Do Children “Burn Out” on ABA/EIBT After 18 Months?

I have seen a lot of postings on websites where parents talk about their kids making good progress in ABA programs for a while, but then they start tantruming and their rate of learning falls off. Is this common?

Children may plateau at any developmental level. However, if a child’s rate of progress slows down due to tantrums, noncompliance, or lack of motivation, the cause is most likely poor programming or poor therapy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of minimally trained EIBT providers out there. They know how to teach discretely, and teach some basic communication skills. However, they do not know how to integrate children into preschools, develop peer socialization skills, or introduce high-level language programs (all critical components of a competent EIBT program). So, they run out of things to teach. Then, they make kids mad. They pointlessly expand previous programs (for example, teaching a four-year old to label every item in every kitchen drawer), or, they try to teach high-level language skills randomly, completely out of any developmental order (for example, expecting a child to engage in a conversation about what they did over the weekend, when the child doesn’t have the verbal skills to tell you what he/she did two minutes ago.).

Many EIBT providers also lack the experience necessary to diversify and naturalize reinforcement procedures as children mature. Tickles, rough-housing and food can be very effective for early stages of an EIBT program. However, their effectiveness decreases substantially for those children who make rapid developmental progress. Two critical changes in reinforcement procedures must occur as children advance through the EIBT curriculum:

1) The types of reinforcers used must be expanded and varied. To maintain a child’s willing cooperation as they progress through hundreds of programs and thousands of hours of instruction, therapists need to use anything and everything that a child finds interesting or motivating. For example, playing outside, trips to the park, movies, videos, video games, toys, trips to restaurants, trips to stores, swimming, etc. Now, you can’t use these reinforcers on a trial-by-trial basis. This leads us to the second critical reinforcement change that must occur over the course of an EIBT program:

2) Reinforcement schedules must be naturalized. Children have to learn to work longer in order to get bigger reinforcers. In early stages, this may mean working for three minutes in order to get to play a video game for three minutes. By kindergarten, this means working for several hours or days before getting preferred activities or items (and sometimes the preferred activity is just going home). Children have to be on roughly the same reinforcement schedules as their classmates, if they are to potentially function independently in an academic setting. The gradual transition to these types of reinforcement schedules has to be an integral part of an EIBT program, and it has to start years before kindergarten does.

Children vary in how much they learn and how much they will benefit from EIBT programs. However, competent behavioral teams can adjust the demands placed on any child so that they can be compliant and cooperative, regardless of their rate of learning.

What does "ABA trained" mean?

My school district tells us that all their classroom aides are "ABA trained." What level of experience should I expect from a person who is "ABA trained?"

Unfortunately, the term "ABA trained," is pretty much meaningless. It can be used to describe a person with a doctorate in applied behavior analysis, or a person who attended a two-day training on discrete-trial teaching, 10 years ago. Typically, you will see personnel closer to the latter extreme.

The best strategy is to define the level of experience that would be appropriate for your child's educational needs (with the help of an ABA professional), and request a person with those specific credentials. For example, you may request, "a person who has received a minimum of six months of training and supervision from professional-level ABA personnel in the development and implementation of token economies in academic settings." Note that in this example, we specified that the person was trained by an ABA professional, for a specific amount of time, in a specific procedure.

In addition to these details, it is also critical to define what level of supervision your aide will receive (how many hours per week, by whom). Even the best aides will require ongoing professional supervision.