Q-ABA: Routinely Building Schedules

So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

It's been good, and I think there will be a lot that we can learn from it currently and moving into – Whatever service delivery model this pandemic takes us to and normal life resumes to in the near future.

So that's been interesting for me during things like quote unquote spring break and having my kids during a time when they were now not on a break, but starting online learning for their schools and something else that I know has been a struggle for educators, parents, and professionals alike in finding a balance.

So I think that's what we're going to launch today is trying to not just arrive at specific or slight certain procedures that might be helpful for parents but maybe finding a little bit empathy here and trying to answer the question of how do we stay sane as parents as aba professionals as people during quarantine especially when we're talking about delivering service to kids with a certain diagnosis or being a parent to a child with special needs or just being a parent there's a lot to balance

there especially in this uh in this day and age?

They were definitely stressed, but they were in more like, OK, what does this mean? Like just figuring it out mode. The week after that, I was getting a lot of feedback from parents of like, I'm going crazy. My kids are driving me crazy now because I think they were able to figure some things out. And now they were focused on their kids and they were like, oh, now we've got the possibility of a school year without school in person school. And then parents were getting really stressed with that.

From my small share of parents, it seems like they're starting to find this new normal and find some things that we'll talk about that maybe can make it a little bit easier, a little bit less stressful. It's still going to be stressful, but as you always talk about that difference between stress and distress, I think it was very distressful initially. And now it's gone to stress.

So I look forward to talking with you about some of the strategies that I would recommend that I've seen some of my parents use successfully and ones that I've recommended to parents that they haven't used, but I would continue to recommend to them so that they can turn their distress into stress and their stress into some level of semblance. I do think it's interesting that I would bet money if we were to say, hey, I'll give you a month with your kids. And no, you know, you don't have...

You don't have to work. All you do, you got a month with your kids and you can just hang out with them. Parents would have been like, oh, that's sweet. And now that it's there, now everybody's like, oh, crap, I don't know what to do. And everybody's driving everybody crazy. That's interesting how, I guess, careful what you ask for. We say we never have enough time to spend with our kids because we're always working, always doing all these things.

And now that we have time to spend with our kids, we don't want to spend with our kids.

So too bad if you don't want to do this, we're going. Right? Hey, we just paid for Disneyland. No, we're not going home after two hours. We're here all day. You can kind of use the same strategies in this circumstance, I think, if you can kind of prioritize and balance everything. So the first launching point that I want to present to you is the idea of schedules.

So something that we can all struggle with, whether we're dealing with quarantine or not, is keeping some semblance of a schedule, and more importantly, getting through most of that schedule most of the time. Now, as a parent, in terms of academic routine and scheduling, I can call myself an educator of sorts. I certainly have the background to feel like I can execute this. But at the same time, I haven't been responsible, by and large, for six hours a day of educating my kids.

Well, academically speaking. I think we're always educators as parents. But the idea here is, are we going to keep a bell schedule, or are you going to gradually build... a schedule based on some semblance of a routine. What do you think, or what have you heard has been successful for parents?

And let's try to arrive at some launching points so that anybody who's trying to establish the idea of a schedule, any parents out there who are still struggling with that idea, can gain some relief from our discussion today.

And that when they're at school, when they're going to school, they wake up at a certain time. They eat breakfast at a certain time. They go to school. They've got their activities planned out. Very predictable, even with us. Prior to March 16th, I would wake up. I would eat breakfast. I would drive to work. I'd go park in the same spot like I had a routine, and that all got thrown out the window. So I get a lot of parents saying, like, oh, my kid thinks they can eat all day.

Well, have you ever told them they can't eat all day? Is it explicitly defined for them when they can and can't eat? They think they can watch iPad all day. Well, have you told them that they can or can't watch iPad all day? Just because you have this idea doesn't mean that it's not reflected to your child.

So that schedule of... I know I have iPad from 4 to 5 because every Monday through Wednesday I can have iPad between homework and after dinner, etc. Now it comes out the window because there is no homework as it used to be or dinner times, you know, dysregulated. So I've told all of my families and it would still be the number one suggestion I can give is get on some semblance of a schedule. I think that's just so important.

Like I said, I don't have kids, but I can relate to when our office was being repainted and everything was all over the place. And just from all the clutter and the lack of a schedule and things moving, our work rate just got deteriorated so significantly. So that schedule and just having clear, defined areas to the best that you can. Some people are going to be able to have rooms for work. Other people, it's going to be the kitchen table, whatever. This is the work area.

