13 Nov 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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Preparing for the long holidays when you have a child with Autism

I know you may not want to hear it be we are approaching the end of the school term and the long holidays. Many parents of children with autism often face this time with a range of emotions – relief and anxiety.  Relief that there is an end in sight for the daily school & daycare routine. Anxiety when you think about how you will be keeping your child occupied over the holiday period.

Start planning for the holidays now (while you have the time and energy!)

Here are three ideas/strategies to help you cope with what’s to come:

  1. Create a visual holiday routine/schedule

For someone who struggles to differentiate between the days of the week, it is essential to establish a routine for a child with autism. By establishing a routine, you will be able to offer a sense of control and structure. It will also be much easier to transition to the back to school routine once the school term starts again next year too.

When a child is anxious about what is going to happen it will often come through in their behaviour. For example, I have seen children ask repeatedly for swimming throughout the day as they do not have an idea what they will be going next. Obviously, it’s a rare parent and child who is not going to be stressed by this behaviour (in the child’s case note being able to go swimming on demand). And yet, this behaviour may be avoidable.

With a visual schedule, children can see what is expected of them and what they can expect to do next. From a therapy perspective I would encourage you to think about including some time to practice the skills that they have mastered during therapy sessions too.

Your therapy team can help you work out how to create a visual schedule so please let them know if you’d like this help. Putting one in place now (even when it may not be as needed) is a nice way to transition into the holidays too.

  1. Let’s keep learning!

Learning does not end when the school term ends. When therapy stops (e.g. at the end of term) we often see a decline in skills acquisition and maintenance over the long holiday period. Being out of routine and not having therapy can lead to lots of stimming time and not enough skills practice.

Apart from keeping up with regular therapy sessions, I recommend my parents to spend time generalising the skills that their children have mastered within sessions. Holiday time can be spent expanding their skill sets and to exposing them to new stimuli. For example, teaching children to tact zoo animals when you make a visit to the local Perth Zoo or teaching them to tact car colours while playing “I spy” on the road.

  1. Have some down time

Being a parent is hard work. Therefore, it is very important to look after yourself during the holidays. Be it spending some alone time by the beach or even taking a short 5 minutes break to sit and sip on a hot cup of coffee before it gets cold. Do it. Because you deserve it. And remember, happy parents usually make for happy children too!

Holidays don’t have to be stressful!

In actual fact, holidays can be a lot of fun. Start thinking about how you will set up your days, particularly once you get past Christmas.

Please talk with your Program Managers about the activities that you could do to help generalise the skills that your child has learned during their therapy sessions.  While the office will be shut from the 22nd December through to the 7th January, most of the team will be on board through-out the rest of January.  We usually have a bit more flex during the holidays so increasing therapy sessions is also an option.

Rachel Puan

Assistant Program Manager (ABACAS)

01 Nov 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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Back to Basics (Part Five) – Behaviour Change…What does it take?

In the last post of this series, I want to talk about behaviour change and ABA. I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about ABA being more than just tackling problem behaviour.  ABA build skills, provides early intervention, social training, and much more. However, tackling problem behaviour is something we do, and often do very well. Working with problem behaviours requires multiple steps, and commitment from a number of people.

What’s involved with behaviour change?

I’ve outlined some basic steps for effective intervention below:

  1. Baseline
    Your Program Manager will want to establish a stable base-line before they intervene. This can tell us a number of things such as, is the behaviour naturally decreasing and maybe doesn’t need intervention? What situations does the behaviour occur in, and are we able to predict it accurately? What does the behaviour look like?
  2. Function
    All behavioural interventions should be function based. Interventions which are function based are supported in the research to be the most effective. Evaluating this might require formal testing, or can sometimes be done through observations.
  3. Replacement Behaviours
    How can this child get their needs met in other ways? People have a right to get their needs met, and others have a right to have theirs met too. The solution should involve not only reducing the problem behaviours, but increasing skills and tolerance of the reasonable preferences of others.
  4. Plan
    Once all this information is gathered, there needs to be a long term plan to fade any artificial systems that might need to be put in place to increase tolerance and skill building to a level that can be maintained by the natural environment.

Making sure everyone is on board

The initial phases are the easier part, once all this information is gathered and a plan is written, all the people involved in the child’s life will need to buy-in to the plan. This means that they commit to following the recommendations consistently, across the board, and increase to the next stage of the intervention only when criteria is met in all environments. This part of the process is just as important as the plan itself.

