Aaron is a behavior analyst with the Nemours Children’s Health System. Based out of Orlando, Aaron works with autistic children ages two through six on pinpointing developmental roadblocks and creating a strategy to overcome them.
Transcript
>> My name is Aaron Bavakwa [assumed spelling]. I'm a behavior analyst with the [inaudible] Children's Health System. We have an autism treatment unit here, primarily focused on early intervention. So we have children as young as two years old and up to about six years old right now. Some of the reasons some patients might come to our system is early signs of autism. So some language delays and deficits or maybe problematic behavior in excess -- excessive tantrumming, maybe aggression or self-injury, hitting themselves in the head, head-banging, or a lot of repetitive behavior. That is stereotypical for children with autism. First we'll take kind of a holistic approach in that we want to review all their records, we want to see if there's any medical underlying issues. From that point, we'd interview parents, kind of talk about their day-to-day, see how things go for this child from sunrise to sunset. From there we conduct some observations based on the interview, really see what their skills are at, what their strengths are, what may be some of their deficits. And from there we conduct a more focused treatment based on our assessment. What we're looking to see how the child responds to different changes in their environment, if it's just an instruction or a change in their routine, perhaps a typical routine that goes poorly -- mealtime routines or transition from a fun activity to some more structured activities. Or even how the patient may interact with other peers. If they're not speaking yet, we may start with teaching them sign language for some basic needs if they want things like drink or if they're looking for crackers. We'll teach them a physical sign to make since we can't physically prompt them to say words. Then we find that as they start to build more language or build some mode to access what they want, the words start to come -- are more likely to come after that, so. The majority of our assessments are done here in the clinic. We do have the availability -- in certain cases we actually just did a toilet training procedure, which involved teaching the parents to carry out some of the practices. And that involved us going into the homes, making sure that their environment was set up for success there as well.
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