On Bad Parents

Today is Autistics Speaking Day. To follow in the tradition of last year, I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about something that I wouldn't normally blog about. Be forewarned that this is not -- at all -- a pleasant topic. In fact, it's downright disturbing. If you are a parent to an autistic child, this will be particularly disturbing to you. If you are autistic yourself, it will be equally disturbing in a completely different way. Be forewarned.

Towards the end of September, the blog The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism hosted a series of exchanges referred to on-site as the Self-Advocate/Parent Dialogues. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend you do so -- including the comments. Yes, I know that's ten-eleven (depending on how you count) blog entries, many of which have an inordinate number of comments. I make this recommendation anyway -- and recommend it strongly.

During that exchange, a lot of issues -- many of which are very important -- relating to the parent/self-advocate divide in the modern autism world were discussed. By and large, the parents present were interested in helping their child and were willing to respect and try to understand the viewpoints and interests of autistic people. And, while I can't directly confirm this, I strongly suspect (and have no reason to disbelieve) that those parents love their children and wanted to do what they could to help them. I believe (and have no reason to disbelieve) that, to those parents, their involvement in autism issues was not primarily about themselves or their personal interests and desires, but rather about trying to raise their children.

One fact, however, was not mentioned during that dialogue, and it's a simple fact that while the above can almost certainly be said about the parents who participated in the Dialogues, it certainly cannot be said about all parents. Put another way, not every parent of an autistic child is a good parent.

"Good" and "bad" are relative, of course, and everyone makes mistakes. I'm not trying to demonize or stereotype the parents of autistic children here.

Still, there's an attitude among parents' groups characterized by the presumption that each parent loves their child and is generally trying to raise their child as best they can. There are three real problems with this -- and I've already discussed the first one. Specifically, parents are human and thus fallible. Even if a parent is trying to raise their child as best they can, this doesn't mean that they are.

The second problem with that presumption is far simpler. It simply isn't true.

I know I've repeated myself here. This was deliberate. The point needs to be driven in -- preferably with a metaphorical sledgehammer.

For years, I've been reading coverage of parents doing truly awful things to their children. Take for instance, Marguerite Famolare, as quoted in this article about the Judge Rotenberg Center. According to her, the center's systematic torture of her child is great -- after all, if she shows him the remote control to his shock harness:

He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being.

I have to rather strongly disagree with her definition of humanity. Beyond this, I think that the quote speaks for itself.

Then there's the case of Karen McCarron, who I recently learned is trying to appeal her well-deserved sentence and get a new trial. Her story is, in a way, much simpler to explain -- she murdered her daughter and blamed her actions on said child's reified neurology. According to her lawyer, McCarron believed that Jesus would bring her child back, sans certain reified aspects of how she learned and experienced the world.

I did not select these two cases at random. While I could have picked from a lot more, including many not on that list (which is rather outdated at this point), they serve as illustrations of the fact that there are some phenomenally bad parents out there. Some of said parents have autistic children.

More importantly, however, they serve to illustrate another factor -- the ways in which certain attitudes prevalent in the autism world can be used as justifications for truly monstrous acts towards autistic people. When I object to, for instance, the reification of autism, I am doing so for damned good reason. When I talk about psychosocial stigma, I am not talking about something even remotely close to trivial.

Finally, these cases are public -- they have public documentation which I can link to. Trust me, I have a lot of examples from personal experience. I've spent a surprisingly large amount of my professional life trying to clean up the messes that bad parents and poor parenting decisions (of various sorts) have left behind.

The third problem with the attitude I referenced is central to the attitude itself and not the underlying beliefs. There is an old saying that "sympathy for the guilty is treason to the innocent." The saying -- and the underlying meaning behind it -- apply here. Yes, parents of autistic children often function without adequate support, are stressed, are under incredible pressures, etc. If, however, we choose to allow this to detract even one iota from our condemnation of this sort of parent's inexcusable actions, if we say that Karen McCaron's actions were "really about a lack of support" or some such, we are essentially arguing that the act of torturing or murdering an innocent child is excusable.

I disagree with this in the strongest terms possible.

Such actions need to be condemned. We, as a community, owe that duty to Karen McCaron's and Marguerite Famolare's victims.

I have, at this point, been writing this blog entry all day -- essentially dropping everything else in my life to do so. It is, however, phenomenally difficult for me to do so. As I type this sentence, it is 6:17 in the evening. I have been writing this almost since I finished breakfast.

