More on RDI
This past weekend I attended an RDI (Relationship Development Intervention) workshop. The information I received was well worth the time and money invested.
Highlights of Information:
As we had thought, ABA and RDI therapies address different aspects of autistic children. I’ll try to put the information in short form here, then elaborate on some of the unfamiliar terms. When you read the short form, I think you’ll understand why I had “brain drain” when I got home. But hang in there, and I hope it will make sense as you keep reading.
Development Areas: ABA vs. RDI
- Emotional: identifying and labeling vs. referencing
- Social: procedures and scripts vs. regulating
- Communication: imperative and instrumental vs. declarative
- Memory: rote vs. personal, episodic
- Cognitive: rules vs. contextual, relative
Emotional: Hannah can identify emotions on people’s faces because we’ve drilled the obvious ones over and over. She can even label the emotions. But she doesn’t reference, or read, people’s faces around her in order to get feedback on what’s happening and how it might affect her. RDI emphasizes referencing. The speaker used the illustration of teaching a child to look at a book (remember our first ABA drill was “look at Mommy”) vs. teaching a child to read a book. Hannah complied with our prompts to look at people, but she had no reason to do it on her own (without prompts) and didn’t know why she was doing it.
Social: Autistic children excel at learning procedures and memorizing scripts to use in certain social settings. For example, when a person comes in the door, we say, “Hello.” But we can’t teach a script or procedure for every situation Hannah may encounter in her interactions with other people. She must learn to regulate her actions based on her referencing of them. We regulate all the time without realizing it (change volume of voice, change distance from person you’re speaking with, walk faster or slower, etc.). She needs help to learn how and why.
Communication: Imperative, instrumental language can be more easily understood as “demand” language. We use that kind of language all the time in ABA therapy: ask the question and expect the one right response. Declarative language is simply stating a fact or opinion without demanding a certain response from the listener. Neurologically typical people use about 80% declarative language in conversations. Hannah needs to learn to hear and use declarative language in order to keep a “normal” conversation going with another person.
Memory: Most autistic kids are great at rote memory, remembering the facts. The part of memory that is missing for them is personal episodes and how the events affected them emotionally. The speaker gave this example: When you hear 9/11, you recall how the events of that day affected you personally and emotionally. You don’t file that memory in your brain under “the color of the couch” you were sitting on when you heard about it. Autistic kids’ neurologically-damaged brains don’t make that emotional connection automatically. They basically have no personal, episodic (episodes) memory. We have to help them create those memories and review them often to enable them to develop a sense of “self” and some common sense. For example, if you don’t remember how running out of gas affected you personally, you won’t have the motivation to avoid running out of gas in the future.
Cognitive: Autistic children operate under a right-or-wrong mentality. They usually think in absolutes. We need to help them learn to think contextually. For example, how long is long enough to study for a test? An autistic child would want a set length; he would struggle to understand the concept of “until you know the material.” He might reply, “How do I know when I know the material?” Hannah needs practice thinking about what is good enough in settings when no absolutes are applicable.
Bottom line: ABA therapy is great for teaching facts and rules; however, it doesn’t address the need for learning how to live in an ever-changing, uncertain world with other people.
Changes we’re trying to implement:
- We are trying to use declarative statements more and “demand-language” questions less. It’s a challenge, because with most young children we use questions a lot in order to help them learn. (“What did you do today?” “Was it fun?” “Do you know who’s coming tomorrow?” “What are you doing?”) We have to re-train ourselves.
- We are trying to incorporate the principles of RDI into everyday life situations and not just our “lab” time when we do the activities in the book. In regard to referencing, we are looking for ways to create a sense of uncertainty or anticipation so Hannah will have the motivation to reference our faces. If things are predictable, she has no reason to reference.
- We are trying to look for everyday situations in which we can encourage Hannah to regulate her actions to fit in with ours. This objective is a step-by-step process. Currently, we’re working on getting her to start and stop a simultaneous activity with one of us. I think we made a little progress today with banging wooden blocks together. They make a nice ringing sound in your ears, so Hannah loves them.
- We purchased a dependable digital camera so we could try to capture personal, episodic memories for her and archive them for frequent review. This is a bit tricky, in that the event must not be the focal point; the picture needs to catch a moment of emotional connection with another person with the event simply as the backdrop. I think we’ll be taking a bunch of pictures, trying to find the gems amid the rocks
I realize this letter is long and probably a bit mind-boggling. Thanks to all of you who try so hard to understand autism in general, and Hannah in particular. Thanks also to all of you who pray even though you don’t understand autism much. God knows exactly how Hannah’s brain works, so it’s more important that we talk to Him about her than that we try to figure it all out ourselves.
In closing, I want to assure all of you that we don’t in the least think ABA was/is a waste of time. It is an effective tool to have in our chest of resources, and we plan to use it. We thank God for bringing another tool called RDI into our lives at this point, and we plan to use it too.
Best go change the batteries in that digital camera. We took an awful lot of pictures today!
