The importance of using AAC in ABA therapy for minimally verbal and nonverbal kids.

Importance of AAC in Therapy

not all ABA therapists are made equal...

Alaska finally began providing ABA therapy for autistic kids this fall, after nearly 6 years of trying. This is HUGE: before this, we were only able to do speech and OT, and in our case we were lucky enough to have a grant that also provided a behavioral aide 6 hours a week. She turned out to be this incredible person with 20 years experience working with kids on the spectrum, and taught us a lot. So to have nearly 10 hours a week of services has been great for us and for TT.

But the ABA allows for up to FORTY (40!) hours a week of ABA. Caramba! That is amazing. So we began with a group of people in the fall, who we knew a little from a class we did, and seemed to have adequate experience, etc. They began coming to the home, and doing these incredibly structured activities, mostly at a table, where they would verbally ask TT to do things, then chart whether she did it or not. This approach was destined to fail.

Our daughter first began using AAC a few months before that, and hit the ground running. Within a week she was putting together 4 and 5 word sentences, and seemed to know where most of the words were. It changed her life. And as she appears to have poor audio processing skills, the AAC device became a mainstay not just of her communication to us, but of our communication to her.

I tried explaining to the supervising therapist that we felt it was critical that AAC be used throughout the therapy, not just to elicit responses from TT, but when asking her to do things. In the case of this therapist, she was simply not able to understand why this was necessary. For whatever reason, she thought the primary goal of ABA was to strengthen AUDITORY comprehension, which she called "verbal communication", and that using the AAC device as a 2 way communication tool would not be an acceptable form of this therapy.

It seems mind boggling to me that anybody could bill themselves as an autism therapist, yet have such a little understanding of apraxia, audio processing problems, and the vital role that visual communication plays for these kids. Sort of like people who refuse to sign to deaf people, insisting that they should only learn to read lips so they can fit into a "hearing" society. One would like to think those people went the way of the dinosaurs, but I'm afraid that's just not true.

Needless to say, we parted ways quickly. Now we are lucky enough to have a wonderful, flexible psychologist with 20+ years under his belt, who runs the ABA program for Hope Community Resources here in Anchorage. He understands and promotes the idea that you need to meet the child "where they're at", and has enthusiastically taken to helping add new pages, words, and images to our AAC device, coupling many things with physical hand signs, which is yet another way to help strengthen my daughter's understanding and active participation in communication. If I hadn't known any better, I would assume everybody is as awesome as he and his team are - but all parents need to beware of any therapist who seems rigid and won't listen to you. After all, you are your child's main therapist, and the one who knows them best!