- ABA Therapist
- Your Patience
- Prioritize
- Functional Analysis/ Assessment
- Treatment Plan
- How long? Forever?
ABA Therapist
As a person who practices applied behavior analysis, I can say for my colleagues that parents are so excited to finally get a chance to meet us and can't wait for us to work on their child's behavior problems. But we can't forget that all factors can affect the child's behavior.
Your Patience
How much are you willing to put in for the best result? Are you interested in the quickest method to get rid of a problem behavior now that only last a short time or are you willing to test your patience for a behavior treatment plan that takes time and will last longer? That's a tough question, especially if you deal with it on a daily basis and it effects your child and your daily living.
Prioritize
One thing I always suggested is to place all behaviors on a scale. Which behaviors need immediate intervention and which ones do you wish to work on, but can still tolerate? In addition, the most important question when you are "picking" the behaviors to work on is: Is it a significant social problem? Does it disrupt his daily life? Impairs his/hers social interactions? Is he/she distressed by it? Because, what maybe annoying to you may not be OK to intervene, just because "you" are annoyed by it.
Functional Analysis/ Assessment
All behaviors have a function (a reason). All behaviors need to be assessed to find out the function. Because, a good treatment plan depends on the function of the behavior.
Treatment Plan
Once this has been figured out. A treatment plan will be implemented (applied) and monitored with data collection (is the frequency of the behavior staying the same, decreasing or increasing?). Frequency of behaviors can be affect by events in the environment (death, separation, new stimulus, etc.). So some treatment plans may take months with a whole lot of data collect. But all of this is done to make sure we are doing the right thing with concrete evidence.
How long? Forever?
So is my child going to be in treatment forever? No. We will be able to determine if it's working or not. If not, we choose a different treatment plan. In addition, during the treatment process your child is taught new or alternative behavior to help him/her apply their new skills in different situation (generalization). But it takes time. It takes time to learn to ride a bike. It takes time to drive a car. It's going to take some time for your child to learn the new behaviors. But are you ready and willing to go along with the process, step by step?
For further reading check out this article based on a research study that observed parent patience whose children were going through behavior treatment programs : http://news.emory.edu/stories/2014/10/marcus_delayed_discounting/
or the actual research article (with subscription) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=call+n+AND+delay
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