The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

Children on the autism spectrum are at high-risk, perhaps three times more likely to experience serious injury and even death in contrast to typical peers. This session shows how these children become endangered and offers a behavioral problem solving process to both prevent and intervene with these safety related behaviors. Children on the autism spectrum are at high-risk for serious injury and even death. Research suggests that these children are about three times more likely to die as a result of an unintentional injury in contrast to their typical peers. Obviously, many of the characteristics of autism contribute to this high-risk profile and the behaviors and environmental conditions that accompany almost all unintential injuries are amenable to behavior analytic techniques. The session will begin by showing the elevated risk profile for children on the autism spectrum and the rather high profile for children in the United States. We will carefully examine a number of ways children on the spectrum become endangered. The topic of elopement /wandering will be discussed as this often is the primary doorway to danger. As children wander they often find their way to water and drown. I will share a number of strategies that professionals can use in an effort to prevent elopement and drowning and minimize other risks.  I will review the behavior analytic research on elopement and show how some of this technology is useful for home-based elopements but also discuss some of the critical limitations of our current research.  For example, most studies on elopement, as noted by Iwata, do not identify escape and the primary function of the behavior, an unusual finding in light of the nature of most elopements. The session will also examine safety issues in transportation safety.  Transportation related incidents are the primary cause of unintentional death for children over 4 years of age.  Here, behavior analytic approaches should be used to proactively consider several dangerous behaviors including seat-belt refusal and disruptive behaviors while a vehicle is in motion.

  While schools typically are very safe places for children with autism, we are seeing the emergence of some patterns of risk at school.  Two of thse patterns are described in detail.  The first relates to the behaviors of teachers and administrative staff once an elopment has been reported.  Here, delays in reporting the incident to local 911 services can result in vastly increased risk for the child.  Secondly, patterns of unreliable supervision by staff, including “cell phone play” during times when staff should be engaged in active supervision of children now constitue a significant and growing problem.  I will suggest several ways to both identify this problem pattern and to then intervene so as to eliminate this dangerous staff safety issue.  These new risk patterns will be discussed along with a number of problem prevention practices that parents can be asvised to insist on in their child’s program at school. Finally, we will look at a process for behavioral problem solving that can we used with a wide array of safety related behaviors. Here, we will examine the main format for transportation and industrial safety, the Haddon Matrix, and overlay it on the traditional behavior analytic ABC model in an effort to gain both an understanding of a specific safety problem and judgment guides for intervention.

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