ABA is a behavioral conditioning model by their own definitions and marketing, which is not a psychological support model.
If you are experiencing difficulty in seeing a difference, the community of the #ActuallyAutistic have provided the following clarifying information:
ABA focuses on behavioral conditioning for the convenience of the parents, or the surrounding culture and society.
A psychological support model focuses on supporting and empowering the autistic individual in their education process and educating the family on understanding and accepting the autistic mind that lives with them.
You might want to give serious consideration to refactoring the part of your thinking that views autistic minds as being in need of a “cure”; particularly as the very neuroscience you’re touting has already demonstrated this is a continuum of neurological, physiological, environmental (read: literal biosphere), and experiential interactions that cannot be reasonably treated separately any longer, but must first be understood separately so that holistic solutions may be defined.
Stanford PhD Robert Sapolsky’s first year human biology lectures are available at no cost, online, so no one has excuse not to know this information here, today, in 2021.
Of that first year lecture series, we recommend that one spends serious thinking time with lecture #25, entitled: “Individual Differences”. Be prepared to check your assumptions, and for that to be difficult:
Neurodiversity is real.
Autistic minds do not require a cure.
They will however, benefit from support systems that help buffer them, protect them, and help them modulate specific experiential symptoms to provide them with further confidence, self-sufficiency, and esteem.
Won’t you join us in helping the #ActuallyAutistic children and adults who still lack this understanding as part of their support and medical protocols?
- Look for providers who do not support ABA.
- Look for providers who do use support language (i.e., autistic male, not male with autism).
- Look for advocates who do demonstrate current medical and scientific understanding of #neurodiversity (as outlined in th video above).
Talk with your friends, your family, and your colleagues. Somewhere in your proximity, there is at least one autistic person who will benefit from your choice to do so.
This document, en whole and without modification or derivation, is donated to the Public Domain in the hope that it will assist in this information spreading further and faster in benefit of all autistic people.