Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table.
So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.
And welcome once again to ABA on Tap. under much different circumstances today, but really making an effort to come at you nonetheless. I'm here with my gracious and quarantined co-host, Daniel Lowry.
Mike, good to hear from you, man. Wish we could do this in our usual style and together, face-to-face, so we could do it that way, but over the phone will suffice in these interesting conditions we're living in now.
I agree, sir. And we have a wealth of ideas to share already. We had a stockpile of these episodes. So to speak, between you and I, and now all of that is kind of out the window.
We actually considered doing a show together last week and since then have reconsidered for obvious reasons, which we won't get into too much today, but we might be talking about quarantine behavior and social distancing behavior a lot more in the near future as it does kind of fall into our constant expertise, although in a different application. So we're going to be talking about that. We'll see all in time, right? But it is good to hear your voice, man.
And I know we've been talking over text and email and messenger, but haven't actually talked directly in almost two weeks. So good to hear you.
You too, buddy. Great to hear you as we try to figure out not only how to do podcasts with this new reality that we're living in currently, also how we deliver ABA services in this new interesting time.
So I guess we had unofficially termed this QABA, was the name of this episode, unofficially. We'll see if we change our minds on that, but quarantine ABA. We've all dealt with the idea of social distancing for two weeks now. And at the same time, we had deemed ourselves experts in so-called online learning and distance learning, Khan Academy, certainly a great little website that I use with my kids. But this has kind of changed the face of that. as well.
Wouldn't you say, Dan, kind of poke some holes in what we thought was ways kids learn online and the whole notion of screen time. It's changing a lot of social standards in many ways, and I'm just kind of skimming the surface there. I'll let you go with that thought for a while.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. It was a It was doable when it was kind of optional online learning or online learning within the schedule of in-person learning and day-to-day activities. But now that it's forced online learning with people that, i.e. parents, that might not be well-versed in the online learning realm, as we're all learning together, at times may seem chaotic. And that's, I think, what we're kind of running into a little bit and then trying to mitigate that currently.
So that's something you and I had a chance to talk about briefly, something I've been thinking a lot about in the past two weeks, and really over the last week, when everything really ramped up and we realized, okay, this is going to be a while. Well, I think most of us are coming to that realization. Something we talked about in our first episode... fortunately, was this idea of a direct transfer of technology. And I saw a lot of that happening, right?
Clearly, we're going to plug in the camera. We're going to have our little token charts up on the camera. That's going to be what's going to happen. And you know what? That, by and large, did work for some of our kids. But then we faced... the same challenges we've been facing with that direct transfer of technology. And I've kind of elaborated, at least for our purposes here today, and something that we'll probably expand on much more, is three levels of service.
And not that it's so different now in quarantine, but the application, the interpretation of these three levels is the same. We always had the idea of consult ABA service, right? You deal with the parent, you talk to them, you meet with them, you do a great job of group parent training. Really, the client can access the service pretty easily. And then we've always had the notion of parent participation, something we talked about in our first episode a little bit. What does that look like?
Is this just us running the show? So now the idea of parent coaching becomes super important. We're going to create, we're almost like Peloton or Planet Fitness in that sense, right? we're going to do something along with you on the camera. And then there's the idea of can I directly engage this child or this client on the screen so that I'm running the show or the keeper of the instructional control like we've more traditionally seen.
So I think if we can work through those three layers and maybe add to that, that might be helpful here because it does, it's helped me anyway, think of how am I gonna approach any given client, any given registered behavior technician and their skill set, knowing that some of them I might lean on for all three levels, some of them might not be ready for any of them because of a limited experience, in all fairness, just due to time, and doing the more traditional service.
So, man, we've got a lot of ground to cover here, and I feel like we've been successful, at least professionally speaking, but there are a lot of questions to ask and answer still.
Absolutely, and it's one of those things, like most things in life, that the more information we get and the more answers we get, the more questions we then have to get more answers, and that circle continues. You mentioned a couple things that I thought was interesting.
Initially, you talked about kind of the parent participation aspect, and I remember, I think it was maybe like a year ago or something like that, sitting down and we were just chatting about how eventually ABA, in theory, should become primarily a parent training model or a parent education model because we're trying to teach parents how to care for their kids, and we're not parents. Most of us, you are, but most of the direct therapists are not parents.
