Learning To Say ‘NO’

Leah Kocmarek wanted her son Owen to be able to learn to say ‘no’ – to be able to say ‘stop’. Leah wanted this for Owen to help him advocate for himself to keep him safe.

“With respect to ABA therapy, we had heard the horror stories about kids being coerced to stop all stims and vocalizations or forced to make eye contact with people,” says Leah. “That’s never happened in our experience. It’s mischaracterizing ABA and providers as a whole if someone constantly says ABA is abusive. It’s not true.

“The ABA of today is not the same as yesterday.”

That’s the message Leah has for anyone who has misgivings or has had a negative experience with Applied Behaviour Analysis in the past.

Owen is currently five years old, but it was at about two-and-a-half that Leah and her husband Mike, an OPP officer, began to suspect that their son had autism. He was no longer talking. He couldn’t sit still for longer than a couple seconds. He had no way to meaningfully communicate.

“When he was two, he had about 75 words and then he slowly stopped using them,” recalls Leah. “We had a new baby girl and we moved when Owen was two years old. We simply thought this was a regression and you know he’ll pick back up. By Christmas, however, we were saying ‘you know he’s not really saying much anymore, this is kind of strange.’ We had his hearing checked and it was perfect according to the test.

“I’m looking at other kids in the same age group. I have two friends who all had babies in the same month that he was born. Their kids were doing imaginative play and he couldn’t do that. They were talking to themselves and he didn’t do that. They were picking up many more words and he wasn’t doing any of that, so that’s kind of when we suspected he was autistic.”

Leah has a background in developmental services working with adults with disabilities as a care coordinator. She knew a little bit about ABA therapy, but it was by chance at a townhall meeting that she met a BCBA (board certified behaviour analyst), who encouraged her to visit their local service provider. She saw firsthand how ABA therapy was helping non-verbal kids like Owen and how meaningful it was to their families.

“I wanted to make sure that he had the ability to say ‘no’ if he wanted to,” explains Leah. “If he wanted a break, if he wanted something to stop, that his therapists would listen to him. 

“Outside of ABA, Owen’s little sister was always taking his stuff and because he’s non-verbal he doesn’t have any ability to really tell her ‘no’. In telling the therapists this, we also began working on the word ‘stop,’ which was also one of the most significant things for him to be able to learn for his safety around traffic. They worked on it – ‘stop, stop, stop.’ He began listening to ‘stop,’ but he never said ‘stop’ to us or his therapists. One day his sister was touching his things again and he walked over to his PECS book, picked it up, pointed to ‘I want stop’ and he walked over to her and he gave it to her. I cried because to me that was just so amazing. Without ABA, he probably would have had a meltdown and we may never have known that it was because she was touching his toy. So, the ability for him to say ‘stop’ and ‘no’ is incredibly important for him.  ABA isn’t turning him into a robot, it has empowered him to advocate for himself.” 

While Leah recognizes that it’s important to acknowledge that ABA therapy may not have been practiced in the best manner in the past, she wants people to know that the ABA therapy her son is receiving today is positively life-changing.