Strange Technologies

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

We like to entertain criticisms of ABA, especially when they come from ourselves, and And today's episode is entitled, or we're loosely entitling it, we'll see if it sticks, Strange Technologies. Things that we do, things that I can say, whether I'm in California or in Georgia or just amongst any group of ABA professionals.

terms that will be recognizable as technologies that we all envision in a certain way, and we're going to break them down today and find out why it is we do them, where they come from, what level of effectiveness they seem to present, and better yet, how do we improve our use of these technologies, if not modify the way they're used. So really excited about this level of self-reflection. Are you ready, Mr. Dan?

things while very useful technologies that we can explore how useful they are and can we maybe break outside the box of what that means or first establish what they mean and then break out of the box to figure out how to make them more individualized and more technologically savvy as we continue to progress.

That's your visual for ABA.

I think I've, by and large, abandoned the use of that exact definition of visuals for a long time now, knowing that if you're a sighted person, anything within your line of sight is a visual, per se, if you can take it in or perceive it visually. But if we think of something very useful, I know you like to tease me about this, but we think of picture exchange communication systems. Something that is empirically validated, very useful, very complex.

And that's certainly probably one of the foundations of this term we throw around in terms of visuals, in terms of exchanging these one by one, two by two inch laminated squares. The reason they're laminated is Because our kids will tear them up otherwise. So they don't rip. Exactly. Okay, so just to make clear again, why do we actually do this? Why do we practice these things? We're going to break it down all the way. Also for longevity

Okay, so we say visuals, we're not necessarily thinking words, we're thinking icons or an icon that has a word underneath it. A very, very specific format that self-perpetuated and then becomes a definition of treatment or a treatment procedure. So now in ABA, we're using visuals as opposed to visual strategies, and we've got this idea, this vision of these squares with these sort of funny icons sometimes, sometimes with words, sometimes not.

And I think the danger in that is that people end up making attributions. So somewhere in a young RBT's mind, the idea of of visuals becomes this magic wand that the child with AST automatically understands, even though we know that that visual icon, that square, is going to take as much teaching and learning as anything else we're going to demonstrate to that client.

Now, yes, they might make a visual match in terms of what's pictured on the icon or the square and some something in their natural environment, in which case then we're taking advantage of that cognitive skill to match item to item in some way and then using that as our kernel toward learning and expanding toward new learning and whatnot. But I don't think that that's the way people conceptualize it. They look at it and say, oh, we need visuals. Why?

Because we're doing ABA and because this child has ASD and naturally ABA has these one-by-one, two-by-two laminated squares with board maker icons because naturally kids with ASD gravitate to these things and they understand them as though they're natural to them. And those things are not true whatsoever. And I think that's the real danger in, or that's the only danger that lies in that generalized phrase of let's use visuals.

Or how do you communicate to somebody with auditory processing disorders through visuals? But what visuals do provide is kind of a universal understanding. And what I mean by that is I can be on a freeway in California or Maine, Florida, probably other countries as well, and see the white sign and the numbers there. And I automatically know that that's a speed limit sign.

So it does create some universality of like being able to see it and identify it without even necessarily knowing the language and things like that. Even though the word speed limit might be in a different language, I can still understand and conceptualize what that visual is representing.

So I think that's kind of where it comes from or an Ikea instruction, rather than having to write it in 1500 different languages, they show you the picture of it assembled or, you know, typically just assembled and you have to figure it out. But in theory, it would be in many different steps. And that allows a learner to not have to individualize it for different languages, languages and hopefully make it more universal among the understanding.

I think one other thing that's kind of important that you are highlighting is that the ABA is obviously a consumer product as well. And I think as ABA has certain traditions, if those traditions are absent, the consumers then are wondering about the quality of ABA that they're getting.

So what I mean by that is because, for example, my previous company, and I would imagine a lot of the A lot of companies, including ours, we use visuals as well, but there's certain traditional visuals that are established with all new consumers.