For more information about ABA and how we can help with challenging behaviours please talk to your Program Manager (Rachel or I). We will be able to work out with you the best way to help.

Jasmin Fyfe

ABACAS Program Manager

24 Oct 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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Back to Basics (Part Four) – Reinforcement and Punishment

The collective gasp of all the people in the room is a familiar sound every time I mention the word “punishment”. I can thank some poor ethical choices from 50 years ago, and the confusion between the word punishment in regular language versus what it means in the context of Behaviour Analytic literature. This article will cover what reinforcement and punishment are in terms of behaviour, and hopefully you will have a better understanding of how we use these effective techniques, in a safe and ethical way.

Reinforcement

Let’s start with reinforcement. Reinforcement is the addition or removal of a stimulus, that increases the future frequency of a behaviour. Any time behaviour is increasing (or maintaining) you are reinforcing it. You can reinforce your partner doing the dishes or them sitting on the couch, your child’s tantrums or their use of functional communication. There is no good or bad in reinforcement, it only refers to the behaviour increasing.

Punishment

This is the same for punishment. Punishment is the addition or removal of a stimulus, that decreases future frequency of behaviour. Once again, there is no good or bad, and punishers are not necessarily things the average person would find aversive or see as harmful. Let’s look at some examples.

Antecedent (before) Behaviour Consequence Future Frequency
A parent says “please do your homework” Child completes homework Parent praises the child Behaviour increases, more homework is completed (reinforcement)
A parent says “please do your homework” Child completes homework Parent praises the child Behaviour decreases, less homework is completed

(punishment)

We may think we’re doing one thing…but actually  children see it as another!

In this example the same sequences of events occur, and we see different effects on the child’s behaviour. It is these effects on behaviour that determine what is punishment or reinforcement. We see this happen in our daily lives all the time, we think that we’re helping, but behaviour isn’t changing or it’s getting worse. When we break it down something that we are doing in earnest, is actually punishment (reducing behaviour).

In conclusion, reinforcement and punishment are not about good and bad, they are scientific terms that help us understand behaviour. Once we understand a behaviour then we can change the environment, or up-skill people around us, to help a child better succeed and have a happier time in their home, school or community.

Please call Rachel or I on 9274 7062 for more information about your child’s program or about any of our services.

Jasmin Fyfe

ABACAS Program Manager

09 Oct 2018

BY: admin

Admin

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Back to Basics (Part Three) – Verbal Behaviour

In the next of our five part series, we look at verbal behaviour in children. Some children come into our ABA program with little or no expressive language.  Some of our young clients expect their parents to “read their mind” and just “know” what they want. In other cases, parents have developed really good skills of predicting or anticipating the child’s needs. For example, parents learn very quickly that when their child starts climbing up the bookshelf – it usually means that they want something.

For many of our young clients, the first step is to teach them the value of language. From a behavioural perspective,  this may mean teaching the child the function behind a word. A child may be able to say the word “help”. However being able to say the word, is not the same as knowing that “help” is the word to use whenever the child requires assistance. For example, being able to use the word “help” becomes very handy when trying to reach that thing that’s out of reach.

Types of Verbal Behaviour

In order to understand this better, let’s have a look at the types of verbal behaviour. According to Skinner, verbal behaviour can be categorized into these parts: echoics, mands, tacts and intraverbals:

Echoics Repeating what is heard vocally or with the use of manual sign imitation – for example,  saying “water” after another person says “water”.
Mands Requesting for something – for example, asking for “water” because you are thirsty.
Tacts Identifying objects, verbs, situations by labelling them – for example, saying “water” when you see water.

 

Intraverbals Answering questions – for example, saying “water” when another person asks: “What would you like to drink?”

An Example of Teaching Verbal Behaviour

Programs focusing on verbal behaviour often start by working out what a child is able to do. There is no point trying to teach a child to use the word “water” if they are not yet able to produce the correct sounds. A child may first need to be taught how to say “water” and to learn how to pronounce it correctly so that others can understand (using echoic strategies).

From there, the next stage it to teach the child that saying the word “water” will lead to good things happening (in this case being given something to drink or to play with). This is the process of teaching mands. Positive reinforcement is important as it will lead to the child being more likely to say the word “water” whenever he/she wants a cup of water. A flow on effect from this is that in increasing the child’s vocabulary, we might be able to reduce problematic behaviour (e.g. sinks being flooded and fridge doors left open).

