Autism Labs

Applied Behavior Analysis with Autism: A Parent's Journey Through Aggressive Behavior

• Autism Labs Community • Season 4 • Episode 10

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In this episode of the Autism Labs podcast, Mike Carr shares his journey with his 35-year-old nonverbal, profoundly autistic son, Michael. He discusses how Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), when used with empathy and consistency, has helped manage aggressive behavior. Mike explains core ABA principles—like antecedents, behaviors, and consequences—and stresses the importance of not reinforcing negative actions, especially in public. Highlighting the success of J13’s program, he shows that real progress is possible with time, patience, and a trained, unified team. His message to caregivers: the journey is tough, but meaningful change is achievable.

Mike Carr (00:03):

Welcome back to another episode on Autism Labs podcast. And today we're going to be talking about aggressive behavior, which as a dad of a 30 5-year-old, low functioning, severely autistic son, we've wrestled with this our entire lives just about, and you perhaps have too, and I'm one of the worst people to talk about how to address it, which is the reason I want to have this episode is that I think I've learned the hard way, what maybe some of you will learn much quicker than me. So I want to share with you our journey. And last week I talked about our J 13 culture and our J 13 team, and there's an awful lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to create the kind of environment of joy and happiness and excitement that talked about in that video. And I didn't really talk about all that work.

(00:51):

It's never ending. It's ongoing. It's a constant challenge. We constantly have behavioral challenge surfacing with different members of our community. Our team is trained, but there's always something we didn't anticipate or it happens in such a way that we haven't encountered before. So I want to talk about the importance of ABA. And I know some of you that might cause a innate of reaction, and I'm not trying to talk about the science behind ABA. There are tons of books and articles out there about the pros and there's some about the, all I can say as a parent, I've seen it work miracles for our son, but it's not ABA practice without the human element. There's some days where Michael, he's had a bad night, he didn't sleep very well. He gets up tired and grumpy rather than ABA, he just needs a hug.

(01:37):

He just needs more love. And so that day is going to be a day where he can do some things that maybe he wouldn't normally get to do, and we're not putting as many demands on him. He just needs a little bit of a break. So we modify our A applied behavior analysis and therapies a bit, but there's some things that are really important and ABA speak. There are three key elements. One's the antecedent, one's the actual behavior, and one's the consequence. And I've always hated those terms, especially antecedent. I said, okay, that comes before, but exactly what are we talking about here? Okay, so what an antecedent is, is that is what the precursor is to the behavior. Often it's what causes the behavior. And there may typically be more than one thing, right? So it's paying attention beforehand or if it's after the fact, going back and doing a postmortem and trying to figure out, okay, now what were the things that sort of set him off?

(02:28):

And then the behavior occurs. Well, what was the behavior and the screaming, the yelling, whatever, and then what's the consequence? How do we correct it? Or what did we do right or wrong? This is where I give in all the time. And so I'm really bad at this and I want to share with you some of the exact things that have happened for us. You get an idea as to what's going on. So for instance, our son used to inch the jebus out of me. I mean, literally I would have bruises up and down my arms and it was just awful. Or he'd pull your hair really hard. I mean, my wife had some of her hair ripped out by the roots. That's how bad it would be. Or if we let his fingernails get too long, even yesterday evening, he dug his fingernails into my neck when he wasn't happy about something and he can scratch you and draw blood and other things too.

(03:17):

So we've experienced all those kinds of situations and you need to sort of be aware of what might happen, anticipate that, and then how do you get yourself out of it? We even had one situation where a police officer was driving by and our son was out walking, blowing his colleagues, and he was upset and he was pulling her hair and he had her pulled down. She was bending over, and the officer called in an assault, our son's assaulting. He didn't know our son at the time, and the police chief knew who we were and intervened. But the point was, you can get pretty darn serious pretty quickly. So I want to show you a short video right now of Michael paying attention and patiently waiting with the help of a timer when things are going well.

Haden Hunt (04:01):

As long as you staying in your seat and waiting nicely with a calm voice and calm hands, then we can have some yogurt when the timer's finished. Okay,

Mike Carr (04:18):

Now that's pretty cool. And instead of Michael screaming when he wants something like yogurt, Hayden, who's our executive director of John 13, sat him down in a very calm and steady voice, got him to sit there and wait for two minutes. Sometimes it's five or 10 minutes, and he'll sit there and wait. Believe it or not, he wants the yogurt, he wants to play basketball, or he wants the Atkins bar, whatever it might be. Now, you may say, there's no way my son or daughter would do that. I mean, because they'll go nuclear in 15 seconds. Well, it took us a while to get there. I mean, the number of hours you've heard about the 10,000 hour rule to get really skilled at playing the violin or whatever. We haven't spent 10,000 hours, but we have spent many hundreds of hours, perhaps well over a thousand hours, over years with a dozen, dozens of people to get Michael to the point where he would just do what you just saw. Now, even though Michael is nonverbal, I mentioned he was low functioning, so he can't really talk. He uses his iPad to communicate. He has a few words, but they're hard to understand. So his expressive language, his ability to talk, his limited, but his receptive language, his ability to hear and understand much richer has a much wider range of words and vocabulary that he recognizes. And that's pretty cool. And so here's another video. This one's a little bit longer showing him doing something calmly, maybe too quickly, but calmly when he is asked.

