who cannot? You can tell me to just put him in speech therapy but he is not even at the point where he can “focus” enough to get anything out of speech therapy (told to me by a few professionals). He is allowed to stim all he wants and he is allowed to play with his toys the way he wants. He is taught that there are different ways to play with his toys and he is stopped when he bites his hands as a form of stimming out of fear that he could injure himself. Again, I guess I am an awful abusive parent since I don’t allow him to bang his head and bite his hands. If that is the case, that I am an abusive parent because of this, I am okay with being labeled as one.
She explicitly says “It is one thing to stop a child from hurting themselves by banging their head.” Encouraging your child to communicate his needs is GREAT. Keeping your child from hurting himself or others is GREAT. Letting him play with toys how he wants and stim all he wants is GREAT. Literally nobody said otherwise. This is a very specific set of criticisms of very specific practices which you say you do not practice. Why are you up in arms defending against an imaginary attack? If your comment is true, then this literally ain’t about you and you can move on with your life.
Nobody in this comment section said that you should let him bang his head (I assume against something and not in the head Bob way) or bite his hands. Neither has this article. This is a very guilt trippy, woe is me type of tone to take to an article which by your own words in this comment shouldn’t apply to you bc you’re not doing ABA. The autistic people commenting and the one who wrote this article are specifically saying you shouldn’t restrict non-harmful behaviors or force a child to act like a Neurotypical child.
If you want your son to communicate with you more, maybe get him used to the idea that it’s okay by providing him with a text to speech device or AAD. That way he can communicate with you and it gives him another option beyond gestures. Find a speech therapy that will Incorporate the things he already likes to do into the therapy to keep him attentive and motivated and have patience with him. Sure some nonverbal autistic individuals will remain that way but some of them just need more time and patience before they start speaking. Which can also be done at home just as much as in speech therapy.
Is making yourself out to be a martyr really so much more important than actually genuinely listening to people like your son? Nothing here was a condemnation of helping an autistic child if (and when) you’re simultaneously listening to them (including nonverbal communication) and searching for a balance between their comfort, needs and things that are important and necessary for them to learn, let alone keeping them from harming themselves which was literally mentioned as a necessity. No one has labeled you a horrible mom and an awful abusive parent other than yourself but by doing that you’re making certain should anyone ever have any suggestions to you or bring up ways in which you could improve, it’ll be impossible to have any dialogue. But then, that’s the point of ‘So I guess I’m the worst parent ever!!’, to shut down any and all conversation, and that way there’s no need to honestly look at which things you’re doing well and where you might try something different. It’s also the chosen way of many parents who don’t want to hear the things they did that hurt their children when those children would like to talk about them in order to heal. Just one, ‘I guess I am just the worst parent then, I’m okay with being labeled that (by myself)!’ and those kids will know they better heal their wounds on their own because their parent is too busy playing the martyr to have a healthy, constructive dialogue.
Nobody ever said that you’re an abusive parent other than yourself. Nobody said that your child should hurt themselves. You’re getting upset over an attack that doesn’t exist.
As a single parent of 2 and doing 90 percent of the work and the other 10 is just where my ex puts my son on minecraft I find it hard to function in my role and follow responsibilities I have with the challenges present by my children. My 8 year old son is high functioning and my 13 year old daughter has health/immune challenges. My son can get violent and it’s hard. He isn’t independent with doing things. This is hard. I am beyond tired here as an older mom in perimenopause. Sooo I validate feelings look for needs help with communication but I have had consequences for hurting because it is scary. I am trying to help find ways to redirect when explosions are about to happen. I don’t agree with ABA but I need tools. I need training. I don’t want compliant kids but I need Cooperation and safety for all. Where do we go for that? Is it time consuming and expensive? I will dedicate time but it can’t be excessive. I work and do it all on my own. If you have suggestions I truly appreciate it. Thank you for thus amazing post!!! It’s helpful.
The only suggestion that will actually work is to love your children.
That is all. Love them.
Be there for them, care for them, hear them, see them.
These are the things my parents never did, which increased my anger outbursts, decreased my function and destroyed my sense of self-worth, I had 5 years of ABA, neglecting parents, no friends in that time because nobody believed in me that I could have relationships and the only way I can succeed in this world as an adult is to mask and ignore my emotions, otherwise I am labeled as a violent retarded person.
