I remember what my son Lucas was little some psychologist wrote in the report
that he was very prompt dependent even back then before I was a behavior analyst
that comment he's prompt dependent made me angry
today's video blog is all about prompt dependency and whether we should blame
the child or the adult on that issue
Hi I'm Dr. Mary Barbera autism board certified behavior analyst and
best-selling author each week I provide you with some of my ideas about turning
autism around so if you haven't subscribed to my youtube channel join
the over 10,000 subscribers who have so today I want to talk about prompt
dependency and I started off this video by saying that a psychologist put that
Lucas was prompt dependent in a report back when he was young he was about
three years old I think and she kind of said that he was prompt dependent and it
really made me angry because even back then before I was behavior analyst I
knew I had learned that prompt dependency was not the child's fault
the child was simply responding to the prompts and it was the adults fault
because the adult didn't understand how to fade that prompt to allow the child
to be more independent so what it is prompt dependency is when a child cannot
respond without a prompt so if the child wants the phone and I hold it up and I
write away for maybe I wait a second and he's not responding so then I give him a
prompt "ph" and he says phone and I give him the phone that child because I gave him
the "ph" prompt a partial echoic prompt of "ph" the child says phone accepts that prompt
and I give him the phone that child is going to become prompt dependent on me
giving him a partial echoic prompt I remember way back I was in a classroom
and we had this older teacher and I pointed out that she was giving kids
this partial echoic prompt every time she'd hold up something she'd go "p" and the
child would then say pen and she'd give him the pen I said you just gave
that girl a partial echoic prompt start stop saying "p" when you hold up the pen
so she okay okay and she holds it up and she gives him a little prompt of "p" I'm
like what are you doing it was so ingrained in her head that she
just could not not give a partial prompt now that's an echoic prompt we can also
give kids imitation prompts we can give kids physical prompts and whatever
prompt we put in we need to make a plan to take that prompt out to get the child
more independent over the years I learned about transfer trials transfer
procedures to basically fade from prompted to unprompted and in 2005 I
published an article in the analysis of verbal behavior with my BCBA mentor dr.
Rick cabina called using transfer procedures to teach tacts to a child with
autism that article was the study that we did with my son Lucas teaching him to
name pictures of items that he didn't know and we were able to use prompting
procedures and transferring those prompts from a prompt such as a receptive prompt
touch the chalkboard and then what is this called chalkboard so that
eventually we could fade out the receptive touch prompt and get get Lucas
to just respond to what is it and he would say chalkboard so that article and
that study was a very controlled way to show what I'm what I'm teaching you now
if you don't know what a transfer trial is and you are in need of learning more
this is going to be you're going to need a little bit longer of a tutorial and
you can sign up for one of my free online workshops at Mary Barbara
forward-slash workshops but in general we want to make a plan to program for
our child based on their individualized assessment and we also want to make a
plan to use transfer procedures to fade out our prompts so that the child is not
prompt dependent if you find yourself using a lot of prompts and you don't
know how to fade them that's when you really need to learn more and it is a a
very important procedure for you to learn how to fade out your prompts
through the use of transfer procedures all in all prompt dependency is not a
child problem the adults in the child's life need to learn more about how to
fade their prompts so if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up leave me
a comment and share this video with other parents and professionals who
might benefit and don't forget to sign up for a free online workshop today and
I'll see you right here next week