You may have heard of floor time for kids with autism or signs of autism, but I am actually
a big proponent of table time.
So today I'm talking about how to help kids, how to increase reinforcement.
So we have happy learners at a table.
Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Barbera, autism mom, Board Certified Behavior Analyst and bestselling
author.
Each week I provide you with some of my ideas about turning autism or signs of autism around
so if you haven't subscribed to my YouTube channel, you can do that now.
So every month within our memberships portal, we have Q and A calls.
And so this month we had a few questions about how to increase reinforcement at table time.
So parents and professionals can do short 15 minute bursts to get the most learning
possible, but we want our learners to be happy.
We want them to be running to the table or at least coming willingly.
And we want them to be happy the entire time.
So in this question and answer segment, I'm covering how to do just that.
This is coming up time and time again, almost every day within, within our group and almost,
um, and a lots of questions submitted.
Okay.
So let's talk about reinforcement and the table.
And, um, as most of you know, the Turn Autism Around Approach thinks very highly of table
time.
You may have heard of floor time, which is Stanley Greenspan's model, where it's a lot
about following your child's lead and, um, Uh, I'm not really familiar with that with
his model, but it's a lot of on the floor, natural environment teaching.
I have found over the past two decades, uh, as a mom and as a behavior analyst is that,
um, it's much easier to teach parents and to teach therapists and new therapists, how
to, um, sanitize a room or a corner of a room and how to pair up a small little table.
If you have an older child, of course, you pair up a larger table, pair that up with
very strong reinforcement and, um, because what we know with Applied Behavior Analysis
over the years is that kids need a lot of trials.
A lot of exposure, not just chasing them around the room, oh they look out the window, oh,
there's a tree.
That's one trial of tree.
Now they go to a toy on the floor.
You hold up a cow, Moo moo says the cow, and then the child's off to something else.
Basically, what I've seen over the years is that kind of therapy, whatever you're going
to call it by very well-meaning professionals, very seasoned professionals is not adequate
for most kids who are, have severe language delays.
Um, it doesn't even have to be autism.
It can be early signs of ADHD, early signs of a learning disability, just a, Just a speech
delay.
These procedures work, even for typically developing children.
I've, I've taught lots of grandmas and, and things.
Just friends of friends or, um, where they've said, you know, I'm a little worried about
their speech and I'm like, you know, get a shoe box, cut a slit into it.
Mama, mama, mama.
I mean, you might think, well, mama's around.
I could just point to mama.
There's something about the repetition and the reinforcement is actually putting the
picture of the mama in the box and it disappearing.
And for little kids, these procedures tend to work really, really well to shape up, um,
language and to give them, you know, 10 trials of hearing mama, maybe not even saying it.
And you might think, well, yeah, but my child is sitting at the table now for two weeks
or two months, and they're not talking yet.
But if they are sitting, if they're happy, if they're putting pictures in a box, they're,
they're putting potato head parts on, they're watching you, as you say, head or nose, maybe
they're not even doing it yet, but this table time is actually a mixture of natural environment
teaching and intensive teaching, and we make everything really fun.
Um, and really reinforcing, especially in the beginning when the child has no, um, reason
to think that sitting at the table is going to be fun.
We don't call it work.
We call it mommy time, learning time, table time, fun time.
Um, we call it potato head time or whatever you want to call it, but it, if the child
is not running or at least walking there happily and not sitting and attending eventually,
it's not going to happen overnight.
Um, some of my clients that actually has taken me, you know, a few sessions to even pair
up the table with reinforcement.
So we, when we're bringing a child to a table or calling the child to the table, we want
to make sure that we have handful of reinforcements.
Um, I usually recommend edibles or just things you can eat, little, little bites of things
you can eat.
Um, drinks.
Uh, many times we use an electronic, although kids tend to be very addicted to iPads, um,
which is a problem, and I, um, I see it, as a bigger problem than I did even a year or
two ago, based on some of the research by Dr. Ami Klin.
I also did a podcast episode about his work, uh, episode number 93.
And, um, so a lot of times, instead of an iPad, I recommend like, uh, putting the table,
um, in front of a TV.
And so the adults can control the reinforcement.
We are not watching, you know, uh, five minutes of a movie or 30 minutes of a movie, we are
showing them small bursts of movies and you could be like, we're completely screen-free.
Awesome.
Don't use it an electronic.
Uh, you know, that is great.
Um, or you might say my son has extremely picky eating, I don't want to mess with foods
at the table, perfectly fine.
It, these are just some ideas.
I have actually found that, to get a table, even more reinforcing, we should do things
like water, play, wind up toys, um, really think out of the box, um, uh, you know, singing
songs, playing games.
We used to do like spaghetti arms with my son.
We do, you know, three, two, one blast off if they're small enough that you can pick
up and they like that.
Um, make it fun, if it's not fun, we need to make it more fun.
And um, so we need to make the table fun.
In addition, the rest of the room or the area needs not to be fun.
Because if I am competing with things he likes to play with or stim with, um, it's not going
to go very well.
So, but I don't, I don't ever want to trap a child at the table, make them sit at a table.
I don't want crying at the table.
So, um, And this is a balance, right?
So we want to sanitize, that doesn't mean clean.
That means get, uh, the toys and everything in boxes up on the shelves.
This will really also help your child learn to point and request and know that things
are organized so that we are able to use these toys to get more language.
I hope you enjoyed that short excerpt from our Q and A call.
And if you would like more information about joining our online course and community, you
can attend a free online workshop at marybarbera.com/workshop.
If you liked this video, I'd love it if you'd leave a comment, give me a thumbs up, share
it with someone who might benefit and I'll see you right here next week.