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.