And it's always kind of been, I feel like this thing on reports where, hey, let's increase parent engagement, and some parents look at it as rested and other of them don't, and now it's not really an option. Now it's kind of AVA as maybe it always should have been, or maybe it should be moving forward, is how do we get the parents to get on board with whatever we're trying to teach as opposed to a two-hour respite service.
In addition to that, it's now begging the question, how long should sessions be? I know we talked about a lot of that in our first episode, but two-hour sessions, yeah, we're going to try to do it, but a lot of parents are getting worn out and the kids are losing engagement after an hour. We have a fair amount of experience in the telemed realm at our company personally, and we've been moving in there with some growing pains, but fairly successful, I'll say.
So I do feel like we've come from a point of a reasonable amount of knowledge in ABA and telemed as the rest of insurance companies look to allow that funding as people are quarantined through telemed, which used to be a verity, and getting parents involved and seeing how long we can run sessions. Finishing up my statement, then I'll pass it right back to you.
We'll talk more in subsequent episodes or Q&As as we talk about quarantine and answers about some specific strategies that we found to be successful to make your quarantine life a little bit easier. Because now, as parents, you guys have to be parents, and you have to be educators, and you have to be providers, and you have to be ABA therapists. And those are no longer truncated in four different people. This is one person now that has to provide all of that.
So kind of wrapping that idea up, I think it's definitely turning ABA on its head, but hopefully it'll come out the other end in a better, more parent participatory fashion and less of a 20-year-old person who's fresh out of college is going to come teach me how to work with my kid and play with my kid for two hours. So I covered a lot of ground there, but I'll pass it back to you, Mr. Mike.
You covered a ton of ground there, man. And I've got a million ideas, and I hope I can grab onto one quickly here as I buy myself some time. But I felt a fair amount of success with a few clients. Let's say, you know, without spending too much time on the professional life, you know, I think about 50% of my clients right now are ramped up for a regularly scheduled set of weekly sessions.
So now recommendations about one, two, three times a week, two hours, hours and a half at a time, that changes the math quickly when you're doing half hour at a time, assuming that that's a parent consult or somebody that can engage for longer than half hour, and that has happened. So I was feeling this great amount of success, just to give you a specific example, with one particular client who I consider somebody who we're fading back on, right?
So really just attending situations that are offering more social skills, more peer interaction. Well, now we can't do that. So how does... you know, how do those clients' needs change? Well, they change a little bit. Let's talk about the current circumstance. Okay, so I feel very successful. We're going to be able to provide all three levels of service for this particular client because he will engage on screen.
Talking to the parents about this, we're all very excited and excited They tell me something very candidly. They say, look, you can point us to whatever website. You can send us whatever worksheets you want. We'll go through them. We're both very intelligent people. But at the end of the day, there's a skill set, a constant expertise that you have that requires you to be here. And we don't have that.
And I know before we started this recording, I sort of put out this metaphor of the idea that as a proficient, pretty technically sound individual that has some confidence in their skills, you might put me in a cockpit in an emergency situation to land the plane. But at some point, my skill set is probably going to fall short, and you'll need at least a trainee pilot next to me to make that happen fully safely. Now, maybe I'll get the plane down, and there'll be a crash, but everybody survives.
And that's kind of the questions we're asking right now is how good can it get and how quickly can we get that to be that good? And then, unfortunately, how long are we going to do this? So there's a little bit of frustration and all that uncertainty, and I'm just skimming the surface of that idea.
But I think the benefit is that at the end of all this, we're going to come out... much more knowledgeable about distance learning and online stuff than we are, and than we thought we were before all this.
I couldn't agree more. I think your airplane analogy, I remember, I think the technical term of the content expertise that our therapists have is, as one parent called it about four years ago, is the sauce. That's the technical terminology. I remember one parent saying that, I want the sauce. My therapist comes, and he can get my kid to do everything that he wants him to do, and then I try to get my kid to do it, and he's not able to do it. So he's like, I want the sauce that that guy has.
So, yeah, I think that's what we're trying to give over to the parents for the best that we can so that they can have the sauce to land the plane, proverbially speaking. And that's a little like a recipe, right?
