Therapy Update

Andrew's been in speech therapy since October of last year, and started with ABA in May.  He's doing really well with both and loves his therapists!  We're going to be stopping speech next month when he starts preschool, but we'll continue with ABA for the foreseeable future.

ABA is hard to describe.  It stands for Applied Behavioral Analysis, and is a reward-based therapy program that can help with just about any skill a child has trouble with.  On occasion, his therapist takes videos of some of their sessions together, so I thought I'd share some of them here.  Maybe it'll make it a little easier to understand what types of things he's working on.

Kids on the spectrum frequently have problems thinking and reacting quickly.  Their brains get stuck on one type of thinking and it's hard to transition.  His therapist quickly asks a bunch of questions that require him to change the way he's thinking.  When he gets stuck, you can see her gently suggesting the right answer.  In ABA, the kid is "never wrong."  The therapist will help as much as necessary to make sure the kid gets the right answer and positive reinforcement.  The next time, she'll use a little less, so on and so forth, until Andrew gets everything on his own.  In this session, you can see him asking for "Phonics."  When Andrew works hard, he gets rewarded.  Sometimes it's snacks, sometimes it's tickles, and on this particular day, he was working to get to play "Hooked on Phonics" on the iPad.

We're also working on Andrew's fear of haircuts.  They've started having pretend haircuts to get him more used to the process.  Usually, he screams and cries as soon as he gets in the chair.  During therapy, they go through all the steps that are required of a haircut at his barber.  When they first started, Andrew wanted nothing to do with it.  As you can see in this video, he's getting a bit better.  He's still not thrilled with it, but he doesn't cry or fight it.  I'll be interested in seeing how this translates for his next haircut!

This last video is from this morning.  He's already able to answer questions much faster, and goes for longer stretches without asking for rewards.  He really loves his therapist and works really hard to make her happy.

Each of these videos is less than a minute long, but he works for two hours at a time, twice a week.  It wears him out, but he does very well at it.  He rarely complains, even when he's forced to do things he doesn't want to.  The therapist is working on skills to help him get ready for school next month, and will work closely with his school aide to make sure that Andrew is doing the very best he can.  We're all very proud of how well he's doing and hope to continue seeing so much progress!