Education often uses positive or negative reinforcement to teach the student a lesson. For instance, a child learning to speak is going to receive smiles when they emulate the sounds of the adults around them, and this is going to encourage them to continue with their attempts at speech. This is a simple illustration of the effects of positive reinforcement, but there are some people for whom this tactic just cannot work. Consider the millions of children born with some form of ASD.

ASD stands for Autism Spectrum Disorders and is a sort of umbrella name for a large category of issues. These issues can range from very mild to very severe, and unfortunately there is no known cure for any of them. Instead, there are widely accepted therapies and treatments. Among the most widely accepted are the treatments that use ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) as their foundations.

Applied Behavior Analysis is not actually a treatment in itself but is the science by which human behaviors are observed, analyzed and altered accordingly. Most of the ABA strategies that are used for children with ASD issues will count on the effects of positive reinforcement to generate reliable results.

These strategies are often different from those used by the parents and teachers of children without ASD because such children have no impairment to their ability to imitate. As mentioned at the opening of this brief article, a child with ASD may not be able to emulate the speech patterns and communication skills of the adults around them. This is not something willfully done and is simply a symptom of the Autism disorder.

This means that the child will need to experience the effects of positive reinforcement in a different way. For example, a parent or teacher may need to identify the types of rewards that a child needs to encourage them to focus on developing their speech. This reward will then serve to help that child to communicate more effectively and on a much more independent basis. Soon, the effects of positive reinforcement (the reward) will become unnecessary as the child learns to associate the pleasure of speech and communication with their own emotional responses.

This is certainly more complicated than the traditional route to speech development, but ABA tactics are known to be one of the most beneficial to children dealing with any level of ASD. Parents and teachers are encouraged to seek training for themselves in order to implement the best strategies at home and at school.