Lisa Jo Rudy Does A Bettelheim, Demeans ABA Parents While Pushing Her New Autism Book

Lisa Jo Rudy and I seldom, if ever, agreed on autism issues while she was the host of the About Autism web page. Lisa Jo has a high functioning autistic son and leans towards a Neurodiversity perspective on most autistm issues while my son is severely autistic and I have NEVER been accused of buying into Neurodiversity ideology. I did, at one time,  actually praise Lisa Jo Rudy though for her courteous approach to me and others with whom she disagreed on autism issues:

"About.com Autism by Lisa Jo Rudy is a corporate blog written by a parent who shares a neurodiversity perspective but tries honestly to present all sides of autism issues objectively and with impeccable courtesy."

Now that Lisa is no longer the host of the About.com Autism page though she appears to be taking a new approach to discussing autism issues. She has done a  Full Bettleheim in order to promote her new book "Get Out, Explore, and Have Fun: How Families of Children With Autism or Asperger Syndrome Can Get the Most Out of Community Activities."

In promoting her new autism book Lisa Jo demeans parents who employ evidence based ABA therapy to help their autistic children by actually stating that their resort to ABA therapy for their children is more about dumping their kids with the therapists and freeing themselves up to go shopping than in helping their autistic children. In a Wicked Local Cape Cod article linked by Autism Speaks "In the News" section the following segment appears:

“Rudy said although the most common form of autism therapy is Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) she opted for another method.“The ABA recommendation is for 40 hours a week and it’s more about handing your child over to a therapist while you go to the grocery store,” she said. 

Rudy discovered the Greenspan Floortime Approach, developed by the late Stanley Greenspan, which focuses on parent and child interaction.”

Bettleheim's refrigerator mom's theory essentially blamed lack of parent child interaction for causing children to become autistic.  The theory was in fact a fantasy with no evidence in support but it was widely accepted by the psychiatric/psychological professionals for many years and caused great harm to both autistic children and their parents.  Although Bettleheim's fantasies have long been discredited it appears Lisa Jo is still reading his books when she suggests that parents seek ABA therapy not because it is the most evidence based effective intervention for autism but because, according to Lisa, it frees the parents up to go shopping.  Lisa of course prefers the 

Greenspan Floortime Approach because, according to her, it focuses on parent child interaction.

How Lisa Jo knows anything about ABA as someone who didn't "opt for" ABA for her child has always puzzled me.  What is most interesting though, apart from her new willingness to demean ABA oriented autism parents while promoting her book is her failure to mention the different evidence bases for the effectiveness of the two approaches as autism interventions.

Many credible authorities have recommended ABA as the most evidence based effective intervention for autistic children including the office of the US Surgeon General and the Association for Science in Autism Treatment.  The American Pediatric Association issued the following statements about ABA and Floortime therapies in December 2007 noting the abundant evidence over several decades in support of ABA as an autism intervention and the scarcity of quality evidence in support of Floortime and similar relationship/developmental models:

ABA

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is the process of applying interventions that are based on the principles of learning derived from experimental psychology research to systematically change behavior and to demonstrate that the interventions used are responsible for the observable improvement in behavior. ABA methods are used to increase and maintain desirable adaptive behaviors, reduce interfering maladaptive behaviors or narrow the conditions under which they occur, teach new skills, and generalize behaviors to new environments or situations.

The effectiveness of ABA-based intervention in ASDs has been well documented through 5 decades of research by using single-subject methodology21,25,27,28 and in controlled studies of comprehensive early intensive behavioral intervention programs in university and community settings.29–40 Children who receive early intensive behavioral treatment have been shown to make substantial, sustained gains in IQ, language, academic performance, and adaptive behavior as well as some measures of social behavior, and their outcomes have been significantly better than those of children in control groups.31–4

Floortime

"Relationship-focused early intervention models include Greenspan and Wieder's developmental, individual-difference, relationship-based (DIR) model,⁵⁵ Gutstein and Sheely's relationship-development intervention (RDI),⁵⁶ and the responsive-teaching (RT) curriculum developed by Mahoney et al.^57,58 The DIR approach focuses on (1) “floor-time” play sessions and other strategies that are purported to enhance relationships and emotional and social interactions to facilitate emotional and cognitive growth and development and (2) therapies to remediate “biologically based processing capacities,” such as auditory processing and language, motor planning and sequencing, sensory modulation, and visual-spatial processing. Published evidence of the efficacy of the DIR model is limited to an unblinded review of case records (with significant methodologic flaws, including inadequate documentation of the intervention, comparison to a suboptimal control group, and lack of documentation of treatment integrity and how outcomes were assessed by informal procedures⁵⁵) and a descriptive follow-up study of a small subset (8%) of the original group of patients.^59"

American Academy of Pediatrics, Management of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Published online October, 29, 2007, Reaffirmed by the APA, September 2010.  

Lisa Jo Rudy has chosen to depart from a previously courteous, objective approach to discussing autism issues, unfortunately for autistic children whose parents abandon ABA efforts based on Ms Rudy's personal prejudices.  Most parents demeaned by such comments will not take them too seriously because the Bettelheim cold mother's fantasy has been widely exposed as nonsense (outside of France anyway).  The autistic children  of parents who look to Ms. Rudy for guidance though may not be as fortunate.