Author: Barry Morgenstern

There are a bunch of great videos on YouTube showing people celebrating their win too early but end up losing games, championships, races, and more. In sports, there are times when things look certain to go one direction, but due to a great play, extraordinary luck, or carelessness, the outcome is completely different. Right when the person or team thinks they have won, something amazing happens, and they are shocked.

The reason why this is works as a YouTube video is that the reveal happens immediately. The volleyball team is celebrating–but then, the other team makes an amazing play and recovers. The runner is showboating right before the finish line when another runner passes him. A football player is dancing right before the goal line when a defender catches up to him. It is obvious seconds later that they were celebrating too soon.

In sports, it is probably just overexcitement that gets players celebrating a couple of seconds too early. In behavior analysis under normal working conditions, we have huge pressure to celebrate early. Parents want to know about the successes that their children are having. Effective management requires that we celebrate success with staff. School districts and insurance companies require that we report whether goals are “mastered” or not.

The problem is that many of those goals won’t matter too much since the results might not maintain over time–which is unfortunately too common. I was lucky that as a young professional, Patricia Krantz explained this problem to me very well. Pat recognized how essential it was to celebrate, but she also understood that milestones often don’t lead to a major difference in the child’s life without more effort.  When reporting on success, she would constantly ask the question, “That’s great, what’s next?”

That’s the way to do it. Sure, celebrate each success. That’s important. Just not too much. Too much celebration leads to overconfidence. Much better to say, “That’s great, what’s next?” Acknowledge the success, but immediately start working on what’s left to do.

During my sophomore year in college, I decided to take piano. I never had music lessons as a child, and I thought it would be fun to learn. I didn’t take it seriously—I had no delusions that I would become a professional musician. One of my major goals for the activity was that I would be able to play “Happy Birthday” at a friend’s birthday party. I also hoped to be able to play the “easy” versions of some Billy Joel songs.

It turned out that even Piano 1 in college was VERY hard. Everyone else in the class had years of lessons as a child. I was completely lost, and I had to learn things quickly. I was intense about it. All the practice rooms were booked for music majors during the day. Therefore, I had to get up super early in the morning to get a practice room, which I did every day, including weekends. I also was able to get a free “tutor” for an extra lesson each week. During spring break, I took a keyboard with me so that I could practice.  Despite all that effort, I bombed the final exam and somehow managed to get a C+ in the class.

Not one to give up easily, I decided to take Piano 2. I just wanted to learn to play well enough so that it was fun. The grade doesn’t matter. On the first day of class, the teacher had everyone play a short passage. When it was my turn, the teacher interrupted and said, “you are mutilating the music.” At that point, I decided to drop Piano 2. I still can’t play “Happy Birthday” at parties.

The point is that someone with my level of motivation should have been able to achieve this goal given the right instruction and environment. The problem was that I was years behind my peers, and despite enormous effort, it just wasn’t reasonable to expect me to be able to catch up and perform well in the college classroom. It was the wrong place to try to learn.

Children with autism are often placed in a situation like I was in college. They might be years behind peers in language skills, reading skills, math skills, or social skills. Sometimes it is possible and appropriate to make modifications that allow successful participation. In the right situation, with the right team, with the right child, it can work amazingly well.

But other times, it is simply not possible given our current state of knowledge. Many children with autism are smarter than I was. They don’t need the teacher to tell them that “you are mutilating the music” to learn that they can’t do what everyone else in the class can do. It’s obvious to them. That can lead to unnecessary frustration, severe problem behaviors, and low self-esteem. Often, it is possible to teach the skills the child needs, given the right conditions. Sometimes the right conditions are not available in the General Education Classroom.

If a child needs to learn critical life skills, it is worth considering if the General Education Classroom is the best place to acquire those skills. Sometimes the answer may be yes. Sometimes the answer may be no. Too often, the question doesn’t get the careful consideration it deserves.

Don Baer said something like, “Behavior Analysis is the process of changing complaints into behaviors to be changed, which if changed, will change the complaining behavior of the complainer.” That’s a pretty good simple description of the job of a BCBA. One of the key skills in behavior analysis is translating the initial complaint into a behavior to be changed.