Of course, we also want the child to be able to use this new word in other contexts. For example, being able to apply it to new situations (e.g. looking at the ocean and commenting on the “water”) through to being able to answer other people’s questions (e.g. “what would you like to drink?”).

Where to from here?

All of our clients enter into our programs with different levels of language. The job of your ABACAS Program Manager is to understand their current level of skills and work out next steps.

Please feel free to talk to either of the Program Managers about any questions you may have about verbal behaviour and your child.

To find out more about our services in general please call the Child Wellbeing Centre on (08) 9274 7062.

Rachel Puan

Assistant Program Manager, ABACAS

19 Sep 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team / Admin

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Back to Basics (Part Two) – Functions of Behaviour 2.0

In an earlier post this year we touched on the four functions of behaviour being:

  • Attention
  • Tangible (things)
  • Sensory/Automatic
  • Escape

(This is the link to the post in case you want to re-read it – https://www.childwellbeingcentre.net.au/abacas-team/functions-of-childrens-behaviour/

To expand on last week’s blog about the three term contingency, we’re going to talk about how we can reduce motivation for children to engage in problematic behaviours, specific to their function.

Functions of Behaviour

First things first. When starting a new intervention it always help when your child is eating well, sleeping and in good health.  Sometimes this is where we need to start before we can change behaviours. However for this example, let’s assume everything is fine. Let’s look in the example below:

Antecedent Behaviour Consequence
Child is playing alone for 10 minutes with parent in room Child throws object at parent. Parent scolds child about importance of not throwing items.

(Attention)

A child has been playing on an iPad for an hour, parent removes and gives demand “clean up your room” Child throws tantrum Parent withholds iPad, but does not follow through

(Escape)

How does knowing the function help us?

In each of these scenarios a child has engaged in problematic behaviour.

Let’s tackle problem one. In this instance a child was engaging in appropriate play behaviour for 10 minutes before they engaged in the problem behaviour. The problem behaviour resulted in parent delivering attention, where as the play behaviour did not. The prolonged period without attention creates a state of deprivation  which increases the value of a reinforcer (in this case attention). This means a child is more likely to give responses that have previously resulted in attention being delivered.

To improve the behaviour in this example, we can look at catching the child being good.  Delivering attention often enough (for the behaviours you want to see more of) will make it less likely that the problem behaviour occurs.

Problem two lets us see an example of satiation which reduces the value of a reinforcer. These parents may successfully be able to get their child to clean their room on a regular basis using a “first, then” instruction with the iPad. However in this instance the child had prolonged free access to the reinforcer, and so  it has temporarily lost its value. When you are offering reinforcement you should check for value, not just assume it is what the child wants.

A large part of the what the team does is to identify the purpose of behaviour. One we understand that we can make effective changes.

Please feel free to contact me on 9274 7062 if  you would like to know more about functions of behaviour and motivations or talk about our services.

Jasmin Fyfe

Program Manager, ABACAS

12 Sep 2018

BY: admin

Admin

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Back to Basics (Part One) – What is the three term contingency?

Three term contingency?? For parents who are new to ABA, you’ll be discovering that we use a lot of jargon. It is our job to make sure that we not only translate this into layman’s terms for you, but also educate you about ABA terminology throughout your therapy journey. This is going to be one of a 5 part series focused on educating parents about terminology, what they mean, and how you can start applying them yourself. Parents continuing the work we do into the home, especially during Early Intervention (EI) is essential to see optimum success.

5 Part Series

In our five part series we will be covering the following terms:

  • The three term contingency
  • Functions of behaviour
  • Verbal Behaviour
  • Reinforcement and Punishment
  • Prompts

The Three Term Contingency

The three-term contingency is a critical part of ABA, and all behaviour can, one way or another, fit into this breakdown. ABC, or Antecedent – Behaviour – Consequence, is how we frame behaviours. Behaviour and learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum – there is never a behaviour with no explanation. An antecedent is what happens before, and a consequence is what happens after. An antecedent can signal that reinforcement or punishment is, or is not, available for certain behaviours.

Here are some examples:

Antecedent Behaviour Consequence
The teacher says “who knows what letter this is?” Child responds by putting his hand up and saying “a” Praise from the teacher (attention)
A child has a difficult homework task in front of him. Child says “Can I help you with the dishes mum?” Mum says “yes of course” and they do dishes together (escape and attention)
Therapist says “What goes woof” Child responds “Car” Praise and an edible are given (tangible and attention).
A parent asks a child to turn off the TV The child has a tantrum The child is allowed 5 more minutes (tangible, escape).

