I will say that I agree about ABA in general. We didn’t see much benefit in it at first. We frankly felt that our son was too smart to go along with a strictly skinnerian approach. However, most of your comments can be applied to many, many non-autistic people, within the context of the traditional public school curriculum. Those with minority learning styles have always had a hard time in traditional learning environments. I don’t want to draw too much of a comparison between autistic people and say, people with dislexia. Many of the things you allude to will clearly take me the rest of my life to understand fully.

We finally went with a mixed approach (ABA and DIR/Floortime), with our son, that focuses primarily on encouraging initiative and self motivation. We can see that our son actually likes it when he is able to achieve in one program or another. At the same time, we definately couldn’t see much value in the strict ABA approach.

As regards the issue of society not being open to including people with disabilities…well, I didn’t know how true that was until we realized our son would have a disability. And I’ve come to realize that viewing his disability as a disaster is completely wrong. He’s a gift exactly as he is and being different would make him…not him.

I still think giving him all the support we can now will help to limit his disability in the future, like working a muscle he’ll have to use in the future.

Someone pointed out to me that the way I use my body is very frugal.   That is true of mind as well.  ABA is not generally very frugal.

It’s hard to describe simply and shortly though, it requires too much of “There’s an assumption in this that I don’t want to reinforce by answering the question as asked” stuff and that takes time.

I will say though that given the length of our interviews (over an hour each, I think) versus the length of the program (15 minutes), you weren’t going to get a lot of nuance, so, I’d suggest reading here, and reading Jim Sinclair’s web site where xe also talks about a lot of these things (xe and I differ on some of this, but have a lot of agreement on basic principles), and maybe reading the Autism Hub which is a blog hub containing autistic people, parents, and a few professionals. (Again, not everyone there agrees, what’s in common is a valuing of autistic people as autistic people.)

Oh also there’s a recent post, Is This Really Neutral, Everyday Terminology?, that addresses some of this.

The shortest answer I can come up with, is that I don’t really see autistic people as separate from society, so I can’t see anything wrong with integrating into society, but I don’t think society is very integrated to us, at all, and I do think that disabled people are sort of over-modified in order to fit a very narrow non-disabled norm for the comfort of non-disabled people. But that doesn’t even begin to describe what I mean.

Hope I’m welcome. I’m a parent of a still cute little boy with autism. Of course, I’m someone who doesn’t need to be convinced of the inherent worth of someone with autism, and I’m constantly amazed and the richness of Nigel’s live, as well as the richness he brings to mine. I also believe Nigel may very well learn to cope with living with the confines of societies norms, even though his verbal language development is slow and he’s developmentally behind according to “typical” standards. I have a question though regarding some of the thinking behind this (can I say?) movement. It’s purely an informational question with no opinion behind it.

Is there any notion that we are somehow doing something wrong by trying to increase our son’s awareness of the other humans around him with various forms of therapy? What about behavior modification techniques to move him towards bathroom independence? We don’t want to clean up huge messes, and like it or not, others won’t want to either. We KNOW, he wants to be a good boy, and doesn’t want to inconvenience us.

I’m the first to champion and appreciate his special, unique way of relating to the world, but I also feel there’s something to be said for integrating with society. It seems to me that throughout human evolution, societal relationships have been the key to survival and advancement. Obviously, it’s our collective responsibility to keep society enlightened and inclusive but we need each other and even “typical” children have to learn to conform to standards, right?

This is a question from a parent whose feeling his way in this role as protector and educator of a child with a “minority configuration to his sensory aparatus” (can we put it that way?). So any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Oh, if some money could help with yer troubles, B., I have a little bit. Sending you some money would be pure self-gratification on my part. I like your writing, and want you to have every accommodation to help you feel good enough to continue with it. Aside from any other good feelings I may have for you, of course.

Snork.

You have my email addy.