Give ABA Vermont!
An Awareness Campaign for ABA Therapy
When I was a young boy, say second or third grade, my teacher tasked us with writing an essay about what we would do over winter vacation. As one could expect, the excitement about playing in the snow and opening up what Santa would bring my little brother and I was a lot more fun than having to write about it. As I toiled away to meet the demanded ten sentence minimum, my childish grumpiness grew greater when another boy was told they only had to write five sentences. Later that night, I was quick to exclaim to my mother during dinner my frustration over the heinous injustice that had befell me. My mother, a veteran teacher of just about every grade level, chuckled and calmly explained “are you and that other boy the same person?” No, obviously not, I thought. “Well different things are harder for different people,” she replied. “Those five sentences were probably just as hard for them as those ten sentences were for you.” BAM! My mind was blown and I felt so guilty for ever being jealous of them. I didn’t know it then, but this was my very first experience empathizing with someone with autism. Fast forward a decade and a half, that boy and I are grown and still best friends and I have been teaching children on the spectrum for over two years.
Give ABA Vermont is an awareness campaign I started seeking to graphically design brochures and pamphlets promoting Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), the therapy style I have seen do the most incredible work for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The idea arrived when tasked to decide on a topic for my senior capstone project for undergrad. I recalled back to one summer when I was working for an ABA center and attended a monthly staff meet. The director and one of my superiors presented a seminar entitled “What to do When Challenged on ABA”. Pff, I initially wrote off, who would ever be against such an incredible autism therapy? Little did I know how much that meeting would change my small, clinical world.
ABA has been around and continued to evolve for over sixty years, changing the lives of countless children with ASD and their families. With ABA, I have witnessed children who could not put on a sock then learn to dress themselves. I have seen kids with language development issues undergo speech therapy and come out ecstatic to talk your ear off about their favorite Sesame Street characters. Seeing ABA in action is something that could melt even the coldest of hearts. I have seen ABA work wonders during my short time in the field, so why is awareness necessary? As it would turn out, unverifiable and loud campaigns against ABA therapy are apparently shouted on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms alike daily, slandering the therapy as being alike to the abusive and manipulative mental institutions of the 1960’s and earlier. Even here on Medium, a cursory search on ABA yielded quite a few. This is the result of the fringe, more extreme end of the neurodivergence movement, which ABA is in complete support of, voicing their opinion pieces. These voices, however, are valid to a degree. By nature of being an old therapy style that has evolved over the decades, there was a time where ABA adhered to the practices of those less than savory mental institutions of the 1960’s. Where many therapy styles fall out of favor and are replaced with the next hot trend, ABA has endured and grown, casting away its outdated components while still administering the empirically validated, data-based therapy that has changed the lives of countless children for the better. Awareness is necessary, so as not to deny parents the opportunity to learn about one of the most successful, accredited treatments of ASD. This is why I saw it as my responsibility to create and share my Give ABA Vermont movement.
Give ABA Vermont is proud to announce that its Chittenden County brochures are now available at the Vermont Family Network’s Williston location.