 

The consequence that is provided determines whether or not learning will occur. In three of these examples some “unhelpful” learning is occurring!

Sometimes your therapy team might ask you to keep ABC data on a behaviour of interests so that we can help design an intervention based on function (more on that next week).

If you are interested in this topic, or have any questions further questions about how this might be applicable to your child please feel free to call me on 9274 7062.

 

Jasmin Fyfe

ABACAS Program Manager

04 Sep 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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Early Intervention and ABA Therapy

Many parents who are first starting ABA as part of their child’s early intervention (or may have had some experience with ABA therapy) often ask  the question, “will my child be sitting at the table the whole time?”. For Early Intervention (EI) clients, the answer should be no. Early Intervention ABA Therapy focuses on a combination of teaching developmentally appropriate skills and reducing challenging behaviours. How many small children do you know who spend 2+ hours a day seated at a small table with an adult? I imagine the answer is none.

ABA Therapy might teach children some skills at the table because this is a good way to ensure focus, reduce distractions and deliver the maximum number of learning opportunities. However, once these skills are mastered at the table then Natural Environment Training and generalisation should be used so these skills can consolidate. There is no point in children having ‘therapy skills’ and no practical skills.

What skills can be taught?

ABA can focus on improving play, social skills, daily living skills and toilet training. If these are socially significant goals for your family and your child, then ABA can teach these using the same principles of learning applied when teaching a child to discriminate between two flash cards. Social relationships, which is often one of the most difficult skills for children with an Autism Spectrum Diagnosis, should be taught in a way that will open up opportunities with peers, not just therapists and adults, and sets children up for success in real life situations.

Daily living skills (such as brushing teeth, washing, dressing etc) can all be taught using ABA in the natural environment. Your Program Manager should be able to develop a behaviour chain for any skill, and teach it to your child until they are able to function independently. The goal for any skill is that is provides benefit to the child, whether that be increased independence, increased access to learning, or increased access to relationships.

Early intervention ABA should use a range of strategies

It is important to have realistic expectations of children in a therapy context, including how much time is age appropriate to spend at a table. ABA programs should be comprehensive and focus on more than table top skills. They should be individualised and consider self care, social relationships and play as well as language development and verbal behaviour milestones. They should use a range of strategies to ensure that all that valuable learning can be used in different contexts.

If you have any questions about your child’s program please contact your Program Manager on 9274 7062.

Jasmin Fyfe

ABACAS Program Manager

28 Aug 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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Parent involvement in behaviour therapy and why it’s so important!

Through this post we talk a lot about our evidence-based practice, what ABA is and how this therapy can help you. You might not realise this but parents have a huge role in therapy and are often pivotal in the progress that children make.  Therapy requires commitment from all parties but the results are worth it.  The evidence shows that parental involvement in early interventions can predict academic outcomes later down the track, and the amount of school support required.

Therapy is not something therapists ‘do’ to your child.  Therapy is not a quick fix for problem behaviours. Neither is it a cure for anything (and we don’t want it to be). Therapy is a long term investment in skill development that sets your child and family up for the best quality of life possible. An important message to take away from this is that the skills that are being learnt are not just skills for your child. Therapy provides an opportunity for you as the parent to learn new skills. It’s about showing you different ways to respond to behaviour and also how you can foster your child’s development and honour behaviour support plans.

How Can I Engage with Behaviour Therapy?

Parents often start off feeling a bit lost when they start therapy. Should you ask lots of questions? Yes! Should you know your child’s goals? Yes! Should you feel comfortable with the techniques being used and do you have a right to say no? Absolutely. All therapy should be negotiated with you and you should be regularly updated by the therapist about the progress your child makes in therapy and any problems along the way.  Your understanding of therapy will help to foster continued use of strategies in the home…and hence allow your child to make positive steps.

Therapists love parents asking lots of questions so if you’re feeling unsure about how to do something please ask us. Therapy skills need generalising with new people, in new environments all the time and parents are some of the best people to do this.

Work with your Behaviour Therapy Team

An ABA Team can consist of many people.  In our program your main contacts are your 1:1 Behavioural Therapist and your Program Manager. Program Managers aren’t out as often as your regular therapist.  It’s important that you can be open with your Program Manager and communicate frequently. Make sure you email or call if you have concerns and ask your regular therapist to CC you in on any updates. You can also take up parent training and consultation services. Aside from a nice way to meet other parents (training) it’s also a way we can empower parents and help to work through issues that are occurring outside of therapy.