So you can watch a cooking show, but somebody going to, you know, almost like a HelloFresh or whatever those services are called, picks out your ingredients, already has it chopped for you. and then just watch as you execute it versus you picking up the food and somebody's made it for you. So again, another way to conceptualize it, that's a really good point is, and you talked about this earlier, our parents lean on us for some respite.
Even if they're participating fully with us, at least we're kind of driving the car, manning the stove, if you will. And that's a really good point, the sauce. The sauce is going to be missing. I know exactly who you're talking about there in terms of our professional life, and we'll certainly have that individual and his better half on at some point in these times, I'm sure. I know they've been figuring out a lot of good stuff that the world should hear about soon.
Your cooking analogy, I think, is so on point, and I think it relates so well to ABA because these therapists who are well-versed and do have the sauce, so to speak, it's kind of like they don't necessarily need every ingredient. Maybe if an ingredient's out, they can go find something that's It's good enough, or they can make it without an ingredient, or they can kind of go on the fly and figure it out, you know, the difference between cooking and baking.
Everything doesn't necessarily have to be so exact, and that's what a lot of these therapists have. And when they come into situations where it's time to put the flour in and, oh, crap, we don't have flour, I'm comfortable. I can figure something out. Versus the younger therapists are oftentimes the parents. If I don't have exactly what's on this recipe book and I get to a point and it's not there, then I'm stuck and I don't know kind of how to get out of this situation.
I think that cooking analogy is more accurate than probably even initially imagined. That comfort and that ability that no matter what we can do, I'm going to make something. It might be a little bit burnt. It might not be the best possible chicken cordon bleu, but it's going to have some chicken and some cheese and some ham, and it's going to be edible. That much I'm sure.
Is it edible? That sounds like a future title here for a podcast, and again, it is really accurate.
So far, procedurally speaking, we've been very exclusive about recipes in ABA this is the SD this is the expected behavior and this is the consequence this is what your chicken cordon bleu is gonna look like and if it doesn't look like this then it's a minus or on our binary scale it's a zero and now we're gonna have point ones and .0001s all the way to the .9 of that, you know, zero or one binary scale. And I like your phrase, is it edible? Does it work? Is it nutritious?
And if you can take it down right now, Mom and Dad, we're going to have you have to try chicken cordon bleu again next week and then some other dish. And of course, the chicken nuggets. And then we'll see how edible that is. But I think it really stands to benefit us professionally because we're going to have to challenge ourselves here to be able to have more than one recipe, to have ingredient substitutions. So procedurally speaking, we should get stronger here.
Yeah, I mean, that's the benefit I see in the future is we were, not to use this phrase so strongly, but we were kind of one-trick ponies in many ways. And this is going to force us to be able to see many variations of the recipe, more like the cook and not the baker, knowing that there's also sorts of gradations between those two things. levels of exactness and improv, I guess, to use those words kind of loosely. But I like that, certainly like that analogy.
And, again, we can come out stronger from this, both in ideas as to what to do in distance and then how those, you know, travel over or translate into our actual contact here, hopefully in the near future. So...
Edible ABA, coming to the podcast soon. I remember the analogy or your story just brings me back to a couple parent groups that we run and talking about, you know, at the end, is it edible? It might not be exactly how you wanted it, but I can reflect back. I remember you're working with a client currently who's struggling with a shower routine.
And, yeah, we want to think our recipe is, okay, we say no. John Doe, it's time to shower, and, you know, first shower, then you'll get whatever, and John Doe goes in the shower, and then it's over, and then they get whatever. Or time for homework is a common one. You know, I joke about the English person saying, you know, time for homework is, Mom, how much would you like me to do?
Absolutely, Mother. Immediately, yes.
And, you know, oftentimes it doesn't happen like that. I remember an example about the showering. I think Custer gave some disrespect back to the parent, and then it kind of went back and forth, but you asked, well, what happened? And the parent said, well, the kid showered. All right, we're good. The kids will rip up homework, and I'm not going to do it and rip it up. Well, maybe you tape that homework together, and they eventually do it, and they hand in a tape homework assignment.
Maybe the ham's above the chicken or below. It doesn't have to look exactly... what we want it to look like. Obviously, we don't want it always to turn into a meltdown, but was it edible? Did the task get done? In both cases, in the parent groups, if you add the shower and the homework, it got done. I think that's something to focus on. At the end, it was a success.