 Most of the time, this isn’t too big a problem. For example, when a parent reports “he is disrespectful,” we continue interviewing and observing until we can translate “disrespectful” into observable behaviors–hitting, kicking, screaming, or cursing. So far, so good.

That often works fine. In fact, translating complaints into observable behaviors is usually considered such a routine part of practice that many people don’t think new BCBAs need much training to learn to do it. But in my view, BCBA training programs should include instruction on this skill because while this is an easy task most of the time, it can be challenging in certain situations.

One common situation where BCBAs may have trouble translating the complaint into a behavior to be changed is teaching social skills. These skills are often subtle and complex and very difficult to translate into easily observable behaviors. Another difficult problem can involve staff management. We want staff to “show initiative,” “have a positive attitude,” or a hundred other fuzzy statements that aren’t easy to define.

This leads to a situation where we need to do something but don’t have a clear idea of the critical behaviors we should target. When this happens, BCBAs might sometimes resort to selecting targets that are easy to measure instead of what is critical. This obviously can lead to poor programming. In my view, Bob Mager wrote the best guide to this skill.

One of the most difficult problems that BCBAs can face is working with learners who have high-intensity problem behaviors that don’t occur very often. I’ve seen several situations where the behavior occurs rarely, but when it does, it can lead to serious injuries. Treatment is necessary, but assessing the behavior is difficult.

If problem behaviors occur frequently, you can assess those behaviors and determine why they are occurring. That’s essential to developing an effective plan. But if the behavior only happens one time per month, there won’t be a lot of opportunities to see the behavior. This makes it difficult to determine why the behaviors occur.

Several strategies are commonly recommended for this problem. These might include a variety of procedures like conducting assessments over long periods, focusing on precursor behaviors that are related to the problem behaviors, and taking detailed notes or videos when the behaviors do occur. Another common strategy is to look for events that are remote in time but may be related to the problem behaviors (e.g., sleep, ear infections, menstrual cycles). The key here is that we are looking for why the problem behavior occurs. BCBAs often see this as detective work. Can we figure out why the behavior occurs? But there is one commonly overlooked reason why the problem behaviors occur so rarely: The people working with the individual are great at preventing problem behaviors.

When individuals engage in dangerous behaviors, parents and staff are highly motivated to prevent those problems from occurring. They tend to develop all kinds of tricks to make sure the learner doesn’t engage in the high-intensity behaviors. I call these tricks the limitations. This might include a wide variety of strategies that might be perfectly appropriate like offering choices or avoiding loud noises.

Whenever I’m faced with a situation of low-frequency, high-intensity problem behaviors, one of the first things I’ll look for is if there are prevention strategies in place. If you ask, people might say no because they might not even realize they are using them. One great way to test is to see what happens when a novel untrained person works with the learner. In my experience, if you look for prevention strategies, you will almost always find them.

The potential problem is that it is extremely difficult to be perfect at preventing problem behaviors. That’s when you potentially have a dangerous incident. Therefore, while prevention can be appropriate, is not a long-term solution. The only real long-term solution to problem behaviors is to teach the learner effective skills to handle life’s difficulties. How do you know what situations are critical to teach? Often the answer is to find the limitations.

What is the main reason we come to work each day? I believe it’s because we want to see the children make progress. Of course, I understand that it is a “synthesized contingency.” For example, few of us could afford to come to work if we didn’t get paid or receive other benefits. Still, seeing the children make progress is crucial. I believe that without effective programming, few people will be able to continue in this type of job over the long haul.

Now, one problem is that this benefit comes with emotional reactions. When things are going well, I feel great and extremely positive about our work. But if we have one of those days, suddenly, I feel sick and can barely make it to work. It may be that I go to extremes, but I think this is common. Learning to handle these feelings is critical for success in a field like ours. Parents often feel this too. They can be excited by one great session, and then depressed after witnessing one that doesn’t go great.

It is easy to take the positive approach when you are not the one working with the child day in and day out or are not the parent of the child. In my experience, supervisors tend to forget what it is like to have a tough session and are sometimes dismissive of staff and parents who are upset.

Yes, the vast majority of clients are going to make excellent progress in therapy based on applied behavior analysis. One of the biggest obstacles is handling the emotions that come from an occasional problematic session. Overlooking this issue can be a major cause of failure. I’ve often argued that this is so important it is necessary to have a plumber on call.