r/ABA • u/sofiaidalia • 20h ago

Put with a High Behavior Client with No Training

I’m just very frustrated about what happened on Wednesday afternoon and need to vent. I work in a clinic. I did almost 4 weeks of hands-on training (shadowing the other RBTs with their client and slowly taking over more and more of the session as the days went on) and I was put with the same few kids consistently during it. I passed my written exam on Tuesday and was thus fully certified, so on Wednesday they had me one-on-one with kids the whole day. My morning client was the sweetest little girl, very low in maladaptive behaviors, who I had done most of my training with. I even took my comp with her! We knew each other and were comfortable with each other. The morning went very smoothly, the only hiccup was when we had to clean up from her favorite activity to transition to lunch, but we overcame it quickly. I wish I could say the same for the afternoon.

For the afternoon, they had me with a boy with extremely high behaviors, especially aggression. I had never been with this kid before. I did zero percent of my training with him. This child did not know me in the slightest, and I didn’t know him either, yet they just threw me with him. I spent the afternoon getting kicked, punched, he slapped me in the face so hard that I had his bright red handprint on my cheek for the next 2 hours, he bit me three times (one of which was on my breast), he threw blocks directly at my face, and he eloped so many times that I spent most of the session chasing him around the clinic to the point where I had an asthma attack. The only person who helped was his morning RBT. The BCBA stood outside his room on her computer while he screamed at the top of his lungs and attacked me for 20 minutes. If it wasn’t for his morning RBT helping me out, I would have left for the day halfway through the session.

I understand that I will have to work with high behavior kids in this job and that I will probably be paired with this kid again in the future. I’m just upset that I had no chance to pair with this kid at all before taking over his care for the afternoon, especially considering his behaviors are very well documented. I feel like if I had gotten the chance to shadow a session or two of his before hand, he and I both would have had a much more successful session.

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6

u/novas_rebel BCBA 14h ago

It’s normal to get a kid when you start out and to not have paired with him. Once you begin your session is when you start pairing. The client who you shadowed and did your competency with is usually not who your client will be. Now the BCBA should have definitely been supervising and helping you since it was your first session with that client. That’s ridiculous they didn’t help

2

u/sofiaidalia 8h ago

It definitely didn’t help that literally that morning, a clinic-wide message was sent saying that the RBTs were calling for support from management (so the center managers and BCBAs) too often. We were told that we should refer to the kids’ BIPs (which I didn’t get a chance to read because I immediately had to start managing the kid’s behaviors) or take the kid to a social area and ask another RBT to keep an eye on them for a bit if you need a little break (which I could not do because it was near impossible to transition this kid to any location, he’d either elope or start beating me up). I was given no support other than from his morning RBT, and I felt incredibly discouraged from asking for more support.

2

u/justsosillysorry 14h ago

It’s unfortunate that you were not offered support in that moment, but I’d advise you to voice your concern about your lack of physical management experience with the BCBA. All clients are different in their aggressions, but also their size and their easiest redirections. I’d tell her you’d like to see her model the physical management outlined in the behavior plan.

1

u/sofiaidalia 8h ago

Yeah I’m going to voice my concerns on Monday. I was out Thursday and Friday (sinus and upper respiratory infections, yay!) but I’m going to tell them that I felt like I was given zero support and zero preparation and that not only me, but the kid suffered because of it too. I was upset and became dysregulated, and I know he was too. I was just some rando who came in and started making demands of him, I don’t blame him at all for how the session went. He and I should have had more support, and I feel like we were both just set up for failure.