This is the time we're going to do it. The number one, schedules, and number two, and then I'll pass it to you because I think you started this in my mind, is the difference between schedules and routine. I think schedules is more we think of like a tangible thing. We think of like a now, like there's a schedule. I can point to it. I can look at my Google schedule or something like that. Some of us might have schedules. Most of us might have schedules. All of us have routines.

Some of those routines are based on schedules, and some of those are just routines that we – get into, right? We go to the gym and I always do this and that and this and that. I never necessarily even thought about it. It's just my subconscious routine, which is a schedule. And I think those routines got thoroughly thrown off with this. And a lot of behaviors arised from it. Not that a kid was necessarily trying to rebel from their parent or the kid was like, screw you, I want to eat all day.

The kid just didn't know what the new routine was. So I thought that was really interesting that you brought up schedules versus routines. So I'll pass it back to you. Hopefully that more than thoroughly answered your question. Probably more than people wanted to listen to, but that's my two cents on schedules and routines.

I've learned some things. But I still haven't played on schedule. meaning I don't wake up every day and set a time every day to sit and play. And I think that... for me as we're all lunch, is to say that if I were to do something on schedule, as well as routinely, then I would really see improvement in my approach to the drums. And right now, I'm doing something more routinely, but not yet quite on schedule. And I would want parents to sort of take this example and run with it.

Meaning that right now, and you're absolutely right in your time frame, I know the first two weeks, it probably wasn't until early April, and I think I used to joke with you on our messages and say, I think I might avoid the ulcer. I think I might actually avoid the ulcer today because I got a grip on something in terms of our telemed and the way I was approaching the services, trying to redefine them, trying to figure out how to actually give adequate and suitable service to clients.

So I can understand as a parent and as a professional that it's taken some ramp up time. But I do think that, that said, really quickly, there is hope on the horizon and more than that. Now I know that because I've done some things routinely with some clients, as well as on a schedule, thank goodness to the fact that we're a service that has an appointment scheduled, I feel... And I think that a lot of my clients hopefully would say the same at this point.

Again, there's still a lot to learn and a lot of the responsibility that's being shifted to them within this service. But because, you know, especially I think of some of my very, very young kids who I knew from the beginning, me or my RBT's having instructional control via Zoom for a two-year-old. I checked that and kind of threw it out the window pretty quickly, meaning, no, that's not going to make sense. That's just not the way this modality is going to work.

So it becomes a matter of shifting this responsibility to the parent and what is that going to look like. And what's been very successful, and I have to thank some colleagues, some old colleagues that lent me this information, from some resources they had, and this idea of creating and defining the play space. So I sat with these parents and these younger professionals that we work with. And I said, so what are we working on again? It's these and these and these targets.

And what stimuli do we think are going to evoke these targets best? Okay, mom, dad, I want you to have those things ready. You're going to have one of those things here at this table. Remember that table by the chalkboard? And then you're going to have the other one over by your computer. So that way, no matter when the kiddo gets up, and says kind of observably, no, I don't want to engage with this, you can just see what else they'll settle on.

And once they settle, then you bring us with you, and we sit there, and we kind of sit and sit, and we coach you about all those joint attention pieces, and remind you of all those cues that you now should be doing. So if we can do that routinely at the same time, that we've scheduled, now we've got something powerful to work with. And is that to say that you're only going to do this when we're on the screen?

No. In fact, it's now our work to create these play routines, again, very specific to an under three or a two-year-old, to create these play routines that are going to be so engaging that you're going to want to show us next time we come on screen, and then we're going to expand those. Now, why is that happening? Because you're doing things routinely. And for us, as far as the service is concerned, you're doing things on schedule too.

So again, I haven't really defined specifically for any parent how to run school at home, because I think that's going to be individualized in every household. But the answer lies in doing things daily, routinely. And then as efficacy and familiarity builds with those, and there's a reinforcement history to be drawn from, you can more easily say, this is going to happen at this time and that's going to happen at this time. And the informative function comes into play.

So now you can tell your kids, we have to do this at this time because of this. Dad, mom has a meeting at this time, so we better do the science or the art project before that or after that. And again, I'm saying these things very ideally, but without trying that day to day and routinely having some success and routinely having some kickback and failure, I don't think that the premise or the idea of a schedule can ever be truly achieved.