And if you have an ABA provider that doesn't come with that new hire travel scale or that new consumer travel schedule, visual schedule, things like that, a parent that's savvy or maybe thinks that they're savvy and has heard all of the visuals that their friend's kids have gotten might look at their provider who doesn't bring those things and be like, well, I'm not getting the quality of ABA that I want because I'm not getting these visuals that my friend's kids got or I've heard that ABA is

attuned with. And that can also probably lead to some curiosity with parents. Just as we went through as the switch from DTT to PRT, when we stopped bringing the table and chairs and parents were like, what is this? You're not doing ABA. Well, if we don't bring the visuals, they might think we're not doing ABA as well. And by visuals, I mean the specific visuals that are associated with ABA. I'll pass it back to you. But as you've alludicated so nicely, that is just one Yeah, again, I mean,

But you have to have a specific premise or understanding of the color scheme, the positioning of that sign, the number orientation. And I think that's what I really want to assert here, is that especially younger professionals have this idea that just because they've created this visual icon, now the child's going to understand. And they forget all of the learning that we're going to have every day.

trial of when I show you this visual icon this happens I show you this visual icon this happens just like you had to learn your numbers and then to read before you then took driver's ed and learn that this white square and I think that we gloss over all that as though Visual icons, autism, oh, those things are, they go together, and kids with autism naturally understand these icons, knowing that they could be circular, they could be triangular, we could put, you know, for all intents and

purposes for young learners, we could even not use English on there. It's whatever we teach them surrounding those icons, and I think that's the real part of the matter we're trying to get to, is these technologies have become so blindly implemented that sometimes we forget about all that. There's a whole aspect of learning that that needs to be associated with the use of that icon and what happens in response to that icon that I think sometimes younger professionals especially might miss.

Unless you have any other points to wrap up on there, we can actually smoothly segue into one of those visuals that gets very commonly used, which is the idea of break, break time visual, right?

Because you have to prescribe or preempt some sort of escape behavior with appropriate behavior such that you're not reinforcing the elope or whatever undesired behavior we see at times when we're trying to get a kiddo to sit, to stand in a certain location for a certain amount of time, to attend to a certain part of their visual field.

As we try to put those visual stimuli or present auditory stimuli along with visual stimuli to get them to engage and then respond in some desired form, the idea of break time technology, both from a visual perspective and then what it means in ABA. Tell us your thoughts on that.

But the second thing is just this concept of break. And I think... Break oftentimes is, like I said, the absence of something, and that's how it's presented is, okay, you're doing five minutes of homework, and then after that you get a break, which means... Zero minutes of homework during the break. And typically that's also done in solidarity or isolation by the kid. It's like, okay, you get access to your toys or go play because you don't have to deal with the homework.

Not only the homework, but you don't have to deal with me as well because for whatever reason as an ABA therapist, I've now become aversive because I've been paired with the homework. So you get the negative reinforcement of avoiding both of those during your break.

So I would, again, attribute, and I'll pass it back to you, Mike, that when we talk about break, it's really really important that we pair learning with breaks and and we make it more of a fluid idea instead of work break work break work break we're working while we're on break and we're feel like we're on break while we're working it's a good rbt could kind of make that session look

And again, maybe it's a matter of semantics, but I think that one of the things that you often highlight is that from a practice perspective or an implementation perspective, break time also means that I'm doing nothing with you now. I had my program. I ran my 10 trials. Now it's break time. I provided you your reinforcement. You've got your iPad. You're chewing on your M&Ms. And now I fail to interact with you by and large. You made the point just right now.

That means that there's no learning happening during break time. That's just not something that semantically or from a pragmatic perspective we want to promote. I think that learning should be continuous and that if we're taking a break, what that really means is that we're not doing anything at all necessarily. We're putting some things away. We're getting some new toys out. Maybe the child's not allowed to go run around the house for a little while. Maybe that's a good time to go grab a snack.

A snack is a break time where you otherwise stop doing everything else and just eat. Exactly. Exactly. I like that. Point being is oftentimes we also multitask those things, right? I know professionally I'm eating lunch, I'm doing something else. The idea of a break means you're stopping everything to do something else, like eat, for example.

I know we'll get to edibles later, and that has a strange technology in ABA, but it fits right in here that there's this notion that Break time now, we're not interacting, and I think that would benefit from changing.

Now, we know that this comes very wisely, as you were saying, from the idea that you're we're giving you a predictable end to something that might be challenging for you knowing that if we've set up a task that is so challenging that you keep running away then it's up to us to modify that task or to make it seem more accessible or more achievable in order to build that momentum in which now we're reducing the likelihood of some sort of need for escape or a break and then furthermore when we're

breaking it doesn't mean that i'm now not interacting with you it means that we're just shifting gears into something that's not necessarily data oriented or that I'm counting but now we can play something else and it might have a preferred stimulus that you you know again that's providing some reinforcement as a result or coming after these more rigorous learning activity I think you said something that that

It has to be something tangible and edible, which we'll talk about in just a little bit here, an iPad, something like that. And then you go and enter with it alone. That's the biggest issue. So even if you want to argue and say, well, we can separate learning from table time and break, I'd debate that, but that's not the hill I'm going to die on. The reinforcement would be a hill to die on, saying that after the test, I give you a reinforcement, just because this happens so often in ABA.

