Probably my favorite genre of movies and television shows is time travel. I especially like stories with time loops. The best-known story in this genre is Groundhog Day, but there are many others. Recently, when I was sick for a few days, I binged-watched most of them. Time loops involve a person reliving the same day repeatedly. After each loop, they try something new and often improve their life in the process.
Of course, in real life, the same events do not repeat over and over again. Too many things change from day to day. On the other hand, things often don’t change that much. While there are many things in life that you can’t foresee, many things are very predictable.
In our work with children with autism, it can be helpful to think about time loops. We know that when our student hears the lawnmower, sees the iPad isn’t charged or that we ran out of mac and cheese, problem behavior is almost certainly going to occur. If you have been presenting the same lesson in the same way for ten days with no progress, day 11 is unlikely to be different.
If we were in a time loop movie, we certainly would have improved. If the child had a tantrum every day at 10 AM, we would do something different to stop that from occurring. If the child made the same errors during instruction, we would have likely tried a new procedure. Since our days are very varied, we often fail to see obvious patterns. Great BCBAs find patterns that aren’t obvious and more difficult to discover.
We tend to think that every day is completely different–the behavior seems to occur randomly. That is rarely the case. There is almost always a predictable pattern to discover. We aren’t in a time loop movie, but events repeat more than we realize.