Is ABA Bad For Your Child?
Ming, a speech therapist who worked in ABA, acknowledges that older practices caused real trauma for some autistic people, but says the field has evolved. She warns that quality varies wildly depending on training and regulation, and tells parents to read reviews, try providers, and switch if something feels wrong.
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Hey guys, this is Ming here, speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today we want to talk about is ABA bad for you? So just a quick video to answer this question. I get a lot, and that's because I have been an ABA therapist when I just started my career. I am now a speech therapist. I took a master's degree and so on and so forth. Most recently, people have been talking about aba. Ptsd, right? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There's a bunch of adults coming out who are autistic adults who have come forward or maybe they're not autistic, misdiagnosed or anything like that. And they come forward and say that, hey, I am suffering a lot because of what happened to me back in the day when my parents brought me to a ABA center, Applied Behavioral Therapy, Applied Behavioral Analysis Therapy Center. And they say that, oh, I feel really traumatized. I feel like so and so forth. And all you have to do is just to google it and just, just look around. If you're already looking for aba, you probably would have seen these kind of things. And what these adults are telling us, these now grown up ASD or misdiagnosed ASD people are saying that stressful to learn to behave to be like us neurotypical people. Okay? And the therapy methods are like, we're like teaching an animal, treating them with rewards, you know, using a different very rigid ways and making them very unhappy along the way. That's what I say. Okay? I'm just telling you I am a neurotypical person. I am not on the spectrum. I am a speech therapist. I worked as an ABA therapist before. I. Whatever I say here is from my perspective. I am no way representing anyone. It's just my personal opinion. Okay, real quick disclaimer. So I know this topic gets pretty sensitive anyways, so it's not only just aba, all right? PTSD happens whenever anyone has a traumatic experience. Okay? Everyone gets a trauma from bad service in general, just bad things. Okay? I had a student who is on the spectrum, who is now adult, who has PTSD with oral motor. Okay? That's something that I work with every day nearly. Okay, not during now the pandemic. But auto motor is something that all speech therapists will kind of use whether they are pro or not for speech. Oral motor. We have a whole video about oral motor here on Agents of Speech. But it's the fact that they've been forcing her to open her mouth with incorrect methods and that has created a trauma. So it's not only in ABA that's all across this industry and other industries as well. Okay. This can happen to anyone. It could be a bad dentist, a dentist who doesn't know how to build a rapport with a kid and therefore has made them really scared about going to the dentist. Right. It could be a plumber who really screwed up your toilet. And then you don't know if you can trust a plumber anymore. Any professional who will give you a bad experience. All right, so moreover, the people who are coming out now who are grown ups, who are on or, I don't know if misdiagnosed on the spectrum or not, that means they're complaining about service that is at least 20 to 30 years old, right? Or maybe 15. Okay, so therapy for special needs children is not a very old profession. Maybe if you talk about around 40 to 50 years ago, right. We used to, not we like the predecessors, the people who used to experiment on children on the spectrum would be screaming at them, starving at them to see if they have any affection to, towards other human beings and so on. And that's why we have this kind of data right now. And not saying that they did a good job back then. When I was watching that during my, my training days as an ab therapist, which, you know, the clinic that I worked at did a very good job telling us that this was the old type of therapy, this was the old type of things that they did for us to have this understanding now, therefore we're not going to do the things that they used to do, right? We're going to be as naturalistic, as uplifting as, you know, we only do positive things. We do not punish, we only reward or we praise. We do not condemn. You know, this kind of mindsets, right? And the best mindset about this is praise the best and ignore the rest. Right? And I think nowadays, even in the AB industry, there's a huge discrepancy about where the service should be. Is it very structured? Is it like all the way here? Very naturalistic, like doing floor time, if you know what floor time is. Right. I think that if we are comparing a service that is so different in its infancy, maybe even 30 years ago, it would be very like night and day right now. Okay, so remember that student I was talking about who had a traumatic experience about oral motor. When she sees therapists who work now like me as well, it looks very different than when she was a child. Okay? And this was like 25 years ago. Okay. And the, the discrepancy of service is huge. All right? And I would like to say with my own experience, since I have been working in, in Hong Kong, I've been trained by American therapists. I have attended lectures by, you know, therapists all over the world and learning from different people, watching videos, hands on experience, so on, so forth. I would say that there are bad apples in the industry that will or may or may not. I'll be very careful here, try not to step on anyone's toes that, you know, bad service does exist, just like in any industry, right? And especially I've also been to countries that are a little bit behind in therapy. For instance, Malaysia, Indonesia, these, these places I haven't been to anywhere else, so, so I cannot say. But from what I see, at the very least ABA therapists can range from like excellent and very good at talking to children, teaching them so and so forth, to all the way over here that they aren't very especially know what they're doing and that's to do with the training involved, okay? So ABA isn't a very regulated industry and let's say at the very least Southeast Asia, okay? Or even in where I'm from, Hong Kong, there's no regulatory body, there's. You don't need to have a certain education in order to become ABA therapist, which makes way for people who want to make a living off it very easily. And whereas there are majority of the people who go inside the industry are great people because to be honest, hey, you don't make a lot of money over ABA or speech therapy or whatever, right? They're there to, to learn and help. And if they do something that is not good or whatever, that's actually the guidance of the people above them, not being able to give them the correct techniques and so on. So even for myself, even to this day, I, I do believe that in the beginning, if it wasn't for the people who taught me how to do therapy in general, I wouldn't have such a good basis to go on from there, right? If, if I compare myself to my training when I just started to someone else, even in Hong Kong, learn from someone else, you can see the discrepancy is pretty astonishing, right? And I'm not saying to toot my own horn because there are loads of much better therapists out there, okay? I am only good at certain aspects of therapy. You cannot be good at everything, okay? But what I'm trying to say is that this industry, they are good, they are bad. Just like anything, obviously one negative news will explode and then it will make parents who want to try it hesitate and that's where I want to tell you. You have to try in order to know if it's good for you or not. Okay. And you have to take a look at are there any testimonials, what other parents are saying, so on so forth and then go forward with it and try. If it doesn't work then leave, try to find someone else. Okay. And that's pretty much it guys. If your child is hand pulling right now, that is if you're looking for ABA therapy and this is the case then please Download my free 5 minute activity now at ww agents of speech.com handling. Okay guys, so that's it for this video. If you have any questions, any doubts or if you don't agree, literally think that ABA sucks, you know, it's not of no value, then just comment below. We can have an educated conversation about it. Okay? Thank you. I'll see you in the next video which is next week. Bye bye.