A reinforcement is given and the individual engages in that reinforcement in isolation. And then we get an 18 year old that the parents like, well, how come they only do homework to get the Xbox or how come they only brush their teeth to get the iPad? It's like, well, we've never engaged in that reinforcer with them. And then, you know, breaks always been that's how it's always been. So for the last 10 years, you've been having that contingency.

And you expect just one day they're going to wake up and be 18, and that's going to break, for lack of a better term. So I think that's something that you really highlighted that's really important. Reinforcement can be mutual, and it can also be engaged in by both parties during the break.

Because we've reduced our modality, our mode of practice, yeah, even in the first that I was putting forth, there was an assumption that now reinforcement is edible or tangible in some way, shape, or form.

And even the way we do our preference assessments, and again, a lot of this, I don't want to over-scrutinize, we do it as a matter of organization, but even the categories that we look at within our preference assessments or our reinforcement inventories all sort of hit these interesting words of how we see reinforcement primarily as something extrinsic, knowing that we talk a lot about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and ABA and how most of what we do seems to be extrinsically based.

That's a very, very good point. Leads us very nicely into our third strange technology, and it's more about the way we implement or utilize these technologies with regard to reinforcement. And we originally just had edibles on the list, and then you mentioned tangibles. So I went ahead and did a little slash tangibles on there. Give us your thoughts to start on this.

What is strange about the way, you already started on this topic a little bit, about the way we implement edible or tangible reinforcement?

I don't expect a six-year-old to do their homework to get good grades. So yeah, we're going to need some motivating motivator there to get them to engage in the homework behavior. But it's really, really important that we work on fading into that naturalistic reinforcer and fade out those edibles and tangibles so we don't have the 18-year-old only doing their homework to get access to the M&Ms.

So one thing I like to think about in terms of edible reinforcement was, I mentioned it earlier, the way we manage time. So the notion that now we can have a snack time on the schedule or that a lot of times we're seeing kids during mealtimes and there's needs in terms of attention or fine motor and utensil use during those mealtimes, now we have a really good place for edible stimuli to be available.

The other thing that I'll add really quickly there is that we always regard or primarily regard this idea of of reinforcement, especially from an edible perspective, again, with this ratio of you give an answer, I give you the M&M, where if you conceptualize it more as concurrent reinforcement, As long as you're engaging in what I'm doing with you, then now we're just having a snack time while I read you a book.

And if you're reading a book with me and right now you're having a snack time and you're chewing, now the natural social etiquette portion of you chew quietly and don't speak while you listen is very conducive to the listening behavior that I want while I read you the book. And if you're able to have access to the snacks, then the likelihood of you sitting in front of me while I read you the book is also an increase in likelihood.

So you see how those things come together And if we're not careful, in analyzing all those pieces, we might end up with that indirect behavior to reinforce a relationship where the kid makes some important behavior and gets an M&M, which is completely unrelated.

If you want edibles, you do your homework to get edibles. There's no real correlation there in the real world. That's not how you extract edibles out of your environment. So I think that's an interesting point as you bring up. I mean, that's really what we're trying to do is teach individuals how to navigate their environment, live their highest quality of life, and maximize their access to reinforcers.

And all of the reinforcers you're talking about, these edibles and tangibles, are provided by other people. So if that person's not there, then they're not going to be able to extract that reinforcement. Teaching them how to do it is going to have to be done at some point on that natural reinforcement level.

So now that demand is removed from you and Concurrently you might be tasting something very good in your mouth while your dad pats you on the back and says good job Billy and has a big smile on his face and says I'm really happy with your performance Think about how rich That level of reinforcement is as compared to just the delivery of the candy bar or whatever it was. And I think that's the important part is we have to remember why we're trying to sweeten that moment.

Why is it that I want this kid to taste this M&M as a result of them doing a behavior? because I want them to integrate the entire experience. That it also makes me happy that something good is happening in their mouth because they decided to communicate with a vocal behavior knowing that they might have a communication delay which has not allowed them to communicate with vocal behavior very readily.