As always please feel free to contact your program manager on 9274 7062  to discuss any concerns or to fin out more about programs.

Jasmin Fyfe

Program Manager, ABACAS

21 Aug 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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How Behaviour Analysis can help your child develop new skills

Last week we spoke about some changes in the program, and how they might effect you and your child. This week I would like to talk to our parents and potential new comers about ‘why ABA’ or Behaviour Analysis.

Behaviour Analysis is built on the principles of learning, which have been demonstrated as effective in a huge range of populations. It is most well known for it’s use with children who have an Autism Spectrum Diagnosis, but less well known for it’s use in sports, feeding disorders, substance use, litter reduction and much more. Through ABA we can increase and decrease behaviours and build new skills, and we do so knowing our interventions are evidence-based and ethical.

ABA is Person-Centred

Quantifying behaviours as measurable and changeable can feel very ‘sciencey’, and because of this people sometimes feel that ABA might be impersonal, or out of touch with our loved ones. I’d like to argue that it’s the opposite, ABA is one of the most personalised and considerate interventions available, and above and beyond anything else ABA is the practice of hope for every single person we work with. There is an assumed capacity to learn and acquire new skills for all people, and the skills we teach are ones that are important to our clients and the loved ones in their lives. As people, we are always working through a scope of kindness and care, and as practitioners we are working towards effective and meaningful interventions that are evidence and ethically based.

Working with a range of clients, there is nothing more rewarding than hearing a child say their first word, or listening to the enthusiasm of a parent who’s child is starting to play with them for the first time. The goals set by ABA are often focused on developmental milestones, but these goals are also selected in collaboration with both parents and children, and that makes them so much more meaningful to our ABA families.

An ABA program should include people who are significant to the client. They should know what is being worked towards and what they can do to support these goals. They should also have a sense that these goals will make a difference to their lives, and feel pride in their contributions when steps are made towards a new milestone.

If you’d like to talk more about how ABA can fit in with your family, please contact me on 9274 7062.

Jasmin Fyfe

ABACAS Program Manager

14 Aug 2018

BY: admin

ABACAS Team

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Applied Behaviour Analysis Child and Adolescent Services (ABACAS)

ABACAS Update – Our therapy model is evolving

ABA Programs should be individualised, socially significant and measurable. As a parent it’s hard to know what things to look for in a program, who can administer a program and how often services should be delivered. At ABACAS we are always working towards being in line with the Behaviour Analysts Certification Board. All our staff are Registered Behaviour Technicians (RBT’s), or training to be, and we are supervised appropriately by a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst (BCBA). As our program grows and changes, we aim to provide a model that is going to be the most effective and ethical.

The program is currently changing its service delivery model.  We want to make sure that our parents have more contact with the Program and/or Assistant Program Manager and we want to provide more supervision for our therapists.  We have introduced Program Evaluation Sessions (PES) into therapy schedules. A PES is where the program manager runs the therapy session with the child, thereby giving the program manager the opportunity to make sure that skills are generalising and that the program is working well. Our plan is to rune a PES every 6th hour of therapy provided, and a Program Review every 12th hour.

What are the benefits of this change?

Other than you and your child having more access to their Program Manager, and more supervision for therapists there are many benefits of working the program this way. These benefits are tied in with the 7 principles of ABA, which have been italicised for your reference. Generalisation will be addressed, to test whether your child has just learnt how to read one person, or if they are consolidating and generalising skills naturally. Programs will be more effective because they are more regularly evaluated, the data can be inspected more often and changes made quickly if a program needs new steps or is stagnating. This also ties into the program being technological, as more time will be spend producing programs that are highly individualised. We will be able to provide more applied interventions, which means working on programs that are meaningful to you, as your Program Managers will know you and your family better.

With increased supervision therapists will better understand the research base that programs are derived from, and are therefore more conceptually systematic. This makes delivery more analytic, in that the programs will be demonstrable in their effects on behaviour, and most important, programs should be behavioural. We focus on building new, measurable, socially significant skills, that are making a difference in your child’s life and future.

We’re very excited about these changes as we feel it will only enhance the therapy we provide for your child.

What do I need to do?

Your program manager will discuss what these changes will mean with you at your next review. However feel free to talk to the team in the meantime should you have any questions.

Jasmin Fyfe

Program Manager

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