Resources for teaching level 3 kids?
I’m almost afraid to even ask, but…
Does anyone know of any good resources (books, online, whatever) for teaching and parenting level 3 nonverbal (“severe” or “profound”) autistic kids — that are NOT based on behaviorism (ABA) and do NOT involve facilitated communication?
Whew.
Background: It seems that there are level 3 kids out there who just cannot be coerced by rewards. They can learn by intrinsic motivation, and ideally someone could help to guide them and show them, but offering arbitrary rewards for behaviors is a no go. Maybe this is PDA? I don’t know. But it is how my kid is, and I’ve learned of others too.
There are people out there who are anti-ABA, or who specialize in alternatives… but now it seems that almost all of them have jumped on the bandwagon of facilitated communication (lowercase — meaning communication conducted through the use of a facilitator, such as S2C, RPM, etc.). It’s like the two of these things have become opposing camps.
Well, I don’t want anything to do with either of these. If the facilitated communication people can prove the validity of the communication through message-passing tests, I am all on board, but until then, there’s no way. And they refuse to even engage in any discussion about it, so that seems unlikely.
There was already so little good information about kids like these, and now it seems like there’s next to none. Very frustrating. Any suggestions?