ABA THERAPY SESSION 1

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I decided to enroll in some ABA therapy to further help our son control some of his outbursts.  Since the start of 2013, Jacob has begun yelling and name calling on a much more frequent basis and since the majority of his unexpected behaviour happened at school, we had to take it upon ourselves to try and remedy some of his issues.

We enrolled into the 4 week program with the help of Jacob's autism worker.  In the beginning, we were unsure about ABA therapy simply because we had no idea what it was.  We learned about it briefly throughout some previous programming that we had completed, but we had no concrete information on what ABA therapy entailed.

After some anticipation, session 1 was upon us and the program started last night.  We learned that ABA therapy was designed to help limit certain behaviours which we as parents deemed unacceptable in certain social settings.  We together had to choose one behaviour to focus on that we wanted to help control.  The behaviour we chose was yelling at others.

We've noticed that Jacob often yells at others when they interrupt him or raise their voice in any way, even if it was for a positive reason.  As an example, one time my wife was in the kitchen, I then thanked her for dinner, but I had to yell it as she was a few rooms away with the water running.  Jacob exploded and scalded me for yelling at his mother.  He doesn't understand the concept of yelling and uses it at inappropriate times.

During the class, we went into types of behaviour monitoring and how to apply it to Jacob's problem area.  We have to monitor the problem behaviour and document it for 2 weeks.  Then during the next class, we'll discuss it and then tweak it as we need to.  Having a behaviour journal is a great way to help notice triggers that can cause Jacob to yell, which will then help us to spot the triggers before the yelling occurs.

Of course, today being day 1 of the recording, Jacob has yet to yell once.  He got ready for school and left without issues.  And now he's sitting in the kitchen quietly doing his homework on his own.  But that's how things always seem to go around here.  As soon as you think you know what direction things are going, they quickly change and leave you guessing.