Reversal of autism symptoms among dizygotic twins: A case report

>. "the person is a mentally stable and healthy individual", then not.

Some 4 years ago I went through an autism scare with my daughter and booked a 2 day course for parents of children with autism about ABA therapy, held by one of the first parents who cured autism in his child in my country. One of the best courses in my life, and if we could clone that guy and his team, I'm sure ABA therapy would be a lot more efective and the world would be a better place.

Anyway, my daughter was completely neurotypical (the trainers explained that even though she was 1.3 years old and nobody could say for sure at that age, a lot of items in her behavior were neurotypical and how those items would have differed in a child with autism).

There's a huge deal we don't know yet (why 40-50% of children are completely unresponsive to ABA), and ABA is a huge umbrela for a vast array of techniques, but I'm convinced the approach is solid, and the way to go forward.

The issue is the really experienced people who know the high level stuff in ABA go to the "supervisor"/therapy planner role and they work with therapists of various levels in individual therapies.

I was taken aback when they showed us the cognitive/emotional skill sets/inventory for children at various ages. There are HUNDREDS of items they work on and evaluate on.

For each one of those skills there are a few known therapies. Working on each one takes time. Some skills build on other skills. It's probably impossible that a single therapist has all the right personal skills and personal chemistry with a child to work on all the skills. And it's usually a race against time. So you have a supervisor, a team of 2-3 therapists that work with a child for 8 hours a day. It's very expensive when done right. It's impossible that mistakes are not made, and I'm talking if you get the best supervisors money can buy, the best therapists money can buy, which is usually not the case.

The information about the inventory of cognitive/emotional skills ABA has to train in order to "cure" autism made me realize just how complex human beings are, and I'm surprised given this information that the incidence of mental issues is so LOW in the general population, given how many things can go wrong with the human psyche when developing.

But the approach seemed very solid, scientific and professional, though misunderstood by many and I'm sure mistakes are impossible to avoid.

I've seen other "psychologists" of dubious lineages and while I've only seen a few, the difference was just staggering -- the ABA guys looked like professionals knowing their stuff, knowing their limitations, while the various mono-therapists looked like complete amateurs and full of shit.

So I do have faith and hope that in the future, as ABA is refined, things will get better, but the bad labels ABA gets are hurting progress a lot more than they help.

It means ABA is most effective if applied at a younger age.

Think feral children -- it's almost impossible to aquire language after a certain age.

The parent holding the ABA course for parents was lucky to be well off and being able to hire the best, including a personal team of therapists, and his son made a "full recovery" from non-verbal to indistinguishable by experts from neurotypical children even though he started ABA at 5 years, but he told us that's quite a rare outcome.

So in your view, what would be an ideal age in which to carefully and professionally use the ABA methodology? You mention his starting at the age of 5, but also that this produced an outcome that was rare. Thus, would an even younger age be more correct? I don't know enough about ABA to critique it too much, and i'm honestly curious about these nuances. Thanks for the response above despite my late reply.