A view of autism from along the spectrum

A lot has been written about the death of a young boy with autism this past week while undergoing chelation therapy. I expect that this tragic loss will have an effect that will raise the level of accountability of those providing chelation treatments. I expect these changes will be brought on by:

• Increases in lawsuits brought by families or individuals that were either not helped or suffered negative side-effects from the treatement
• Pressure from management of medical institutions on the physicians practicing chelation therapy. The institutions will want to avoid both liability and controversy.
• Increases in rates for malpractice insurance for chelation practitioners. The increases will make some practitioners raise their rates and others will stop providing this treatment because they can’t afford the increased cost.
• Increased awareness of the risks which will get support organizations and governments more publicly addressing the controversy around the treatment.

I can’t predict whether these changes will be big or small. Some of these changes are a direct reflection of the health care and legal systems in the US and may not apply elsewhere. Whatever the scope of the changes, I hope and pray that they lead to avoiding another such tragedy.

I came accross this article in the Yahoo! news feeds this week about families in Texas dealing with shool system issues. The article was the first I’ve read in a while that wove in information, throughout the article, on the emotional aspects that parents with an autistic child face. OK, let me clarify. It’s the first that presents emotional aspects using words like “worrying, arguing, and accepting challenges” rather than words like “nightmare, dispair, and traumatic.” The article itself is not groundbreaking but I thought the tone stood out, in a postive way, from most other articles I’ve read lately.

Every so often, I experience an epiphany and something with which I’ve struggled to master suddenly becomes intuitive and obvious. Over the past several weeks, I’ve had several, all relating to the nature of learning.

At the end of the past school year, a behavior analyst presented a suggestion to the school team for my ten year old son. He encouraged the team to try a completely positive reward system in which positive behaviors were acknowledged, up to two hundred times a day. A ‘token’ would be provided for each occurrence and the tokens could be used for a more tangible reward. We immediately implemented a system for both summer school and home.

The same son and I are currently taking an obedience class with our dog. I’ve found teaching an animal makes some aspects of learning more obvious. I can observe without the interference of emotions, judgments, and similar mental clutter that can cloud my view of my own, or my children’s, learning.

The epiphany was this: Aside from innate skills, all learning breaks down to repetition and reward. Forget about everything else, start with these two things and we’re on the path to success. It’s true for learning how to hit a baseball and it’s true for learning behavior appropriate for the classroom.   But please don’t think I’m comparing my children to dogs!    :^)

Of course, the type of repetition and reward must vary. Visual learners will need visual supports as part of the repetition. The amount of repetition needed will vary between persons and situations. The reward also changes. It’s amazing how positively my son has responded to the praise and positive feedback throughout the day. My initial thought was that several hundred times a day was too much and that the tangible rewards purchased by the tokens would become to important. I sure was wrong.

As I thought about it more, I realized that hearing so much positive feedback is exactly what my son needs right now to help him build positive behavior habits to replace some of the negative ones. I watch him closely as he ‘lights up’ after getting positive feedback. I can see the sense of pride building in himself. He goes out of his way to do things that both earn tokens but also earn the praise and feeling of pride. It’s obvious to me that the praise and pride are a bigger deal to him than the tokens.
We’re using the same token program with our six-year old, mostly to prevent sibling rivalry over ‘tokens’. The reward has much less impact on him as the reward (praise and tokens) don’t mean much to him. He’s a different child, in less need of behavior changes, and not motivated as much by positive feedback.

The cycle of learning gets to be really fun as I teach the boys how to teach the dog. Training a dog requires the boys to shift from learners to teachers. And I change to teaching them how to teach the dog and we talk about reinforcement and giving the dog positive feedback. It’s an interesting shift in roles for all of us.