Again, if we don't conceptualize it that way, even just as practitioners and as purveyors of that edible reinforcement, we might be missing 90% of the treat.

Here's the iPad. It's, hey, you did your homework. I'm so happy that you did your homework. It makes me really happy and feel good as a mom. When I'm happy, you get the iPad. Just that intermediate step makes it more rich. Now, if you want to throw in some, hey, you did your homework, that makes me really happy. You're going to get good grades, and now you're going to go to a college and make a lot of money and things like that. Now we're making the reinforcement even more rich.

So making it more rich, I think, is a huge... We like to do things that are easy oftentimes and just giving the iPad and saying, good job, here's the iPad. But then we blame the kid when 10 years later they're just doing the homework for the iPad because we got lazy on the reinforcement. Moving... Oh. Moving right along, I think that makes a nice segue into the good job portion of our next technology, if

And again, very common phrases that everybody recognizes, kind of catchy, you know, quiet hands. We know that kids on the spectrum, maybe from a linguistic perspective, are going to have trouble with idioms, yet we... sort of insist on using these vague phrasings, calm body, what does that really mean? And I'm being facetious and mildly critical. I don't think that there's danger within these phrases as much, again, as to how they're implemented and what we really mean by them.

So I'll pass it over to you. What do we really mean by these things? Where do they come from? How effective do we think they are? And then what could we turn them into?

Because that's the whole thing that we lost here is this informative function. So instead of you did your five math problems right, good job. You did your five math problems right, oh, you're going to get a good grade or something like that. Giving that informative function, it's almost egocentric from us as therapists to to think that our good job really matters. That's kind of almost like an egocentric, thing for us to do inadvertently.

I know it's kind of abstract because we've done it for so long and we don't really have to go down this rabbit hole, but if nothing else, it does remove the informative function from whatever the task is. Then I just cringe when I hear people say, good job now.

All those things, again, the prosodic cues are important. You're absolutely right. All the information, all of the things that are now happening as a consequence of you finishing your homework, just like with the edible reinforcement, when we're not careful, we reduce it all down to a good job. And yes, I'm not saying that it's completely devoid of value, but we're probably losing a good 90% the exchange there. Quiet hands, calm body, right? It makes us feel good to say that.

What are we really envisioning when we say those things?

So many other things that we could conjure up in those moments that would be much more descriptive, much more declarative, much more concrete, especially for young learners, knowing that from a developmental perspective, concrete language is important for just about any kid under five.

And maybe for some of our clients that are experiencing some delays in receptive communication or understanding, we might want to use that to their advantage so that they understand quickly and firmly, especially in those moments where we're trying to get them into a learning situation, to sit with their hands in a certain place, to sit without making a certain amount of noise with either hitting things or moving things around or with their mouths, and then therefore much more able, at least

within our logic, to listen and look and learn.

Or be in a classroom and see a teacher say, you know, quiet hands, calm body. These are such ABA-specific terms that have just gotten overutilized that are not going to generalize into less restrictive environments, we really need to start looking at other ways to communicate these things that are going to have higher levels of generalization and, like Mike said, understanding as well. Because if somebody came up to me and said, quiet hands, I wouldn't even necessarily know what that meant.

Yeah, well, teachers are strangers, right? At some point, right. And then you reference your parents' response to your teachers and their idea that they're saying this is okay, and that's the stuff that we really need to get to. But again, we won't get into that, and I don't have as much of an issue with that phrase as I do with the ones we mentioned. Moving right along into our fifth strange technology, at least for this episode. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Okay. Carol Gray is one of the persons in our field near and dear to my heart only because I feel like she's responsible for a very important technology which we've then estranged. We've done some weird things with social stories. I'll say a couple things and then pass it over to you.

Again, the notion of social stories, the information they impart, the formatting which Carol Gray and her colleagues have put forth as a way to make sense of these concepts in a well-formatted, structured story type stimulus, super, super valuable. Much like things like sensory diets, the way we implement them and when we implement them, I think, becomes a problem.

So, you're a child, you... emit some sort of undesired behavior, and now as a consequence, you've got individualized, undivided attention from somebody you prefer reading you a story about how you shouldn't have done what you just did. That sounds like potential reinforcement, an increase in that very well undesired behavior. The other part that I contend is I fear that social stories then fall under the rank of some of those things that are overly specialized in treatment.

