Improving Sleep for Profoundly Autistic Learners becomes clinically important the moment a team has to turn good intentions into reliable action inside home routines, treatment sessions, interdisciplinary consultation, and health-related skill support. In Improving Sleep for Profoundly Autistic Learners, for this course, the practical stakes show up in safe, humane intervention that respects health variables and daily-life feasibility, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Profound Autism Summit
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →For decades now, sleep problems have been established to effect between approximately 44-83% 1 of the autism population. More recently, Cohen, Simonne, et al. 2 analyzed over 20,000 nights of sleep from 67 individuals with "low functioning" (NB: today classified as Level 3 or Profound) autism to study whether daytime behaviors can be predicted from prior sleep patterns. A statistically significant predictive relationship was obtained for 81% of individuals, with measures of night-to-night variation in sleep timing and duration most relevant for accurate prediction. These results highlight the importance of regular sleep patterns for better daytime functioning in the Profound Autism community. However, absent from research are effective strategies to improve problematic sleep for profoundly autistic learners who may display extreme behavior (e.g., aggression, self-injury, tantrums, property destruction or other challenging behaviors) throughout the day, at bedtime, and throughout the night. This session aims to dispel myths about the permanence of poor sleep for autistic learners and offer a wide variety of strategies and considerations for improving sleep within the Profound Autism community.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
| COA | 1 | — |
| NASW | 1 | — |
| PSY | 1 | — |
Emily Varon is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst with a dedicated focus on sleep-related behaviors. She has worked in the field of behavior analysis since 2000 and has devoted her practice to improving the sleep habits of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder since 2010. Emily takes the complicated issue of pervasive sleep problems and helps behavior analysts develop appropriate and ethical behavior plans for improving the quality of sleep for consumers and their caregivers. Her focus on sustainability of sleep habits versus “good” or “bad” habits offers families and clinicians a broader, long-view perspective of sleep, resulting in more sustainable results over time. By combining the science of behavior analysis with the science of sleep, Emily has curated our field’s first sleep certification program, The Sleep Collective, designed specifically for Behavior Analysts to become fluent in the assessment and treatment of problematic sleep at any age. Emily resides in Irvine, California with her husband and two teens. Improving the quality of life for persons with Autism, and their families, has been a passion of hers for over 20 years.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
256 research articles with practitioner takeaways
252 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.