So that would be, again, for those parents out there who are frustrated and they're like, oh, man, I don't have a bell schedule and math is never happening at 8.30, even though I put it on my whiteboard that it was going to happen at 8.30. I'm sorry that's not happening, but don't feel unsuccessful. You're in good company for the most part. And keep trying, because reading should happen. Because it didn't happen at 8.30 with you, now they've escaped it.

We might be supporting the completely wrong function of this late behavior, and now it becomes true escape. we've now canceled something from our routine. So the idea that we'll never schedule it becomes less likely. So yes, I think that parents should be forgiving of themselves. They should be very forgiving of themselves and know that we're gradually building this up. And certainly ABA is here to help in that sense.

And I know that we'll get there a little bit later in discussing how our roles have shifted a little bit as well.

That's a really interesting concept. Just... You know, definitely parents should have instructional control to what they say, like stop when a kid's running through the street or something like that. But we really want a two year old learning that they should follow instructions from strangers at two years old. And that being a habit for the rest of their life. And then they they're 18 and they get into a chat room and somebody tell them. Anyway, I digress.

Um, Probably not going to be that good if you put a musician who just riffs and wants to do solos with a band that wants somebody to be on the same timing and the same schedule. And that's, I think, what we're running into with some parents want things more scheduled and some don't. So we'll talk about that in just a minute when we talk about multiple parents being home.

You can still make the show run and you can still complete the song and then do it again the next night because that's what repetition or the power of repetition and then not making mistakes in the future for those shows or whatnot, again, can be totally applied to learning. It's not always going to run 100% perfectly. Actually, it never is.

We're going to have to learn. When you say, okay, son, daughter, it's time to do school at 8.30 and they don't do school at 8.30 and you look at it, well, I'm not a teacher. It's a failure. Well, what can we learn from it? How do we make these all learning opportunities? Because unfortunately, by victim of circumstance, you are kind of going to be their teacher for at least the rest of this year.

I can say that I've got more experience than most people in terms of being an educator or knowing about learning theory. Yeah, but it hasn't been easy. And yes, we are teachers. We are educators. And right now, we're having to do the school stuff too. So certainly, I think that it's our premise here to offer a lot of empathy for that. And you're right. It's not a failure.

It's a gradual process, and everybody's learning right now, and it will get better, and then hopefully we'll all go back to some idea of normalcy as it was.

The parents got to deliver that or the iPad or I have to turn myself into a motivator. And initially it was kind of, you know, left something to be desired. We were all learning and some parents, you know, we're a little frustrated. Most that stuck through it are in a better time now.

And I think that's even metaphorically what we're trying to talk about, you know, The whole picture here with ABA in general, if we would have just stuck in this telemed model of, no, we're going to sit and we're going to do flashcards and your parents are going to prompt you through it, kind of like Lovaas and ABA, we would... I think we'd be trying to stick a square peg through a round hole.

So it was on us to try to modify and say, okay, well, if I can't find tangible reinforcers to get them motivated, number one, what tangible reinforcers can I find? How do I limit them like YouTube videos and things like that? Number two, how do I make myself the reinforcer? Because we were finding that, hey, I go on and five minutes into it, the kid's checked out and the kid's just asking mom when they can leave. And I have no really way to make that kid follow through.

So how do I make myself the reinforcer? And a lot of these things that we kind of overlooked because we can use brute force in ABA, and I use that term kind of in quotes, but it's pretty applicable of, oh, cool, I've got a four-year-old. I can prompt them to follow me. I can't do that anymore. So I think there's going to be a lot of revelations that are made. I know this is a little bit of a side tangent.

For ABA overall, it's going to benefit the field that we're making ourselves more motivating rather than just forcing this individual to follow through as we tell them to do. Instructional control is, you know, we often call it.

I have to decide whenever I abandon a plight or a demand, I can very clearly see, uh-oh, What habit am I establishing here that I'm not going to be happy with in the future? Which means there's no escape for me. I have to deal with it. And very empathetically, what I would lend to parents there is to say, you kind of have all day is the other side here. Meaning that if you needed to take most of the day just to make sure that math got started, you kind of have the luxury to do that.

Now, behaviorally, I wouldn't necessarily recommend you do it that way, but you kind of have all day to make sure that what you say gets done however possible. Implementing some sort of chaining procedure, you know, for those parents who have difficulty with their kids in general, and, well, I have to sit next to them the entire time. You have the luxury to do that right now. and then let them do the very last piece of that task. And then tomorrow, they do the last two pieces.

