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A review by mburnamfink
Understanding Applied Behavior Analysis: An Introduction to ABA for Parents, Teachers, and other Professionals by Albert J. Kearney
2.0
Understanding Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a decent, if somewhat dated-feeling glossary of ABA jargon, and a primer on the fundamentals of ABA. ABA is a widely used approach for caregivers working with autism and ADHD symptoms. Since it has a foundation in the behavioral psychology of B.F. Skinner, there is a lot of jargon: Discriminative stimulus, establishing operation, positive and negative feedback, and various types of reinforcement schedules. The practice of ABA is also inspired by Skinner. Usefully, having defined a vague unwanted category such as "aggression" into a specific behavior, like "throwing paper airplanes at the teacher when she is writing on the blackboard", the child's caregivers set up a system of monitoring, reward, and punishment to shift the behavior in a normative way.
So what is good is that this is a short (164 page) book which will equip you, as a parent, with the words to not be blustered by various disability professionals, and to demand the assistance that you need. Staring at about 100 pages of ABA reports for my own kids, having a place to start to cut through the boilerplate and figure out what the hell is going on is useful. And I also agree that as a rule, you get what you measure, so clarifying "be good" into discrete behaviors and consistently tracking them is necessary, but not sufficient.
What I am much less convinced of is the validity of ABA as a human practice. I deleted the word 'therapeutic' from earlier in this review because ABA is not therapy. It is dog training. I'll agree there are some behaviors that should be managed, that are so disruptive or self-harming that the needs of the caregivers for order outweigh the needs of the child for expression. But by and large, we should try and approach our children as human beings, and work with them to develop a shared understanding of how to grow up as a flourishing human. ABA is not something you'd do to anyone you want to flourish.
And on a second note, Albert Kearney is a senior scholar with a long record in the field, who has committed one of my personal pet peeves for senior scholars writing books, in that he recommends further reading based on when he finished his dissertation in the 1970s. I love books, I love old books, and there are fields where foundational work was done decades ago and has not been surpassed. Parenting advice is not one of those. Please recommend something written this decade.
So what is good is that this is a short (164 page) book which will equip you, as a parent, with the words to not be blustered by various disability professionals, and to demand the assistance that you need. Staring at about 100 pages of ABA reports for my own kids, having a place to start to cut through the boilerplate and figure out what the hell is going on is useful. And I also agree that as a rule, you get what you measure, so clarifying "be good" into discrete behaviors and consistently tracking them is necessary, but not sufficient.
What I am much less convinced of is the validity of ABA as a human practice. I deleted the word 'therapeutic' from earlier in this review because ABA is not therapy. It is dog training. I'll agree there are some behaviors that should be managed, that are so disruptive or self-harming that the needs of the caregivers for order outweigh the needs of the child for expression. But by and large, we should try and approach our children as human beings, and work with them to develop a shared understanding of how to grow up as a flourishing human. ABA is not something you'd do to anyone you want to flourish.
And on a second note, Albert Kearney is a senior scholar with a long record in the field, who has committed one of my personal pet peeves for senior scholars writing books, in that he recommends further reading based on when he finished his dissertation in the 1970s. I love books, I love old books, and there are fields where foundational work was done decades ago and has not been surpassed. Parenting advice is not one of those. Please recommend something written this decade.