We startedtheir ABA programs quite late. Ideally you would want to start as soon as the child is diagnosable and these days that can be very young. My children probably could have been diagnosed around 12 to 15 months, and although it seems extreme to start one to one teaching of language and play skills at that age, in fact the best results come from the children who started very young.
The teaching is labour intensive, and their progress is the accumulation of many tiny steps. There is no pivotal skill that, once you teach it, everything else falls in place. We have to teach everything, with multiple examples, in multiple environments, with multiple people. It is very slow learning with my girls, but progress is steady. Once you know they can learn, you can’t stop teaching, even if the learning is very slow. Every little bit of language gives them a bit more of a life. You can’t have a life without language.
We started this teaching when my elder daughter was eight and my younger daughter had just turned 5. We had previously tried many different things, unsuccessfully, before we found the teaching approach we now use, Applied Behaviour Analysis, ABA for short.It is a curriculum and a teaching methodology that was developed by many researchers over decades and it’s been adapted to teach language and related skills to children and adults with all levels of autism.
The teaching ideally goes on seven days a week, every day of the year. Obviously we can’t manage that. We have teachers who come in for about 25 hours a week per child. We have receivedsome financial help from our local education authority to pay for this. Obtaining this funding was not easy. I try to do some teaching during the times that the teachers are not here. We have been doing the ABA programs for more than 10 years and we, as teachers, have learned a lot during that time. Most importantly, we’ve learned that you can’t teachwithout the child’s cooperation, without the child being happy to work with you, and learn from you. We work very hard to identify how to break down tasks into tiny steps, so the child can be successful on her own, without help, and then we gradually increase what she learns. The ABA programs have been the biggest help in my life with these girls, who are severely disabled and who will always be disabled. It makes all the difference to know that they can learn, albeit slowly, and that the language they learn gives them a bit better quality of life, and reduces the amount of care they will need in the future.
Before we started the ABA programs, we got advice from various professionals on how to teach our developmentally delayed children. Even the easiest tasks that they suggested were too difficult. We got check lists of things my daughter needed to learn to do, but no useful advice on how to teach her. When I asked, for example, how to teach colouring with a crayon, I would be told “Oh, you put the crayon in her hand and hold her hand, and you make her scribble.” If only it was so easy! My children strenuously resisted any attempts to involve them with early learning activities. We failed with a lot of things, and by the time we started ABA my children didn’t want to have anything to do with teaching or learning. With the ABA programmes, we started a long process of getting the girls comfortable with the tutors. Gradually they came to associate the tutors with enjoyable experiences and we were able to start teaching basic language, focussing on items that most interested the girls. We needed a lot of professional help to know how to even start the first steps of this kind of teaching. With my children, we needed to teach very basic skills including eye contact and motor imitation. Even babies can imitate actions like waving or clapping but my girls never did, until we taught them in the ABA programmes. We had to find ways to make each task fun and motivating for the girls, so they would want to do it, and be successful. This is not easy andI can’t emphasise how important it is to get the help of competent professionals.
Even a task as ordinary as toilet training gets broken down into many small steps. The focus is on positive reinforcement of each successful step. We try very hard to avoid blaming the child for any failures. We are the teachers, and it’s up to us to find ways to change the environment so that the child will be successful. Our most common error is to make the steps too big, and it’s very easy to get frustrated if the child fails.
But one thing I have found through the years is that if the girls really understand what it is that you want them to do, and understand how to do it, they can be remarkably cooperative. When they seem to be uncooperative and difficult, usually it is because they don’t really understand what they are supposed to do.
We have needed professional advice to know how to break down tasks into tiny steps and to know what to try if our initial efforts are unsuccessful. I know my friends wonder how on earth I can face the daily struggle to teach my daughters. But it is like every other bit of parenting; once you are doing it, it just becomes normal for you. It’s important to appreciate even the tiny successes.