Haden Hunt (05:48):

Finished. You're finished. Awesome. Thanks for letting me out. Okay, so first, let's put our spoon back in the bowl. Put your spoon down. Go wash your hands, try again. One slow down and one nice job. Okay, come have a seat. Let's talk yogurt. Yogurt. What about yogurt? I want, I want yogurt. Awesome. That's great because I have half left right here. So here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to finish unloading slowly. Then we'll rinse and load our dishes, and then we can have some more yogurt, okay? Okay. Alright. First unload and see.

Mike Carr (06:55):

So this looks pretty easy again, and I mentioned that we have spent so many hours doing this stuff, and here's what you got to think about, and you got to really pay attention to. So anticipate what might happen. Be aware of a situation. You start to see 'em go nuclear and try to intervene, right? But let's say you don't, and the behavior happens. Let's say it's screaming or yelling or something physical. What I tend to do is either yell back at him or give him attention, look him in the eye, give him the evil eye or give in, especially if I'm in a public situation. If I'm out in the public at a restaurant or something, he's screaming and causing commotion and disruption and he wants his sweet potato fries and he's not acting right. And I say, no, you got to sit there calmly.

(07:40):

He doesn't like that. And just start screaming. And I give in after 10 or 15 seconds. That's the worst possible thing I can do because that's what he wants. It rewards him for the bad behavior. So the bad behavior just continues. So it doesn't solve the problem at all. And ideally, what you would do is remove him from the restaurant, perhaps not even return to the restaurant, pay the tab and you're out of there. Or at least make him settle down outside and understand he can't behave that way if he wants to finish his dinner. And that's tough. Dads, I know moms, it's maybe a little bit easier. My opinion. My wife is a saint when it comes to patients I'm not. And so that is the key to the right consequence for the right behavior, and that's what has been drilled into me over and over again.

(08:31):

I tend to be very forgetful, and I tend not to remember what I'm supposed to do when Hayden or one of our other BCBAs or one of the other staff comes and shares all this with me. But the basic thing is, and this is really counterintuitive as a dad that was raised, I can remember when I was brought up and I misbehave. I might get smacked or I might get stuck in a corner. None of that works for someone that's nonverbal. All Michael wants. And I think in many cases I've seen this, a lot of other kiddos, his buddies, his attention, and he's watching me very carefully when he's screaming. And as soon as I react, he smiles. He actually smiles or he'll giggle or he'll laugh because he knows he's won, and you just can't let that happen. Whereas if I look down, I show no reaction, he can't see my eyes, he can't see my face, and he's screaming and I'm just pointing where he needs to go or whatever.

(09:29):

After a couple seconds, he gets tired of it because I'm not reacting, and he'll stop. He'll go sit on the couch. Now, some of our staff has much better what's called instructional control than I do. Ellen, who's our Michael whisperer, and actually she can do this with a lot of the guys. She can slick at Michael, give him the stink eye and he'll stop. But it's taken her 12 years to get to that point. And unfortunately, as the father who's been with my son for 35 years, I still don't have that. Not good dad, but I'm working. I'm trying to get better. But what I wanted to point out when it comes to aggressive behavior is you can solve it even the worst possible cases. We've had parents bring kiddos into our J 13 community program who said he's gotten kicked out of every program he's ever been in, and we're afraid he's going to kicked out of this one because he might try to punch you.

(10:21):

He might pull his pants down in public, who knows, right? And a few events or a few incident occur in the first day or two or week, well, within a couple of weeks, they're largely gone because the staff doesn't reward for that kind of behavior. It tis for the right kind of behavior. If you sit and be quiet, you get the yogurt, or you get to finish your meal, or you get to go out and play basketball, or you get to play the puzzle you want to, whatever that is. So folks, parents that have almost given up on their adult child all of a sudden are unbelievably surprised because this does work. So the key is the three things for this problem is an to see what's causing the behavior, because of course, if you can fix that, if you can address that, and if it's something other than placing a demand on him, but if it's something that's relatively easy to fix or some combination of things, then of course you change the antecedent to eliminate the behavior.

(11:10):

But if it's something that he needs to grow and learn from, then you can't really tweak the antecedent too much. But then the behavior occurs and you know how you're going to intervene, what's appropriate, not show reaction, not show attention. And then if he calms down fairly quickly, then he might get what he wants fairly quickly. If he misbehaves too long, it's off the table, it's gone for the day, and this happens all the time with Michael, or there's a timeout period or whatever it is. It's not anything physical. It's not anything that jeopardize safety, but it is definitely a way to teach, a way to reward that's appropriate, and it makes incredible progress. And we've seen this over and over and over again. So the last thing I would say, and this is another area that I fall down on tremendously, is consistency. If I'm tired and it's the end of the day and I just want him to calm down or go to bed or whatever, I'll give in and I can't do that, then he knows.

(12:11):

And again, he remembers Michael's got an incredible memory and he'll remember what he did to win, and he'll try me and test me again and again and again. Whereas for some of the colleagues that never give in, he won't even attempt it anymore. He knows that that behavior surfaces, he's not going to get what he wants and some other things may happen. So be as consistent as you possibly can. If you can do that both in home and away from home on the job, wherever it is, I think you're going to find an incredible change. It may take a few days, a few weeks, a few months, in our case, a few years, but the payoff is worth it. Lemme know if this works for you, if it doesn't work, or if you have any questions or suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. Just please email me at mike@autismlabs.com, mike@autismlabs.com. Have a great rest of your week. See you.