Without all the noise in the world and people trying to do what’s “best” to make things less “hard”(which, I am trying to understand how hard it is, I’m not a parent, but I’m familiar with it), we can boil it down to children – no matter what kind – just need natural attention and care. Explosions will happen, but they will decrease if the kid is understood, so you know why and when they are going to happen, and give THEM the tools for curbing that. Then they will have no REASON to be angry anymore or not feel overwhelmed because they will know what to do or who to turn to, who to trust and that builds them up over time. IMO you don’t need training. Mother birds don’t need training to take care of their chicks. And it’s not just autism that puts it to blame. Autism is not a problem. The way people that handle it poorly because they are confused and scared are. DO NOT FEAR YOUR CHILDREN it can lead to them learning to fear you because you will turn to tactics and manipulation. It takes time and patience. I hope this comment helps someone in some way.
People with autism perceive this world completely differently and can find new solutions and answers, but society has limited itself too much and cannot allow this, playing this factor in every possible way. In Israel, for example, people with autism are hired for jobs with specific activity spectrums, where few people are able to work. Therefore, even in the gaming industry there is an opportunity to realize oneself, for example in raid carry
Hi! As an autistic adhd person who works in ABA and directly works with children, this is not how ABA should be and I’m truly sorry to those who never had a great ABA experience. The company that I work for strives to maintain client dignity and respect. We never make the kids feel unheard, we always validate their emotions and help them communicate in a healthy way. The only time that we intervene with stimming or other behavior is when it becomes a danger to themselves or others such as biting, hitting, throwing objects, etc. We help them navigate tough social situations, help them learn to share, potty train, read, etc. I hope that this allows others to understand that not all ABA is bad ABA. I do acknowledge that there are some terrible therapists out there, and I hope that those who had bad experiences heal from their experiences. I send all my love!
The things you describe aren’t exclusive to ABA and the methods behind it which are the problem and what makes ABA practices harmful. ABA practices have changed over the years to not look like how it started but it can still have the same affects. It’s also that a lot of practices that call themselves ABA aren’t following ABA methods, they are including methods that are rooted in other types of therapy. There is no good way to apply ABA methods as the goal is only surrounding behaviors, and not patient needs. Even if you do address them yourself, that is not within aba methods.
ABA at it’s core is a behaviorist model that analyzes the behavior of a person, then uses various methods (usually DTT) to stop unwanted behavior and encourage others. Though that doesn’t allow for the person that is doing the behavior work through reasoning as to why some behaviors are unwanted and others are wanted. This also at it’s core leaves what is considered “unwanted behaviors” completely up to usually the practitioner and the parents, which is another big problem. Even if the chosen behaviors are genuinely helpful for the autistic kid, the method would require the encouragement and discouragement of behaviors. At best it could be applied to ignoring the unwanted behavior which is inherently harmful if the child is just communicating emotions in the only ways they know how, and encouragement of wanted behavior which is just positive conditioning and has long term harmful consequences. Those being that it only teaches the kid to do that specific thing over and over and not necessarily anything past it. A lot of practices also still use things like tokens, and prizes as rewards to encourage behavior. sometimes that reward is just “you get to do a thing you like, or you don’t get something you hold sentimentally taken from you”. Or worse is using food as a behavior modifier, either withholding food for not completing a task, or only getting snacks/food to keep a kid engaged in a lesson. This can have adverse affects on how autistic children build relationships and understanding with food.
The focus of the comments seem to be on how “not all aba stops stimming” but doesn’t recognize that the method behind the stopping of stimming is the ultimate problem. It’s still only focused on what the autistic person is doing and changing that through “positive” or negative reinforcement, when that is more of an issue that doesn’t help the kids in these programs understand how to synthesize the behaviors that have been encouraged.
Just to add to your argument, there’s also this article.
I have to ask, do these people actually have children with autism?
What a load of nonsense.
As a parent I can say ABA has made all the difference to my child.
It’s given him a better quality of life. I had to struggle for years to get him ABA because of prejudices like these and it absolutely had an absolutely devastating impact on my health.
My child has never been more happier than when in his ABA sessions. And now that he has it full time everyone can see the difference it has made to him, especially in terms of communication, it’s like I finally see the child that I as a mother knew was there all along but no one else could see because he couldn’t express himself.