So now we're using these stimuli and these activities with these kids, but only for these kids. These kids can't access regular books. Again, I don't think anybody's intent is to say that as much as if we're not careful, we might practice it that way, and then suddenly regular books aren't enough to impart social lessons to kids that are on the spectrum, and by and large, we know that's not what anybody intends to do.

But maybe there's other options as well. And that's the premise of a social story is to explain a situation. And a social story could be a very good way of doing that. Or you could just explain the situation. Or you could show a video model. Or there's a whole lot of different, you could take them to the situation. There's a lot of other ways of doing it.

And it's, you know, just like any good doctor would say, oh, like you have a I've got an individual that was diagnosed with cancer, and there's this, this, this, this, and this treatment. Let's figure out which one's best. They're not just going to be like, oh, well, you have this. This is what you do. You have this. That's what you do. There's options for everything. And the individuals we work with, there's options as well. And yeah, well, social stories are great.

Like Mike said, we can take the premise of social stories and books are social stories, right? But we get this very inside this box idea of it can only be a learning story if it says, my name is Johnny. I don't like haircuts. When I go get a haircut, this is what happens. That That is the only way they can learn about how to tolerate haircuts.

But if I was to watch a video of it or read a book where the character gets a haircut or something like that or play with my dolls or just even have a parent talk to me about it, that no longer is going to work. So great idea. Again, very, very useful technology, as are all of these visuals. social stories, all of these very, very useful technologies.

It's just when they stay in one format and are never expanded upon that it becomes a little bit, and never thought about the alternatives or ways of expanding that specific technology. I bet video social stories are probably gonna be more effective for kids with ASD now than written social stories, and YouTube's pretty easy to find videos on now. But when Carol Gray made social stories, Obviously, YouTube wasn't around then.

So, again, just always trying to find ways to progress these social stories, progress these concepts is going to be the important fact, in my opinion.

The social story is but one. Yes. But instead of that happening, oftentimes what happens is, oh, Johnny can't get a haircut? Then do the social story. And the social story is the intervention modality. And it's the only thing we do. And then when the social story doesn't work, it's Johnny's fault because we fail to diversify the modality of treatment and just leaned on the social story. So

But I do think that we've bastardized the use of PECS by and large in a way that sometimes renders it ineffective or ends up promoting or perpetuating those misconceptions we're talking about here that, you know, why do we use PECS? Well, because kids with autism have auditory processing deficits.

I think, again, please, anybody listening, feel free to write us and challenge me on this I think that's been largely debunked I don't think the kids have auditory processing deficits as much as from what I understand the research combining the visual and auditory streams is a problem so understanding that I'm looking at what I'm listening to is is where the challenge lies okay I digress a little bit let's go ahead and just brute force in the interest of time move into what I think is the most

important, the most frustrating of these strange technologies for me is when you have a kid who can't sit still and then somebody says, you know what they need? They need some sensory.

I mean, what have we done to these children that they need sensory? Are they not seeing? Are they not smelling? What's happening, Dan? Help me.

But watching stars on a computer screen, it's not sensory anymore. So the literal definition would be any stimulus that is interpreted within your five arguable senses. But I think what you're talking about and the thing that we want to highlight is Somehow in ABA, only certain ways of providing those sensations became sensory, and everything else just somehow got thrown out the window.

We tend to compartmentalize or put sensory into this interesting... little box and then these trends develop around those little boxes and then these items sell and then we get tired of those items and before you know it the fidget spinners become the very problem that we had at the beginning which is they're making too much noise and you can't have 25 of them going in a classroom anyway with 25 kids so now they're the problem they start getting banned even though they were promoted as the very

sensory solution at the beginning so it's like we go in these cycles of what you know so what We're talking about kids who are flapping their hands, kids who can't wear certain textures, they don't want to wear pants, they want to wear shorts or sweatpants. The idea that the tag on the back of my undershirt, why did Hanes do tagless shirts? Because everybody gets bothered by that tag.

So the idea is how much does it bother you such that you end up... being overwhelmed by that agitation, and then that impairs your function. So we can all relate to this idea of sensory overload or not registering things enough from a sensory perspective. When we see kids that take a big spill and they don't have a response at all, okay, that's not registering. That's I'm losing the word here, but that's not sensory overload. That's an undersensitivity. Hyposensitivity. Hyposensitivity.