And we call that backward chaining. And again, very nicely done in the lab. And I'm not lending this facetiously by any means. I'm saying that's how systematic we can be. And we have the luxury and the time, in a sense, to be. And I'm also working from home. So I understand that going back to the idea of schedules, you have to be mindful of front-loading, putting your time in, and then giving yourself time to work.

And if you've got a partner wife, husband, how do you schedule that so that you're separating those roles and you're helping each other out I've read about some families or neighbors when they can feel safe enough actually sharing that so kids are going over to one house so that one household and a set of parents can work for a couple hours and then the kids straight households, you know it's pretty smart so again, schedules and routines everybody's redefining this and I think that we've got to

give ourselves a little bit of a break but at the same time lean on the luxury that we don't have an escape that we kind of have again using the phrase loosely we have all day to work on this right now literally not just figuratively so in that too I can very say with a lot of hope that the results I'm seeing from my parent training and the results that I see being illuminated for parents and you know one parent saying I'm not afraid anymore I'm not afraid of the protest or the tantrum because

you know you guys are helping me remember me how to do the de-escalation and how to stay calm and then now I'm seeing the results so you know I'm taking bigger risks or where before I wouldn't have asked them to do this or that because of a blowout now we're doing it and we've done it daily and guess what you know now this kiddo's putting on their shoes or you know things that might sound minimal to to a lot of parents but for those parents that are dealing with you know some level of impaction

with ASD for example you know making sure that a kiddo's wearing certain kind of clothes during certain weather or whatnot can be a very very, very tedious task. So parents really gaining a lot of confidence in knowing that their escape's being redefined. And for kids, too, now. My dad's here. My mom's here. They're not going to go away. I can't run away to my room.

But no work schedule or cell phone or anything else, really, if they're compartmentalizing the time well, is going to allow for my escape, either. So again, a really good platform. I'm not saying it's any less frustrating or any less challenging, but a really good motivating for parents here to really get a grip on some challenging behaviors.

And if I'm under 18 and I leave this area and I try to escape, I'm going to get a runaway and they're going to call the police on me. And it's like, ah! And then for the parents, it's like, this kid hasn't stopped screaming for the last three hours and I don't know what to do. So the escape is redefined, i.e. non-existent in many different ways. you know, realities these days.

One thing you did say that I thought was interesting, and I do want to highlight, I'll pass it right back to you, is you were saying in terms of like doing the homework and things like that, I think this quarantine also brings a unique dynamic in that there isn't like a time, that much of a time sensitive situation Like necessity to get stuff done because I'm home tomorrow and I'm home the next day and weekends are basically like work weeks. It's all just being home.

So if I don't get my work done today, I'll get it done tomorrow or I'll get it done the next day and the next day. And I find that that bleeds in and all of a sudden you've got two weeks of stuff that you've just procrastinated.

really haven't you've had nothing but time to do it but the you know necessity is the mother of invention and there's not a whole lot of necessity right now so that's where schedules really come in because you can kind of compartmentalize these things that need to be done and hold some level of accountability because otherwise it's all right today we're going to do your school work oh you want to do it at 12 okay don't want to do it what about three up still don't want to do it i want to do it

at five okay well then you got to do it at seven oh, you're too tired to do it at seven. Well, we can do it tomorrow because you're home. We can do it the next day. And all of a sudden, nothing gets done. And even though it was on the schedule, it's not part of the routine. And that's the big difference that you're highlighting is you can make as many schedules as you want until it becomes a routine. It's not going to change anyone's life.

And in fact, a lot of kids are going to fight these schedules. They're going to say, this is what you want to have done during the day. Put it on the schedule and it's not going to get done. And you got to try to force some semblance of that or make some accommodations so that it becomes a routine because not following a schedule can become just as much of a routine as following a schedule can. And I think that, you know, day bleeding into day can definitely, uh, you know, bring that about.

So I thought that was interesting that you kind of brought that up and in terms of trying to get things done at certain times of the day.

But please don't continue making a schedule with seven items, knowing that day after day, one of those is getting done. In fact, I think you would agree with me, and please feel free to jump in, but we would probably recommend that... I know we'd recommend... Start with that one. Make sure that one gets done every day. And then once you have some momentum with that, then add two.

And right now, just to harken back to another point that I made, again, in the sense that the parents aren't being asked to be academic educators in the sense of moving things forward, I would also remind parents this is a time for enrichment. So you don't have to move any learning forward per se if you feel you can't. You just have to maintain it. So practice what they've already learned. Use those worksheets that they're sending, you know, that the teachers are trying to offer.