That can even be empowering to parents because so often they focus on the process, which No one wants a 45-minute-long tantrum to get homework done. I get it, and if that's happening repeatedly, okay, we definitely need to change things, but we could easily focus on, wow, you know what? The homework got done, as opposed to my kid just yelled and kicked and screamed at me and told me they hated me. That's
a really good point. Again, I think that that's something that we can gain some growth from in terms of adapting to the gradual nature of And that's kind of why I joke about the English kid or the movie script, right? We all have it scripted out, and it's going to look like this. And if it doesn't look like that, then we failed. And that's not necessarily true. What got achieved? Something got achieved. Did the shower get done? Did the food get eaten? And then you're right.
Do we have to endure a 45-minute tantrum to get this done? And that's where... Parents, even professionals, become as much a part of that undesired habit as the child is. We are also doing certain things that are maintaining that behavior. One of the things that becomes very interesting here with this new approach to service, if you will, is looking at the endurance more than ever having to help everybody understand that the child has no issue with their difficult behavior. The rest of us do.
So we come in and are able to provide very necessary, very valuable support during those times, but now we're not going to be able to be there physically. So the notion of Modeling for your child calm during those tantrums, the notion of staying calm yourself, the idea of take 10 deep breaths, now not just being for the child, but being for the parent. Again, so many levels of ABA is for the parent, not as much for the child. And again, I can't deny our physical presence.
Obviously, I know that being in front of anybody and who you're trying to learn from is of great value. That's the basis of social learning.
And it's changed from the vicarious sense when you go online you're not no longer just directly observing somebody but yeah more than ever it harkens back to this idea that the parents have to at this point in time build some new endurance we're all having to do that I can say that not just as a professional but as a parent myself all of us in relationships in general having to learn a new level of endurance and not being able to see somebody or living with roommates who were not quarantined
with or you know whatever level in between living on your own or being married with multi-generational access or whatever, you know, other.
Or husband and wife just having to be around each other for 24 hours a day.
You know, there's a huge line or a theme of journalism right now focusing on the expected increase of domestic violence and child abuse during this time. And I chuckled not because I think it's funny, but because it's something that we haven't had to really think about, behaviorally speaking. And this all falls in line with what you and I are talking about. talking about.
Now the parents having to be short order cook, clean, medical provider, you know, news watcher to see what's happening next, having to think about how you're going to get your groceries, you're teaching school in many ways, or maybe you're not teaching school. There's a whole sector of cultural differences that we haven't explored yet in terms of, like you mentioned earlier, access to online services.
second language learners or people that have immigrated here from the Middle East or other countries who are also expecting us as service professionals to still be going in to provide services. And again, these are things that I've heard in passing or in directly dealing with people. I'm not trying to single out any particular culture or nationality.
It's just been my experience thus far that certain parents, given levels of assimilation or even education, are all saying, no, you guys have a certain kind and expertise that we can't replicate. So thank you for offering this, but even if we can access you online, how are we going to make up for these expertise? How are we landing the plane ourselves? And again, the answer is, well, we're going to have to teach you, and you're going to build a whole new endurance.
And the benefit is that maybe we're going to integrate a lot of daily activity that maybe you were otherwise leaning on us for. And I say that with all due respect. but there is a bright side to this, I think, in terms of how successful we can be. Obviously, developing that content, I know for two weeks now, has been very challenging for me.
I'm more fatigued and exhausted at the end of a workday than ever, and it's not because I've been driving around from client house to client house, which is also exhausting, but because my mind has been working overtime. So, I mean, again, a lot of good things that can come from this, but there's still so many challenges, and even we don't know what we don't know quite yet.
Very well said. Yeah, in the past, we've always had a fighter jet on standby that we could fly a pilot into the plane to help land it. We've always been able to get there in the flesh and in the body and be able to model these procedures and get them done. And now the government's grounded all fighter jets. They said we have to stay in our home and we can't, at least in California, we can't go into the home. And I'll talk about that in a second. So now it's...
The parents are going to have to fly the plane, and we'll try to Skype in, telehealth in, phone, whatever we can do to try to get them to land the plane safely and fly the plane as well as we can, as you were saying. I do think there was an interesting point you made. I'm sorry?
Go ahead.
