Reading the Research: Reducing Aggression

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article gives some valuable information about how much therapy an autistic kid actually benefits from.  

I spent a short time working for an ABA clinic a few years back.  It was... not really an experience I enjoyed, for a lot of reasons.  Not the least of which is that I didn't really like what I saw of the ABA therapy.  It was kind of dehumanizing, based on bribes and teaching disguised as play.  It was something I didn't see myself doing well in.  

Depending on the child's assessed needs and ability to manage a typical classroom and interactions, they were assigned a number of hours to be in therapy.  That number went up to 40.  

Think about that for a moment.  40 hours of therapy.  Effectively, a full time job for a kid that isn't even six years old.  And that was pretty much inevitably for the kids that were struggling the hardest, which meant that not only were they going to struggle at home, they were also going to be worked very hard, with few breaks, every week day.  

Did they learn?  Yeah, of course.  The clinic wouldn't have stayed in business if it didn't produce results, though the usefulness of those results is debatable.  A kid scoring low on a test, being taught to pass the test, and then scoring better on the test, is kind of obvious.  The relevancy of the test to actual life?  That, I couldn't honestly vouch for.  And I have serious doubts, truth be told.

This study didn't look into numbers as high as 40 hours.  However, I think the results are still rather telling.  It didn't seem to matter whether the kids were given 15 or 25 hours of therapy.  They all improved, even regardless of the specific style of therapy used.

It's outside of the scope of the study, but I'm kind of disappointed they didn't measure child happiness.  I suspect it'd be telling if one of these therapies (an offshoot of ABA) left the children less happy than the other.  It would also be rather telling if the 15 hours a week kids were happier than the 25 hours a week kids.  

One last note: 40 hours of ABA therapy, if not covered by insurance, cost something like $25,000-$40,000 a year.  Typically the insurance covered at least half of that, sometimes more, but it's still a ludicrous number.  That's the equivalent of college tuition.  Can you imagine how much money parents could save per year if this trend holds true overall?  

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)