Is ABA Really “Dog Training for Children”? A Professional Dog Trainer Weighs In. » NeuroClastic
Carol Millman, a professional dog trainer, compares ABA to dog training in this powerful expose.
Dog trainers don’t talk about systematically altering behaviour as if the dog weren’t a thinking, feeling, sentient being.
…I would never treat a dog that way.
The founder of ABA as it exists today, Ivar Lovaas, who is also the father of gay conversion therapy, derived the principles of his therapies from radical behaviourism.
Radical Behaviourism is considered out-of-date by modern psychologists.
B.F. Skinner tried to explain language using behaviourism, but there is a lot in psycholinguistics that frankly cannot be explained through behaviourism.
Some things are larger than reward and punishment. Empathy, for example. Creative language. Storytelling. Music.
So basically, Radical Behaviourism is broadly seen by psychology professionals as a simplistic and restrictive theory which is useful in certain situations but cannot sum up the entirety of the human experience. It doesn’t even satisfactorily answer some questions about behaviours seen in animals.
In any case, very few dog trainers use the radical behaviourism that’s employed in ABA.
So if it isn’t sufficient to properly train a dog, is it sufficient in educating a child?
ABA is focused on shaping an autistic child to behave more like a non-autistic child, even to the point of shaping the child to play more like a non-autistic child.
None of these goals refer to improving the quality of life of the child.
A dog who has been trained not to growl is considered by trainers to be a “time bomb dog.”
Studies show that dogs trained with these sorts of methods actually have an increased rate of aggression, because punishing aggressive behaviour doesn’t deal with the underlying fear and anxiety that caused the aggression in the first place.
Before a dog trainer breaks out the operant conditioning, our first task is to ensure that all of the dog’s fundamental needs are being met.
Before you train a dog you need to accept that it is a dog.
Relieve fear instead of training the dog not to show its fear. Teach your retriever to retrieve and buy a sandbox for your terrier instead of forcing your dog to ignore fundamental instincts.
It’s not only easier – but it’s much kinder.
Yet the vast majority of autistic people when polled (typically 97%) oppose ABA including and especially those who went through it as children.
A good dog trainer doesn’t extinguish behaviours which improve the dog’s mental health and happiness. But an ABA practitioner may not think twice before doing this to a human child.
The emotional needs of children are too often left entirely out of discussions about autism. This should be shocking to anyone who understands children, behaviour, or how emotions and relationships impact us.
Dog trainers understand that dogs need to chew and bark and dig, but ABA therapists don’t understand that autistic children need to repeat words and sentences, flap their hands, and sit quietly rocking in a corner when things get too much.
It focuses on training children by holding their sources of happiness hostage and using them as blackmail to get the children to meet goals which are not necessarily in the best interest of their emotional health.