There was an interesting point you made about the physical presence, and I think that harkens back to that seventh dimension of ABA, of generalization, or more specifically, generality. I think we're going to learn a lot about that dimension right now because we're seeing wily two-year-olds on Telemann. The parents are having a real difficult time with corralling, and our therapist didn't have nearly as difficult a time corralling that kid.
We were able to block and do things like that, but if the parent's not able to do it, then... How much of generality are we promoting? And if we're not doing that generality step, then technically we're not doing ABA because that's our seventh dimension. So I think we're going to learn a lot about ourselves in these times and how we can be there physically, what we can do. I'm going to pose three questions that I've written down here to you, Mike, and then pass the mic. No pun intended there.
Number one. I think the biggest part of this podcast today is going to be our level of being essential, for lack of a better term. The government still considers us essential employees, so we do technically have the ability to go work in individuals' homes, and some companies, for whatever reason, are still... applying that and working in individuals' homes. I've heard. So the question there on the first one with essential is the service of ADA has been deemed essential.
Now, are we able to deliver it in a way that is potentially more safe and in congruence with that 4.07 ethics code, you know, environmental situations that may preclude or hamper implementation of services? This is an interesting one when we're getting into that. It seems like a potential environmental situation that might preclude implementation of the services. So the first question I'll pose to you is our level of essential.
And that's, I think, what we're trying to figure out is the service has been deemed essential, but is us actually being there in person essential? I'll hold off on other two questions and give that one to you, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
Wow. So... essential then has to be dissected right because we are essential to development and development is an important facet of human life but at this point human life is actually at risk if we don't stay away from each other to a certain extent. And when I say risk, I know there's a lot of discussion out there about people being too alarmist or people not being aware enough. All I mean is that we just don't know right now.
And obviously, professionally speaking, without getting too much into that, both of us are in circumstances that decided to stop. going into people's homes pretty early on, and I think that was a really wise choice. But I have also heard of other providers, and in fact, in dealing with some partnerships and telling them what it was we had decided to do, I got a lot of feedback back on, oh, well, glad you guys are doing that. A lot of people are still going into other people's homes.
And I was pretty surprised. I don't know... how much of that is truly the essential, we're medical service providers and we're essential from medical perspective. I would say it's, you know, I had a cyst removed from my forehead recently and if today had been my surgery, I would have canceled it despite it being deemed essentials for my insurance to cover it or whatever jargon they put up. I'm obviously not gonna go get my head cut open with infection festering around our environment.
So, man, it's a tough question. We're essential to development. Is that a cop-out or is that a good enough? And right now we might need to put ourselves – we might need to change our delivery premise or platform so that we can actually support just – the very nature of existence and autonomic response and breathing, and then we will once again be fully essential under normal circumstances.
Right now, I think that we are essential to development, and thank goodness for technology and the idea that we have some level of access. So, you know, that would be my answer there.
That's an interesting point. We are essential to the development of life. Is our presence actually reducing that development of life for people in the household and stuff like that? That's an interesting premise. I didn't think about it from that perspective. I do also want to make sure that I say I hope that didn't come across that I'm throwing anybody under the bus at all. We're all part of this ABA community. I welcome a discussion.
from any ava provider anybody in the field who feels one way or another feels that we should be in the home or feels that we shouldn't because we're figuring this out on the fly here in california to my understanding it's about 50 50 uh 50 of the companies are still providing uh indirect in-home services and other some have completely suspended operations others have moved to a telemed model so in no way am i throwing any company under the bus and We were one of the first, I believe, not the
first, but one of the first to go more telemed and out of the home, and maybe that was the wrong decision. I don't know. Maybe people can give me some rationale that that was the wrong decision and educate us. But I think that term essential is... You know, it's a huge debate right now, right? They're talking about our marijuana deliveries essential, our... UPS essential, you know, things like that. It's interesting. Yeah, liquor stores, GameStop, right?
They're debating whether GameStop is essential. So I don't think there's a clear-cut answer, but I did like your response there.
Yeah, we're going to learn a little bit more. And so just in the interest of time, Dan, let's do these other two questions. And we're certainly going to come back and provide a lot more. I think you and I have found a good platform for recording now and minding social distancing. And I'm hoping that this comes out very nicely on my end. And I think it will from what I can see on the screen. So let's move ahead here and try to wrap up here in the next few minutes.
