The Limits of Reinforcement Techniques What Else Is There? To most parents and teachers ABA reinforcement techniques seem intuitive and effective: •
Use positive reinforcement to reward good behavior ( a hug, a smile, a M&M, getting to watch a favorite TV show)
•
Use negative reinforcement (taking a favorite item away) or punishment (saying “No!” or putting a child in “time-out”) to discourage bad behavior.
These techniques can often work with children who have a typical neurology, who process verbal requests easily and who read subtle social clues. These children have impulse control that is appropriate to their age and the sensory system that allows them to accurately assess their environment. However, these same reinforcement techniques are effective in a very limited way with special needs kids—if at all. Things to consider when using reinforcement techniques on your child: o Reinforcement techniques do not take into account the overall emotional state of the child. A panicked child will lash out unless you remove him from the source of the stimulation and soothe him; no amount of M&Ms or positive reinforcement will calm him if he is severely distressed, and your demands might make him worse. A parent or teacher who is good at monitoring the child’s regulation will get much further at getting calm, organized behavior out of the child. o Children with autism (especially young and/or non-verbal children) have a hard time establishing intentional behavior. They cannot generate the words or gestures to express their needs or express what they do not want; they cannot say (or often even think) “No!” until something becomes so aversive that they explode in a tantrum. Barry Prizant, one of the leading speech pathologist in the autism field, believes that a fundamental goal is teaching an autistic child to say “NO” and defend his boundaries. Something to think about: if a child has a hard time indicating a basic need, or cannot indicate “No!” when they are in severe distress over someone else’s actions, how will reinforcement “teach” him to act better? Reinforcement does not even touch the heart of the problem, and can even worsen it.
o Children with special needs often have poor executive function because of problems in the frontal lobes of the brain and this leads to highly impulsive behavior. Reinforcement does not work well with impulsive behavior because it comes way after the trigger. You can wear a child down by continually giving negative reinforcement for impulsive behavior that he has little control over. Furthermore, children get much more impulsive in stressful situations no matter what kind of reinforcement you give. o Responding to limits requires a certain cognitive-developmental level that special needs children--even highly verbal ones-- often do not fully achieve until much later. When a typically developing toddler starts to learn limits, when they start to learn “Yes, you can do this” from “No, you can’t” they need to repeat the transgression dozens of times before they begin to truly internalize the meaning of “no.” Stanley Greenspan says that a child who is not interactive and is not able to engage in several “circles” of interaction is not able to negotiate the “yes/no” paradigm. Consider where your child is developmentally. Realize that the process of understanding limits is a complex one even for typically developing children. If you add cognitive dysfunction, emotional dysregulation, sensory over or under-reactivity, you can imagine how much more convoluted and difficult this process is for special needs children. Which leads us to the final point . . . o Reinforcement techniques—if they work at all—control behavior; they do not teach a child how to understand their own impulses, or to regulate their emotions. They do not teach a child how to avoid over-stimulating situations. They do not teach a child empathy. All these things come from negotiation and the back-and-forth circles of emotional signaling. Your child needs to be able to sequence several emotional signals in a row and respond to other people’s emotional signals. This is what DIR/Floor Time tries to do.