Thank you. So there's so many things that we boil down into this phrase, that child needs sensory. Or I love, love when RBTs say, oh, they were having a really hard time, so I gave them some sensory. What does that even mean? Is that even an English phrase? Is that even grammatically or syntactically correct? No, it's not. But we all understand it, right? We all, oh, okay. Yeah, that means you gave them some sort of weird hand pressure. You did something on their head and they enjoyed it.

And because they settled into you, we find value in that in terms of reinforcement or engagement or otherwise. I'm not denying that. I think those things are very valuable. Again, it's the misattribution. It's the misrepresentation. And then the overgeneralization of that as an effective method or activity for kids such that we're using the phrase, you know. So if I never heard that phrase again, it would be too soon, right? Yeah. idea, oh, let's do sensory. What does that mean?

Is this a child that we've got headphones on and blindfold on and we've put them in a sensory deprivation tank? Are their senses not active? I think there's so much more to discuss in that realm.

Honestly, 100% of the behaviors that the kids have, in order to engage in a behavior, you have to have some sensory, either hypo, You either have to be over-sensitive or under-sensitive in order to engage in those attention-seeking behaviors because you want your parent or you want the iPad because over-under-stimulated, that's the word I was looking for. So they all have some sensory base, but now we use this term sensory as though it overrides everything else.

And going back on what you're saying, we're all on some level of sensory... There's a continuum of... both individuals and their relationship to stimuli in the environment, and within that individual, their relationship to stimuli at that environment at any given time. And certainly at some point, certain things become problems. Certain people have certain tolerances. My girlfriend hates being in sand or flan because she doesn't like the sensory experience that that provides her.

But yeah, this overall kind of This sensory, I'm going to give a kid sensory or they have a problem with sensory. What does that even mean? And I think it's weird and it might sound like, again, we're being very, picking on semantics here, but when you actually break it down, I think it makes a lot of sense that that term doesn't really make sense in the way that it's being used.

As you learn to sit up and roll over, you learn to crawl, and now things aren't just coming at you, but you're going toward them. So you start figuring out which items or objects are animate, which are inanimate, which have volition, which have agency, and you learn how far you have to reach to hit something. All those things that kids are learning as they learn to... Interact with the world. ...mobilize, It even changes their visual system. Oh, back to visuals.

When you taste something edible, is that a sensory experience? It sure is. So I think that it's one of these things that we've overly task analyzed in a sense.

It's got some good roots semantically to things like sensory disintegration, but for me, developmentally, looking at the first 24 months of life and sensory motor development, I feel that if those parameters don't resolve, then we have things that linger, like stereotypy, like hand flapping, like looking for more pressure than the average child seeks.

These things that if you don't somehow reconcile in those first 24 months of life, they might linger and spill over into continuing development, you know, maybe causing other complications or other challenges along the way.

So I would encourage anybody, it's beyond the scope of our time today, go back to your developmental literature, your Piaget and your sensory motor development phase, those first 24 months of life, and I think a lot of these pieces then start making more sense, especially with how we should integrate them and use them to the child's advantage and in treatment.

Obviously, when we see something that's aberrant or that's undesired... something that might be sensory based, something that's stereotypic, we often think of reducing it where I think the developmental answer usually is find its purpose and then replace it.

Find another way to integrate that sensory perception into their world in a way that now has more social significance or find a way to posit it in its place and time so that it's got privacy or whatnot from a social perspective and it doesn't remain an aberrant behavior. So I'm going to point people straight down sensory motor development in terms of learning more about what it is we might be meaning when we say this child needs sensory.

We've covered a lot of ground today. Really, really excited about this idea of strange technologies and things that we want to redefine and start... maybe utilizing a little bit better. Dan, you've got something else for us?

All we're trying to say is can we expand on them and give you alternative technologies and the next time that your kid struggles with a haircut, maybe you have 15 different solutions you can go to or 15 different social stories you can write, or the next time your child struggles with something and your case manager says, I think we should make visuals, you'll say, cool, there's 30 different types of visuals we can make. Which ones are we going to make?

I hope it's not just these three by three laminated icons. Let's put a little bit more thought into the service that we deliver.

We're really glad to be back and hopefully here as I'm enjoying some leave, I'll be able to persuade Dan to do a little more recording and get a few more episodes to you guys here in quick succession. Cheers. Cheers.