Yeah, if you don't mind, my other two questions are, Number one, the difference for our higher functioning clients, the kind of gray area between ABA and more traditional therapy, what I'm finding for some of my middle school and older clients, middle school, high school clients, are more setting guidelines of what a day or week should look like, checking in, monitoring progress, setting more guidelines, which I would assume if these individuals were in talk therapy, it would be a very Very
similar thing. So it's interesting as we kind of blur or explore those lines between us and more traditional mental health therapy for individuals, obviously, that are vocal. And then my second question that remains is we're doing a lot more parent training. Since we're not in there to directly deliver the service, we're having parents deliver the service. Historically, RVTs or direct therapists are not really trained that much on telling parents how to do things. They're doing it themselves.
They're the workers on the floor. It's been more of a BCBA model. So as companies are switching to more direct online, it's interesting to see the direct therapists and how they're learning or managing this new area that they've for the most part, not really been that expected to manage and managing the parents and guiding them through, which has historically been a BCBA skill set.
So those are my two questions, ABA versus traditional therapy, RBT versus direct in terms of telemed, pass the baton to you, sir.
So higher functioning clients and the idea of guidelines. falls right into the idea of parent training, right? Every parent right now is going to be receiving guidelines from us, more than ever. They need to be receiving those guidelines. As for the higher functioning clients, I think that we could look at ways to transfer into some level of practice of replacement behavior.
And this won't work with all clients, but where Traditional talk therapy, using that term very loosely, might have you sit somewhere in an office and visualize this and then give you a schedule of things. If the client can engage with us on the screen, we actually do have some premise for socialization. We can have them practice things, and I'll give you an analog. Sometimes I'll have pre-adolescent boys getting aggressive with... Moms, specifically, it seems to be.
And I can't always be there when that behavior is happening. And, in fact, I don't want to evoke the behavior. I like that when I'm there, it doesn't seem to happen almost ever. So I'm almost left with a choice of setting up proactively and preemptively, you know, what we call other alternative or opposing behaviors completely. So let me have you do nice things for... your mom while I'm here. Why? Because she's your mom.
So in that sense, we might be able to move into different directions, knowing that we can provide the client, if they're conserved or minors, and their parents guidelines, exercise routines, and then sometimes we might be able to actually walk them through those exercises. And then for younger kiddos, again, level of functioning, might allow us to interact appropriately from a social perspective over the screen.
And then, as you know, I deal with a lot of the younger guys, younger than three, and I don't know how much we want to actually teach them to engage visually to the screen, maybe mildly, but that's going to be a lot of walking parents through a lot of goofy routines they don't necessarily want to walk through, like singing preschool songs and, you know, all those joint attention things that preschool teachers or really good preschool teachers are excellent at doing. So that would be...
That's a good
point. So you're saying more of where, like... older client might be we might be the SDs and talking back and forth as they talk to a to a screen and talk to us through the screen a younger client the parent might still be the SD as they're playing a game or singing a song or something like that and we're just there to provide a little subtle feedback on the screen we're not necessarily the aspect of their attention on the screen for the younger client
right and I've actually and that's that's been a challenge for me I've I've uh played a lot of guitar and ukulele and sang on the screen and over the past couple weeks and it you know I can sometimes see the child engaged to me and they're moving around and I can tell that they're listening and the parent might be trying to get them in front of the screen and I'm saying no no no just on the audio don't worry about we don't want them to fix it on the screen and I alluded to that to that at the
beginning of our discussion and saying You know, where suddenly we were telling a lot of pre-adolescents, so we need to manage your screen time. You know, you're on the screen too much and that's the reinforcement we're using and that's the first thing you lose when you misbehave. suddenly now we're kind of forcing the screen. So yeah, I think there's a lot to learn.
We're going to continue learning a lot as a society, as professionals, as parents, and what this idea of higher functioning or different levels, say, of the autism spectrum and what that means towards service delivery, and then certainly expanding our repertoire and our reach as far as, and again, I don't say this disparagingly, as far as what a traditional just discussion or talk therapy might reach where we're going to maybe find ways to make clients practice behavior while we're on with them.
Whether the parents are walking them through it or we're walking them through it. Really quickly to wrap this point up or this question up unless you have more to add which is more than welcome.