As the amount of time I've spent on this text implies, this is not an easy topic for me to write about. I don't even like to think about parents such as those two. I originally intended to write far more about them than I did... but gave up on several (actually rather important) points simply because I couldn't bring myself to write them. In fact, I even dropped one major and prominent example of bad parenting from my list -- simply because I didn't think I could stand writing out another paragraph detailing such behavior. I know for a fact that I will regret that decision.

I would love to think that every parent was a good one, that (all) parents could be trusted to act in their child's best interests, and that we could count on parental love to ensure that our parents would be our allies.

Unfortunately, I know all too well that this is simply not true.

On Aversives, Punishment, and Language

One factor that complicates many of the debates surrounding applied behavior analysis is the fact that its technical language groups things together based mainly on their effects on specific (and usually observable) behaviors. While this makes it excellent for its intended purpose (analyzing behavior), it also makes said language extremely poor for use in an ethical debate.

To illustrate, let's take the hypothetical example of a boy -- let's call him "Chuck" -- who likes to act out in class. Let's also take three hypothetical teachers, "Jane", "Matt", and "Alletta", each of whom decided to take a different approach to making him behave.

Jane decided to assign Chuck additional homework on days when he misbehaved, gently informing him of her reasons whenever she did so. After a bit, Chuck realized that acting out in her class only led to more work and started paying attention more.

The second teacher, Matt, decided on a simpler course of action. He hooked a cattle prod to a remote control and strapped it to Chuck's back during class. Whenever Chuck acted out (or attempted to remove the cattle prod), Matt activated the device. After a few jolts, Chuck realized that both actions only resulted in terrible pain and stopped acting out, paying attention in a manner that only the truly terrified can.

The third teacher, Alletta, was an advocate of corporal punishment, but had promised Chuck's father that she wouldn't hurt him. As such, she instead called Chuck's best friend, Bill, to the front of the class and spent a few minutes torturing him whenever Chuck misbehaved, making sure that Chuck knew why she was doing so. Not wanting to see his friend hurt, Chuck quickly fell in line.

In the language of behavior analysis, all three of these teachers implemented the same basic strategy: punishment by contingent presentation of an aversive stimulus. All three strategies were punishment because they directly targetted and decreased an undesired behavior class (acting out), they were contingent because the strategy was only implemented when the behavior occurred, they were presentation of a stimulus because all three strategies involved giving Chuck something (be it extra homework, a painful shock, or a traumatizing emotional experience) and those stimuli were aversive because Chuck moved to avoid them (1).

This is not, however, to say that all three of those strategies were equally ethical. Very few people (outside school-age children, anyway) would have problems with what Jane did. Matt's actions were a somewhat exaggerated version of a highly controversial technique used in certain behavioral institutions (2). Alletta's actions, however, haven't been considered even remotely acceptable since the 1700s and even then, they were confined to punishing certain royals.

For those historians reading this, yes, I did name Chuck and the people in the third example after certain individuals. And while Matt's method may have prevented Ollie's eventual hissy fit, just imagine Jimmy's reaction!

To get to the point, however, I also don't mean that these strategies would all have the same effects. While all of them decreased the target behavior, Jane's strategy would have had the fewest unpleasant side effects.

The strategy closest to what commonly comes to mind when the term "aversive" is mentioned to people familiar with today's ABA establishment, however, is Matt's.

If this were an isolated case of misused or misunderstood terminology, it would be a fairly minor problem. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. The language of behavior analysis is -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- designed for analyzing behavior. As such, methods are categorized based on their effects on (usually specific and observable) behaviors and not their effects on the person who is behaving.

Ethical considerations, on the other hand, are almost always based on benefit and harm to people, something which the language of behavior analysis is decidedly poor at describing.

If this was widely understood, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, many people who use the techniques produced by ABA don't understand the distinction. The debates surrounding their use are often muddied by this.

As a general rule, people with postgraduate educations in behavior analysis understand its technical language and use it to talk about ABA's techniques. Everyone else... doesn't, although there are exceptions. Things get more complicated when terms used in ABA have or acquire different meanings outside of that language.

The debates surrounding aversives are, quite literally, a textbook example of this.



(1) According to Cooper, et al. (2007), the most influential textbook on behavior analysis used today, an aversive stimulus is defined as "a stimulus change or condition that functions (a) to evoke a behavior that has terminated it in the past; (b) as a punisher when presented following behavior, and/or (c) as a reinforcer when withdrawn following behavior." In this case, it's (b) that applies.

(2) While modern accounts usually don't involve literal cattle prods, instead involving a variety of other shock devices, there are accounts of literal cattle prods -- and improvised devices made from them -- being used as late as the early to mid-'90s.


References:

Cooper, J., Heron, T., & Heward, W. (2007). Applied Behavior Analysis (2nd Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.