Power to the Parents

Mickey Keenan, Ph.D.

Appropriately, the beginning of this change began on St. Patrick's day in 1997, when a local newspaper in N. Ireland published an interview with a parent and me about the work I had done with her child who was diagnosed as autistic. I had worked with this family on a voluntary basis for over a year and now the little boy was attending mainstream education. Prior to this the local professionals, who had no training in behaviour analysis, had considered him to be yet another sad case of a child destined for an institution for the rest of his life.

Such was the public interest in the newspaper article that I was inundated with requests for help. What to do? I was the lone behaviour analyst in the School of Psychology at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, and I reckoned that teaching parents would be much like teaching undergraduate students. This time it was different. This time the students were highly motivated and they approached their practical work, with their own children, with enthusiastic conviction. Each month for over a year I taught introductory classes in behaviour analysis, again unpaid. Towards the end of the first year my class included up to 40 parents.

I could not keep this up forever so we decided that the group should gain official status as a registered charity and seek financial support for further training. After we formalised our group as a registered charity called P.E.A.T. (Parents' Education as Autism Therapists) we accomplished two significant goals in our first year. Firstly, we published a book that has contributions by parents [Keenan, M., Kerr, K.P., & Dillenburger, K. (2000) (Eds). Parents' education as autism therapists: Applied behavior analysis in context. London: Jessica Kingsley publishers. ISBN 1 85302 778 2] that has been well received by international colleagues. Secondly, we organised the first international conference in Ireland on Applied Behaviour Analysis and Autism, held in October, 2000. Our guest speakers included Gina Green, Bobby Newman, Shahla Rosales, Mecca Chiesa, and Oliver Mudford. The following extract from my opening speech to the conference shows clearly the direction that the group was heading:

For those of you who are not familiar with P.E.A.T., I feel it is best described as a school, a cross-community school in a divided society, a school run by parents for parents, a school without a roof, or without walls.

One of the main goals of our group is to persuade professionals and other parents that the practice of the science of behaviour analysis is long overdue in our community. We educate parents on how to use scientifically validated procedures for the benefit of their children. That is, with professional skills already present in our community [my former postgraduate students] we actively train parents how to teach their children how to learn.

Given the context within which I was trying to promote behaviour analysis in our community [I had no prior experience in working in the field of autism] I was only too aware how my words alone would come across as mere rhetoric. It was time to get some help. The first person I turned to was Bobby Newman. If it had not been for Bobby's personal commitment to the task I had undertaken, there would be no P.E.A.T. group. I am not sure how the group can ever repay him.

If it had not been for Ken Kerr, there would be no functioning P.E.A.T. group today. As a former student of mine, Ken acquired his practical skills in the face of untold pressure for him to come up with the goods. And he did!

Since that conference, P.E.A.T. has continued to evolve and has survived numerous internal political difficulties, something not uncommon for groups such as this. At the moment we have about 80 parents, both Catholic and Protestant, and only one professional therapist, Stephen Gallagher. We are still trying to get our voice heard by education professionals. In the North of Ireland, with all its political difficulties, we managed another small success – we are seen as a non-sectarian group. I had forgotten that, even in the treatment of autism, sectarian politics would manifest itself in various guises. But at least we got that one right! In the South of Ireland, mostly thanks to the work of Ken Kerr, there are currently 20 focus groups modelled on P.E.A.T., and five schools using applied behaviour analysis.

The current hurdle for the P.E.A.T. group has involved our dealings with a task force set up by the two governments on either side of the border to look at autism treatment provision in the whole of Ireland. In political terms this is a significant event, given the history of conflict on the island of Ireland. One of the education inspectors from N. Ireland, who has a significant role in the task force, was in attendance on the opening day of our conference. But amazingly, all of the behaviour analysis professionals on both sides of the border have been excluded from participating in this task force.

When the history books are written that describe the evolution of behaviour analysis world-wide, the P.E.A.T. group will be seen as playing a significant role. Parents, empowered with skills and knowledge of applied behavior analysis and motivated by love for their children, were finally able to overcome academic bigotry toward behaviour analysis, professional impotence in the treatment of autism, and political divisions in their country.

Mickey Keenan, Ph.D., is lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of Ulster at Coleraine, N. Ireland BT52 1SA. He is Director of P.E.A.T. and also co-author of the first multimedia tutorial in behavior analysis, Behavior analysis: A primer, Celtic Fringe Productions, 2000.

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