I've got 9, 10, 11 year olds who are able to interact with me on the screen and now I'm talking to their parents about things like should we do sessions half hour, 45 minutes at a time during the day so that you mom and dad don't need to ask answer questions for them as they go through their school routine you've set up because you also have to do work from home so could I be the face on the screen that they check back into and go hey can I get a snack or I mean I'm not being that literal but
Can I engage you long enough, walk you through that idea of an independent work system? I know that it always has different acronyms, but how do we support that? Maybe on screen, get that started. Maybe even if there's just somebody they can check back in with and we've got several clients at a time and a group going.
Again, there's going to be a lot of direct evocation of certain behaviors with certain clients that we may be able to do that might go a little bit beyond the traditional check-in-the-office-visit talk therapy model.
That's awesome. Yeah, no, I don't think I have too much more to say on that. And the message of saving time is we're talking about saving time. I don't want to take too much of our audience's time.
We have about maybe two more minutes, and then we can wrap up. So you asked about parent training and and registered
behavior. RVT through the telemed and now asking RVTs to work with parents through the direct service delivery because the parents are the ones facilitating the skills. In history, the RVT would be the one directly facilitating the skills. So that 97153 code, the direct code, now has kind of a different meaning.
It does. And I think that now more than ever, and I've alluded to this premise already and so have you, it's going to call upon us to widen our horizons, our knowledge from a professional basis, meaning that we as supervisors, so to speak, need to get better at teaching students our supervisees, again, for lack of a very general phrase, how to get stronger procedurally.
So we had actually prepared an episode of this on the idea of more than more, and that's a procedure that we've just passed on to our BTs and haven't, by and large, examined or fully analyzed, and it's become this mainstay and this standard operating procedure in our practice.
And we've obviously dissected it, and maybe we will put that episode up in the near future, but I think that's part of it is we need, it's going to be upon us as older, more experienced, certificated professionals, so to speak, to get better at explaining procedures, at varying procedures, and being a little less linear.
And yeah, I think that in that sense, our RBTs, for example, will get better at the idea of quote-unquote parent training, at the idea that I may not be a parent, but procedurally speaking, I am now multifaceted. So I can give you this idea, and when that one doesn't work, I can give you this one and that one and that one, And we haven't necessarily prepared our RBTs that way. We've been much more linear, traditionally speaking. And I say that as, you know, in general.
I'm very comfortable to, very proud to say that this has been a discussion that we've had for years now on the idea that there's many antecedents to maybe, many acceptable behaviors to many possible consequences within a differential spectrum and matching law. You know, and I know that I'm, just putting that phrase out there impromptu, but you get the point.
We've been very linear in the past, and now, more than ever, it's the circumstances begging us to open that up, to be much more procedurally sound, and to explain our procedures much more clearly, which means that our RBTs are also gonna be much more procedurally sound and able to hopefully walk parents through one, two, three, four ways up the mountain, as I like to say, all reaching to some, you know, relatively similar destination and safely, although some will be a little rockier or to use
your premise from earlier, we'll all arrive at an edible ABA. Some will be a little crispier than others, but if it all gets the job done, then, you know, we live through one more day and we train the parents through one more day of the procedures and the content expertise that... know a lot of us uh certainly hold in practice every day
absolutely um yeah i think that's that's probably a good point to end off here uh i will encourage you guys as we continue to look at this this q a format to please look at our facebook page which this is tagged on aba on tap please feel free to post uh any questions If you want to be on one of the podcasts, please feel free to let us know. We're trying to encourage some discussion in these. fairly uncertain times. You can look forward to more episodes in the very, very near future.
This is more of a general one talking about this transition to ABA through quarantine. We're going to talk about some more specifics about importance of schedules and predictability and the more specifics of what maybe an ABA session would look like, some strategies, what a day in a quarantine life with a child with ASD might look like, some more specifics moving forward. So thank you guys. Thank you, Mike. It was great chatting with you, man. I hope to see your face soon
yeah likewise Dan
weird times man but we'll get out of this drunker
we will and please do like Dan said send us all your questions and feedback and we really want to make this a forum to share and exchange ideas there's never been a better time to gel professionally as behavior analysts and put some good stuff out there for our clients and people that need our constant expertise so you guys stay well stay safe Dan stay well stay safe we'll do this again soon brother cheers cheers man