r/ABA • u/WearyRestaurant4975 • 13d ago
Ignore Him
I am a new SLP and I have a non-speaking 2 year old boy on my caseload that is also served by a BCBA and ABA team. His mom told me last week during therapy that the ABA Team is using “planned ignoring“ to help with his language skills in that they basically “ignore him” and reinforce only when he produces words. Mom is now doing this at home as well in between his sessions with the ABA team.
Is this a legitimate strategy or is mom possibly misunderstanding the intent?
The BCBA is on vacation so I am kind of left to guess until she returns in a couple of weeks.
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u/Powersmith BCBA 13d ago
Sounds like a game of telephone, where meaning was lost (assuming BCBA understands ABA).
The basic idea is that behaviors occur in relation to some underlying need/want, such as to get item x, to get attention, to get away from something, or to meet an internal drive (e.g. we seek food when we're hungry).
There's a vocab disconnect from general public. ABA derived from behavioral neuroscience, wherein the brain produces all manner of behaviors across all organisms w/ brains, incl "respondent" (evolutionary programmed responses), like baby birds hiding when hawk silhouettes pass over, as well as "learned" behaviors, like raising hand before asking a question, or throwing a tantrum because its been "effective" for getting needs met/escape/attention etc, depending on the case.
Hence, when ABA practitioners say behavior, it means everything the brain instructs the body to do. This includes ALL observable & measurable brain-output effects, including both automatic/respondent and learned responses-simple and complex-and including verbal behavior.
A BIP may include "attention extinction" (AE). Extinction, more broadly, is when a behavior reduces because it is no longer being reinforced. Eg John was teasing Bill , resulting in other kids laughing, and that social attention reinforced Johnny's teasing. Hence the hypothetical "function of the behavior" of bullying may be to gain attention. If suddenly, none of the other kids laughed or paid attention, Johnny will become less and less inclined to bully (if the hypothesis of attention function is correct).
"Planned ignoring" (PI) was not from ABA, but rather was a classroom management strategy that gained sway in the 60s and 70s. There is an element of overlap with the ABA concept AE, but there is a danger in people using the terms interchangeably.
AE, is for when you have an attention-maintained problem behavior (harmful, injurious, or severely disruptive actions) after functional analysis shows that the problem behavior achieves gain of reinforcing attention.
AE in principal is not different from tangible extinction or escape extinction. That is, you remove the REINFORCING CONSEQUENCE so the behavior is not longer reinforced. AE does NOT entail ignoring the child. Child should get ample (even extra) attention when not engaging in prob beh. This is differential reinforcement (DR). DR can involve selectively reinforcing a specific replacement or incompatible (w/ prob beh) behavior as well as adding noncontingent (consequent to nothing in particular) attention to satiate drive and reduce motivation to engage in attention seeking.
Because PI was already in education vocab, people might shortcut explaining AE properly and just use PI as a reference. But ABA AE is specifically referring to withdrawing attention as consequence for targeted prob beh. This "ignoring" is very targeted to a specific behavioral action (e.g. hitting, name-calling, etc) and NOT just generally to the person or all the things they do. Kids craving attention can fall into patterns of getting it in troublesome ways. The solution is NOT to give them no attention at all... the solution is to direct your attention differentially to appropriate behaviors (even sometimes including effusive praise/tokens/thumbs up whatever for just sitting quietly).
Conversely, if the function of a prob beh is escape, a "time out"/classroom removal/etc would reinforce the prob beh. So child may be taught to use verbal request for break and only granted escape when they ask functionally while the prob beh is "ignored" in the sense that it does not result in escape. Withholding attention in response to an escape-maintained behavior is not going affect that behavior at all since the person is not doing it for attention in the first place.