The Four Reasons Your Child Does Anything: A Parent’s Guide to Motivation
4 Ways to Understand Excessive Crying in Infants and Help Parents Few sounds work on a parent’s nervous system the way an infant’s cry does. And few questions frustrate parents and teachers more than the one that follows: “Why does this child keep doing that?” The answer is closer to hand than the frustration suggests. […]
My Child Has Autism: How Do I Know the Program Is Working?
One sentence from 1968 gives parents the standard they need — and the right to demand it. When your child is diagnosed with autism and you begin an ABA program, a question quickly follows: how do I know this is actually working? It is a reasonable question — and it turns out the field of […]
Gentle Parenting? Maybe Not. Research Supports Non-Aversive Response Costs to Build Self-Control
Empathy and Consequences Are Not Mutually Exclusive Gentle parenting has drawn significant scrutiny in the press and in the research literature. Critics on Psychology Today and elsewhere have noted the movement’s reliance on idealized standards with little supporting evidence. The first systematic empirical study of gentle parenting confirmed what critics suspected: despite its popularity, gentle […]
Why Verbal Reprimands Don’t Work:
When Punishment Becomes a Reward and 3 Ways to Fix That In the world of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), what matters most is the data. So many parents use verbal redirections — often born of anger — to stop their children’s behaviors. Inthis blog, we will explore why that seldom works with any degree of […]
Each Point is a New Point (in Time and in Tennis)
All of us suffer through mistakes, losses and failures. Often, we establish seemingly automatic thoughts to protect ourselves. These ideas learn to predict that a distressing situation will happen, again, the next time similar circumstances exist. A point in time, that contains a misstep, often takes on a life of its own. That point in […]