Ask a Behaviour Analyst

Hi all, I am a consultant behaviour analyst for individuals with autism. Please feel free to ask me questions about behaviours that may challenge, teaching functional communication, increasing/decreasing certain behaviours, etc. I can hopefully offer some general advice that may be of help. My job entails conducting functional assessments on behaviours that challenge (finding out why they are occurring), writing positive behaviour support plans, training staff on best practise and much more.

Parents
  • Hello, the only labels my son has had are moderate learning disability and severe specific speech and language disorder. It is only in the last couple of years that professionnals have started telling me my son has autism and he has never been officially assessed for it. I was asked recently by a psychologist if we would like to have these assessments done and we declined because we didn t think it would be helpful for him.  To a certain extent we may have initially started and even encouraged the hoarding because he has always enjoyed reading and is very good at it.We used to buy him lots of books and magazines as a child because he enjoyed and learnt from them. He has always been into sport particularly football and rugby and has been supporting his local teams for years and collecting programmes.  The problem has sort of grown from this.  He now buys newspapers , up till about a year ago he would throw the daily papers away but now tries to hold on to them aswell,  Nothing happened a year ago that I can think of that may have made him want to keep them. I still throw them away but he gets very upset.  He orders booklets and catalogues from the internet and I think he likes receiving them through the post.  he even takes pictures of adverts on the tv so he can order things later.  There is alot of paper accumulating in my house and I do struggle to keep on top of it.  The hoarding is in every aspect of his life, not even just material things, his phone recently ran out of space and he got another one which had more storage because he collects things on there too. He gets apps on his phone whether he will use them or not, he just likes to have them. If we delete them he just downloads them again.  It is quite an obsession he has.

Reply
  • Hello, the only labels my son has had are moderate learning disability and severe specific speech and language disorder. It is only in the last couple of years that professionnals have started telling me my son has autism and he has never been officially assessed for it. I was asked recently by a psychologist if we would like to have these assessments done and we declined because we didn t think it would be helpful for him.  To a certain extent we may have initially started and even encouraged the hoarding because he has always enjoyed reading and is very good at it.We used to buy him lots of books and magazines as a child because he enjoyed and learnt from them. He has always been into sport particularly football and rugby and has been supporting his local teams for years and collecting programmes.  The problem has sort of grown from this.  He now buys newspapers , up till about a year ago he would throw the daily papers away but now tries to hold on to them aswell,  Nothing happened a year ago that I can think of that may have made him want to keep them. I still throw them away but he gets very upset.  He orders booklets and catalogues from the internet and I think he likes receiving them through the post.  he even takes pictures of adverts on the tv so he can order things later.  There is alot of paper accumulating in my house and I do struggle to keep on top of it.  The hoarding is in every aspect of his life, not even just material things, his phone recently ran out of space and he got another one which had more storage because he collects things on there too. He gets apps on his phone whether he will use them or not, he just likes to have them. If we delete them he just downloads them again.  It is quite an obsession he has.

Children
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