Reflections on some early events related to behavior analysis of child development.
Parents were effectively using ABA at home long before the BACB existed.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schaal (1996) tells the back-story of how ABA first reached kids. The paper is a first-person memoir rather than an experiment. It walks through lab, clinic, and home demonstrations from the 1950s and 60s. The writer shows mothers learning to use reinforcers and timeouts to shape their own children’s behavior.
What they found
The big point: parents could master basic operant tools and produce real behavior change at home. These early cases showed that principles discovered with pigeons and rats worked just as well with typical and atypical children. The successes laid the ground for today’s parent-training programs.
How this fits with other research
Sidman (2002) and Simpson et al. (2001) pick up the story where Schaal (1996) stops. Both later reflections say the field then shifted from mom-and-pop trials toward formal mentorship and conference networks. The message is continuous: early parent work mattered, but the next generation added structure.
Laposa et al. (2017) carries the timeline even further. That paper explains how parent demand for trained helpers pushed the creation of the BACB credential. In short, the 1950s kitchen-table sessions in Schaal (1996) are the roots of today’s certified RBT system.
Morris et al. (2022) and Hineline (2022) turn the same history into a teaching tool. They recommend assigning Schaal (1996) to students so newcomers see that ABA started with real families, not just lab animals. The memoir now serves as a classroom story rather than a data source.
Why it matters
When you run parent training today, you are repeating the exact steps first sketched in this paper. Show caregivers how to deliver praise, how to withhold reinforcement for problem behavior, and how to take data on the fridge. The article reminds you that parents have always been the first and best line of intervention. Share the story with skeptical families; it proves moms and dads have succeeded with ABA for over sixty years.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A series of events related to the early application of behavioral principles to child behavior and development is described. The events began in the 1930s at Columbia University with a solicited letter from John B. Watson suggesting a master's degree thesis problem, and continued through the 1950s and 1960s at the University of Washington. Specifically, these happenings resulted in (a) research demonstrating that Skinner's laboratory method for studying nonhuman organisms could be profitably applied to the laboratory study of young normal children; (b) a demonstration that by successive approximations, a normal child can be operantly conditioned to respond to an arbitrary situation; (c) research showing that the effects of simple schedules of reinforcement obtained with nonhuman organisms could be duplicated in young normal and retarded children; (d) the demonstration that Skinner's operant laboratory method could be adapted to study young children in field situations; (e) research showing that operant principles can be successfully applied to the treatment of a young autistic boy with a serious visual handicap; (f) laboratory studies showing that mothers can be trained to treat their own young children who have behavior problems; (g) an in-home study demonstrating that a mother can treat her own child who has behavior problems; (h) a demonstration that operant principles can be applied effectively to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to children with retardation; and (i) publication of a book, Child Development: A Systematic and Empirical Theory, in collaboration with Donald M. Baer, by Prentice Hall in their Century Psychological Series.
The Behavior analyst, 1996 · doi:10.1007/BF03392738