Yes, it's not everything by any means and by no means is anyone saying this is, you know, this is going to be the constant normal. We're hoping for different, knowing that it is important to congregate to some extent or to provide more access to educators now on screen to be able to move some of that learning forward. I've got, you know, my kiddo getting ready to finish his eighth grade year. I feel for him. He's not going to be able to finish physically with his friends.

And usually a graduation that happens is you go into ninth grade. But as he goes into ninth grade, I know that what he's doing now in school is not going to be acceptable. They're going to have to find a way to give the access that moves the learning forward as opposed to the enrichment that we're having to start with now. now. And what that does in many ways is that begins to redefine another daily struggle, the idea of screen time. So six, seven, eight weeks ago, we were concerned about that.

And now we're having to find a way to clearly ensure engagement to that screen and only to certain content on that screen. So while it seems like a different plight, maybe it's not so different. But anyway, I'll stop there and pass it back to you. I think you've got something to kind of harken back to before we move forward. Just

You can make an art project. You can work with your kid. You can watch your kid play video games. Imagine that and teach them through their video games. And then Go online and learn about if they, I don't know, they play Call of Duty. Learn about if you're okay with guns, learn about guns or war or whatever. If you're not okay with that, do Minecraft and learn about programming. Teach kids how to program.

You don't necessarily have to move the common core standards, which a lot of parents, I think, is what you're talking about, might not even understand how to do and have the ability to move forward, but at least take what they do know or what they have learned and make that functional. This is a great opportunity to do that.

But in the interest of doing these nice short segments where we can concentrate on the topic and do so well, it might be a good time to start thinking of some wrap-up points here, knowing that for the next episode we will be looking into screen time and how ABA and education now have something to be a little bit more collaborative about in our efforts to ensure, you know, as we get into the future that kids are going to be able to access screens for ABA services on a different level, perhaps on

a different level of importance, access their classrooms in an ability to or in an effort to move their learning forward, to learn more about math and more about science per common core standards, to use that phrasing. So there's a lot to be done in redefining this idea of screen time and education online or distance learning for those kiddos who who don't have access still to the online platform.

So as a few wrap-up points for today, let's kick off on number one, the idea that we're redefining roles. And the first thing I would want to tell parents is, especially for parents of young, young children, one thing we're learning is that instructional control should have been, by and large, and almost wholly yours to begin with. So for ABA, us learning... And child-led.

Yeah, child-led, child-directed, play-based, where we gradually define this learning time and demonstrate things for you and give you resources and teach you how to be child-directed and play-based. And yes, demonstrate and become part of the play and the interaction and the parallel play, but... From a two-year-old, under three-year-old perspective, instructional control should have stayed with the parent, and quarantine has taught us that.

So I would congratulate us on learning that and encourage parents more and more of children of any age that they encourage their ABA providers to work with them in that manner because it really seems to be giving good results, at least per my initial estimation.

If that's the big contention point, That's on the schedule, and get through that, and then everything will be easier, and then that will become routine. Because we all have routines. It's just, is it the routine we want or the routine we don't want? We talked about the informative function. Being as proactive as we can, I think there's a lot of reactivity because there's a lot of unknown.

I didn't know my kid, and I hear this from parents, hypothetically speaking, Me, I didn't know my kid was going to want to snack all day. I didn't, okay. So initially we're reactive. And now I know that for the last three days, my kid keeps coming to me every three hours asking if they can have chips or cookies or something. Now I need to be proactive. And that's where that informative function comes in, like you were talking about.

So constantly planning, you know, rewriting that script and planning instead of being reactive is going to, I think, alleviate a lot of stress. Yeah. Yeah, and just trying to make learning and making everything as functional as you can. I think it's a great time for us to take it out of the more, you know, rote learning terms and make it more functional and applicable.

What can anybody teach the school-aged child, whether it's cooking, working in the garage, working on the car, learning about postponing bills and what that's going to look like in terms of the math and the balance two, three months from now. I think that's a really good closing point to encourage parents that there's much more to teach, much more to learn. We're all in this together. There's no escape in that sense.

But there is light in the horizon and I think that, at least for us, we're seeing positive results for parents. We continue to encourage families, parents to access the services, access the resources. Certainly reach out to us on our Facebook page if there's any questions or Suggestions that we can offer, questions we can answer, suggestions we can offer. And, yeah, everybody stay well out there. You too, Mr. Dan.