Both traditional parenting, and the “behaviour management” strategies employed in many schools, place great emphasis on the use of rewards, praise and sanctions as an effective way to promote desired behaviour and discourage or eliminate challenging behaviour. However, most PDAers and PDA parents will quickly tell you that these approaches are not usually very effective. Why not? There are a number of reasons.
First and foremost, all of these strategies are designed to increase motivation. The goal is to make the child want to do the desired behaviour and make them want to avoid the undesired behaviour. That is all fine if the problem is one of motivation. You can very effectively make someone want to do something using rewards. What, though, if they already want to do well but they can’t manage it? They are likely to feel very frustrated with themselves because they can’t. If they then also miss out on a reward, that is only going to increase the frustration. If this cycle carries on, the frustration is likely to boil over into anger and even, possibly, violent outbursts.
When you see a child failing, you can either decide that they didn’t want to succeed and therefore need you to add more motivation; or you can decide that they did the best they could but something got in their way and prevented them from doing as well as they want to. If something is getting in the way, the best thing you can do to help them is to figure out what that thing is and help them to fix or overcome the obstacle. To put it another way, no amount of rewards or praise is going to help an amputee to walk – they need walking aids before they can even begin to try.
Another issue is that rewards and praise create their own demands. Recognition of a good quality piece of work can set an expectation that this is the standard that can be reached or exceeded in future. This can lead to perfectionism, which is a problem within itself in autism. Rewards given at the end of the week, recognising behaviour across the whole week, can build stress because of the effort needed to sustain behaviour for a long time. The good behaviour on Monday can be forgotten by Friday. Similarly, if the reward is given in public, accompanied by much ceremony, (such as in school assembly) this can further heighten stress.
Finally, reward systems, even those that highlight only positive behaviours, are often a very public way of highlighting the differences between children. Other children in the class know exactly which children never attain the rewards and the children themselves feel it very deeply. Many people take the scars of these systems with them long into adulthood.
As is often the case with PDA and Autism, when we better understand what is actually going on under the surface, we are better able to help. Understanding always comes before helping.
What is your experience? What strategies have worked for you and your family? What didn’t work?