Reading the Research: Child-Directed Therapy

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 comes to us from the general morass of autism therapies, where everything sounds like it might help, but costs tons of money to try and as a bonus, might also harm your child.  I don't envy parents needing to sift through this morass, but I'm happy to try to help point them in the right direction.  

The autism community has definite opinions about ABA. (Yes, every single word in that sentence is a different link.  No, you don't have to read them all.)  When done right, ABA can be a helpful tool in helping an autistic person learn to communicate.  Unfortunately, it's mostly not done right.  All too often, ABA is used to force autistic people to adhere to some imagined standard of normalcy, punishing their uniqueness until they are too afraid and beaten to be themselves.  This includes the place I worked at for a time, I'm sorry to say.  

The things that are good from ABA all appear to be in this twist on ABA: Pivotal Response Treatment, or PRT.  Basically, this therapy starts with overall goals, like "increasing communication skills" and "rewarding pro-social behavior" and aims for those... but rather than traditional ABA's narrow focus of specific tasks, one at a time, it instead mandates that the child set the stage and have as much choice as possible.  

Far less emphasis is put on "making the person normal" and instead is spent incorporating the child's interests in activities, rewarding good faith efforts towards a goal, and rewarding social behavior.  

Basically, the theory is that you want the autistic person to be able to communicate in ways people can understand (ideally speech since that's the societal standard, but speech isn't necessary to communicate effectively).  You also want the autistic person to interact with others and find that interaction rewarding.  Finally, you want the autistic person to be able to regulate their behaviors, handling emotions like frustration and anger in appropriate ways.  

As long as those goals are handled in a respectful, supportive way, and the therapy truly is child-directed, this seems like it's likely to A) help, and B) not traumatize and destroy at the same time.  

I was never given any type of therapy when growing up, so unfortunately I have little personal insight to shed on the matter.  However, many in the autism community have plenty to say on the matter, so please give the link-filled sentence near the top a few clicks, if you're interested.  

While researching this therapy, I ran across this sample of therapy's practices as well, which you can look over if you're interested.

(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.)