Setting up to Teach ABA

This is where the nightmare begins. People will look at you blankly, or as some kind of abuser trying to turn your child into a robot. Banks will shun you. You will never be able to leave the house again. A mountain of paperwork will weigh you down and you will collapse exhausted each night, not knowing if you are doing the right thing.

It doesn't have to be that bad, but setting up an ABA programme isn't easy. Raising funds, recruiting and planning lessons take time and effort. Before you can even start to teach much needs to be done.

Funding

Depending on where you live, financial support for a home programme is either available or non-existent. In certain US states it might be easier than anywhere else. In the UK, everything depends on the attitude of your educational authority. They vary a great deal. My LEA claimed never to have heard of applied behavioural analysis and is notoriously bad at providing funding.

For a home programme to be successful, 40 hours of teaching a week, for two years, are recommended. Tutors may be paid £5-9 per hour. This rises to over £20 for specialists to review progress occasionally. Include the price of teaching materials, and the cost really mounts up.

LEAs are unlikely to fork out for the costs of more than 15 hours a week for a preschool child. You will need a statement of special educational needs, which takes at least 6 months to get. It sucks. Your child does not have six months, he needs help now.

Recruitment

There is a Europe-wide shortage of qualified specialists in ABA. This may change as more people become aware of this method, but not overnight. My experience in placing an advert in the local paper for a tutor illustrates this point.

I offered between £5 and £9 for just one hour a week of teaching. I specified that knowledge of TEACCH or Lovaas would be an advantage, and that it was to help a child with special needs. I had three replies, two of which were entirely unsuitable. The best candidate had experience of TEACCH but not ABA. TEACCH is slightly more widely used in the UK. Unfortunately she had to pull out due to other commitments, so I was left £45 poorer and still with no tutor.

If you're lucky enough to live near a college that specialises in training special needs teachers you may have more luck. But be prepared for trouble finding good recruits, who are very much in demand.

Doing it yourself

Given my appallingly stingy LEA, and the lack of candidates for the job, I had no choice but to bite the bullet and do the teaching myself. I decided to devote an hour every day to my son's lessons, including weekends. His statement had just come through, and it gave him 15 hours a week with one-to-one assistance, divided between two schools but consistently using the TEACCH approach. Although 22 hours is considerably short of the suggested 40, it was an improvement on doing nothing while my son, who I will call Jamie, became ever more distant from his peers.

Not everyone is temperamentally suited to teach. It requires patience, firmness, and a degree of detachment. Parents of autistic children can be frustrated by the slow progress made. It helps when someone a bit less emotionally involved steps in to help. Autistics are not naughty and slow on purpose (although they're not necessarily angels either). But it can sometimes seem as though they are unwilling to learn. It helps to remember that what may seem a simple lesson to you can, in fact, be very difficult to someone with completely different strengths and weaknesses and a different learning style from the typical child.

On the other hand there is one big advantage. Nobody knows a child's capabilities like a parent does, and this is crucial to teaching well. ABA is not rocket science, it simply requires a consistent technique. I suggest reading the section on "How to Teach" in Behavioural Intervention for Young Children with Autism (Maurice, Green and Luce). If you can persuade grandparents, aunts and uncles, or friends to help you it may cut costs and solve the recruitment problem.