Evaluating a treatment without extinction for elopement maintained by access to stereotypy
Teach a wait-and-request rule, then give brief stereotypy access—elopement stops without extinction.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with a child with autism who ran out of the room to play with doors.
Instead of blocking the door completely, they taught the child to ask for door time.
The child got the door toys only after waiting up to 10 minutes without eloping.
No one ever took the door away forever; they just made the child wait.
What they found
Elopement dropped to near zero once the wait rule was in place.
The child still got to play with doors, but only after using the new request and staying put.
How this fits with other research
Lang et al. (2009) already showed that function-based plans like FCT beat other tricks for elopement. Boyle keeps that idea but drops the usual extinction piece.
Vascelli et al. (2021) copied the same FCT-plus-delay plan in a teen with Dravet syndrome and saw the same good result. The plan works across diagnoses.
Blowers et al. (2020) also cut elopement, yet they did use extinction by refusing to chase. Boyle proves you can skip any form of extinction and still win.
Scheithauer et al. (2025) moved the same logic into parent training and doubled the sample size. Caregivers delivered the plan at home and still halved wandering.
Why it matters
You no longer need to choose between safety and kindness. By letting the child earn stereotypy after a short wait, you remove the escape route without removing the joy. Try this first when parents worry about "taking everything away." It keeps rapport, meets sensory needs, and still slashes elopement.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Elopement is a common and potentially dangerous form of problem behavior. Results of a functional analysis found that the elopement of a child with autism was maintained by access to stereotypy in the form of door play. We implemented functional communication training and contingency-based delays dependent on the absence of elopement and increased the amount of time the participant waited prior to engaging in stereotypy. We also conducted treatment-extension probes, with the participant waiting up to 10 min without elopement.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2020 · doi:10.1002/jaba.682