It depends on how good the therapist is at the end of the day and how well they engage the child. But to dismiss it is just unfair. Autistic children have as much right as any neurotypical child to access education and every day life. It should not be up to some person who does not have the experience of raising an autistic child to tell parents what is and what is not good for their child. As a single parent I have never received any support from these professionals on coping with an autistic child. The only light in these dark and depressing times for me was ABA. So I have had enough of people making these presumptions about the impact of ABA.
You realize that a good deal of the people who are saying ABA is bad and abusive and everything are…Autistic people. Right? You realize the original fundamentals of ABA was created by a man who would not have even seen your child as human, right? Like that’s a thing. Also literally right above this is an article stating that based on actual statistics that ABA is not effective. 76% of those in ABA do not improve at all. 9% get worse. It’s cool and all I guess that you seem to have a moment that you’re in that 16% who do manage to improve. But that doesn’t change the origins of why this came to be and it being bad. Autistic people aren’t going to starting tooting horns and singing this practices praises just because “it’s changed”. I want you to go look up who endorses ABA. Autism Speaks. I want you to look up their history of ableism and the way that they patently have ignored and dismissed Autistic people’s voices. How they are more leaning into trying to “cure” and “prevent” Autism and fear mongering about what it looks like than in how to support the Autistic person. How one of their founders admitted in front of her Autistic child, that if her non-autistic child had not also been in the car. She would have driven it off of a cliff with the Autistic child inside.
And I want you to then still tell Autistic people in this article and in the comments that it’s “a load of nonsense”. You are telling people and dismissing and discounting the words of Autistic people. Because ABA allegedly by your words helped your Autistic child improve. People in this article’s comments who have supported ABA barring very few people have all been allistic. Not Autistic. The people speaking in opposition of ABA and saying “hey there are other ways to help your kid you don’t have to shove them into this specific ‘therapy’.” Are Autistic people. Autistic adults who also used to be when younger Autistic children.
But please! Keep singing praises about it over Autistic voices. It totally doesn’t illustrate the point that when we try to tell you something or express ourselves that we are either ignored to be spoken over or don’t know what we’re talking about. 🙂
Just to be clear, here’s that article:
https://therapistndc.org/aba-is-not-effective-so-says-the-latest-report-from-the-department-of-defense
Some of the things you’re saying about your own kid are just really messed up. Like “I finally see the child that I as a mother knew was there all along because no one could see it” Like I’m glad he does have more tools that help him communicate, but it makes it sound like you’re more worried about how others see your kid than how well you’re kid is actually doing. Also it’s a bit worrying if therapy is the thing where he seems the happiest or what you see as him being that happiest and not enjoying his life. Like of course we don’t want the kid to be upset and actively suffering through therapy, but what is it to be “happier than ever” for him? Is it showing happiness in the way that is encouraged? Because that might not be the most natural way for him to express that. Sure ABA could help him engage in communication, but are they also trying to understand him where he’s at? This is a very surface level view of what is going on. I’m not sure what prejudavces you talk about that prevented you from getting your kid into ABA but I doubt it was the people that were speaking against ABA. Since ABA is like the only treatment that is used mainstream for autisim and covered by insurance.
There is also nothing in this article that says a child doesn’t have the right to an education and access to a good life. If anything the article is strictly for that. ABA is not a normal education, we would never apply ABA to neurotypical children to teach skills, because that’s not how any human learns. Autistic people saying they don’t want kids put through ABA isn’t saying they shouldn’t have a good quality of life, it’s because through their own experiences with ABA and understanding of how autistic people tend to experience the world that ABA can be the thing that actually prevents autisitc kids from pursuing their full academic potential and having a better quality of life. It’s really deflecty and crappy to say that about people that are against ABA, to say that they don’t want these rights for autisitc people (many against ABA are themselves Autistic, and/or have autistic children).
You’re only valuing the opinions of those that are parents (who may or may not have autisim or have never gone through ABA themselves) and not even considering the voices of the people that have experienced ABA first hand, and those that understand how autistic kids experience the world. People valuing not just the resulting outward behavior of the autistic kids, but the methods, how it can make autistic children feel presently and in the long term is why so many are talking about ABA like this. It makes it seem like the value you have of it is only for what it did for your life and not for your son. Especially with the line of ABA being your light in the dark. Is it that when people criticism ABA that you’re taking it as an attack against yourself? Because I can assure you that’s not what’s happening. Many speaking against ABA know understand what parent go through when it comes to seeking help for their autistic kids. What they’re trying to do is show the parents that it can be incredibly harmful, and that it’s not the only way to help autistic kids. There are better ways.