Reddit reviews Applied Behavior Analysis for Teachers (9th Edition)

This is a very big question and not one that can really be answered in a forum post.

Physical intervention is about managing the present moment - preventing (further) harm. It is upsetting and unless carefully planned by a behavior therapist, there's no reason to think that it will improve future behavior. In most cases, that's not its point.

There are definitely steps you can take to decrease the likelihood that there will be a physical conflict. It's important to realize that these steps aren't harmless, though. You have to look at the individual case to determine what's best for the kid. There's a tendency to assume that physical intervention is always the worst, most harmful thing and everything else is inherently better. For example, using extinction (planned ignoring) on head banging might allow the child to hit their head hundreds of times before the behavior remits. Anyway, here's some suggestions:

• Let the tantrum burn itself out, a technique called extinction. If the kid is hitting and kicking you, you walk away or leave the room until the child has calmed. This allows you to avoid doing restraint. It sacrifices much of your treatment time. There's a risk that the child will harm themselves and/or damage property during this procedure. Also, when it comes to the kid's suffering, extinction is generally a pretty unpleasant process. Whether it's worse or better than restraint is probably a matter of individual preference.
  
  
• Decrease task demands, which will decrease the efficacy of your treatment (e.g., child hits when you practice a difficult phoneme --> practice that phoneme less, less hitting). Here, you're keeping the kid happy by letting them do more of what they want.
  
  
• Modify aspects of the task or situation that don't reflect the demands. Use a visual timer, put the kid on a more intense reinforcement schedule, offer more comfortable chairs, etc.
  
  
• Creative or nontraditional applications of typical therapeutic tools (kid has to be guided to chair, do therapy on the floor instead). For some kids and some skills, this works just as well. For others your treatment is less helpful.
  
  
• The most effective ones use behavior modification / applied behavior analysis and take a long time. For example, if a child insists on chewing a plastic tube and screams and bites when it is taken away, the behavior therapist could determine the function of that behavior (perhaps it's seeking sensory stimulation) and create a long term plan to adjust the child's behavior (perhaps rewarding the child for spending longer and longer intervals with the tube out of their mouth). If you're interested in learning about this stuff, the book Applied Behavior Analysis for Teachers (get an older edition - they haven't changed that much) is excellent. But know that these kinds of plans have to be implemented across the child's whole life to be effective. 30 minute bursts won't do much.

Applied Behavior Analysis for Teachers