DDA Begins to Turn the Page?

Earlier today, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) held a conference call to address questions about why the Developmental Disabilities Administration (DDA) underspent millions in  funds and to describe the steps that the Department is taking in response.  This call covered the same material as the Town Hall meeting that was held on November 30 and was intended for those who were unable to attend that meeting.  

This in itself is a good sign.   Too often, public agencies hold in-person meetings which are difficult to get to and use the meetings to say they are open to public input. Today, with telecommunications so advanced, connecting with broader audiences via conference call, video conference or webinar is relatively easy to do, so a single in-person meeting is no excuse for communicating with the public.   I’m glad that DHMH is figuring this out.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Secretary of DHMH, led the presentation with the good news – the steps DDA will take now that this problem has come to light. 

He said four steps are happening for fiscal year 2012:

Keeping the A First in ABA – Using Antecedents

This is the third of three reports from the 2011 annual meeting of the Maryland Association for Behavior Analysis (MABA).

You won’t get through an introductory presentation about Applied Behavior Analysis without reference to the ABCs – Antecedents, Behaviors, Consequences.  We’re taught early to capture information about these three things to analyze in order to develop a hypothesis about the function of your child’s behavior.  So we get a picture about what happens immediately before and after a behavior occurs.  But then what happens more often that not is we think about how to change the consequences.  How can we change our reactions to a behavior to change how likely it is to occur in the future?

A question we sometimes forget to ask is ‘how can we change the antecedents?’  Can we change the environment to prevent an undesirable behavior from occuring in the first place?  When my daughter was six, she would scream whenever I put a particular saucepan on the stove.  I immediately tried to run a consequence-based program toward changing how she reacted to the saucepan.   And then I slapped myself upside the head.   We had a lot higher priority skills to worry about.   So I banished the saucepan for some months, the tantrums disappeared and we worked on communication skills instead.    When the pan came back out, her aversion to it had disappeared on its own.  Picking the right battles is a big part of manipulating antecedents.

An emphasis on antecedents was a big part of what impressed me about Dr. Gregory Hanley’s MABA presentation about treatment for pediatric sleep disorders.