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Category: Preschool-Age Kids

A young girl in a red dress arranging blocks on a table
A young girl in a red dress arranging blocks on a table.
ABA Reform: Distinguishing Meaningful Change and “Neurodiversity Lite”

ABA Reform: Distinguishing Meaningful Change and “Neurodiversity Lite”

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I’ve been doing some more thinking on that most controversial of controversial autism questions: ABA. Right now, most neurodiversity advocates don’t trust the idea that any sort of ABA intervention could be a good thing, and why should they?  Far too many ABA interventionists have been pointing to a few modest changes to their programs – like removing aversives, or adding some cosmetic “neurodiversity lite” jargon – and claiming that this makes their programs adequate and ethical.  But that’s not…

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Children sitting at tables eating prepackaged lunches.
Sensory Sensitivities and “Picky Eating”

Sensory Sensitivities and “Picky Eating”

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I’m a so-called “picky eater,” like many autistic people. Nowadays, as an adult, this is no problem.  I have a system that works for me.  I buy foods I like, prepare them, and eat them.  I do try to cover a variety of food groups and so on, but I am not going to agonize over not being able to stomach some particular food or another – I’ll just avoid it. This is a bit different from the situation early…

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A young child in a green shirt
Behaviour Intervention: Some Key Terms

Behaviour Intervention: Some Key Terms

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Hopefully the fact this post has “behaviour intervention” in the title should act as a content warning to anyone who might find a discussion about ABA triggering, but just to be sure, here’s one now. – – Not long ago, I was complaining about the way advocates and researchers/professionals often talk past one another in the field of ABA.  I grumbled that terms like “ABA” were constantly being understood in different ways, so that even if these groups could get…

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Exclusion Diets

Exclusion Diets

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Warning: I write this post with a minimal and superficial knowledge of the science of diet and nutrition.  I am obviously not in any way, shape, or form, qualified to give medical or dietary advice. You may have heard claims that autistic people need to exclude particular foods from our diets.  These exclusion diets are one of the most popular types of complementary & alternative medicine intervention in the autism world (Perrin et al., 2012).  Special diets may indeed be…

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Revealing the Diagnosis to an Autistic Child

Revealing the Diagnosis to an Autistic Child

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Parents, I know that learning about your child’s autism can be a stressful experience, to say the least.  Maybe you’ve told doctors and professionals about your concerns, only to have them dismissed.  Or maybe your doctor sent you straight along the correct path to a diagnosis, but still you found yourself having to sit through a series of questions and assessments you didn’t understand, before being briefly issued a label with only a little bit of explanation – leaving you…

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Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part II

Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part II

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Quick recap: in Part I, we discussed early intervention and how it could be improved.  I think we covered some important points (the need to be clear about our targets, whether the term “ABA” is no longer helpful), but we ended with an important question: How are we going to ensure that our best and hopefully-ever-improving practices actually get implemented at the community level?  Without a good answer to this question, any improvements we make to our best practices will…

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A young child in a green shirt
Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part I

Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part I

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As an autistic adult who is also a graduate student researching autism, I’m a member of two very different communities, and these communities have very different views on many issues.  It’s like they see the world through two incommensurable paradigms, relying on fundamentally different sets of assumptions about the world.[1]  The communities certainly don’t usually spend a lot of time talking to each other, at least in North America (the British are a bit ahead of us on that front). …

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