Episode 32: Discipline, Dysregulation, and Why Punishment Doesn’t Work

This week is a mailbag episode, and Erin and Matt take on two common questions from allistic listeners that come up constantly in real life. Both questions sound simple. Neither one is.

Episode highlights:

• If ABA is harmful, does that mean all discipline or behaviorism is bad — and what discipline is actually for
• Why punishment fails to teach, and how it damages trust, learning, and regulation
• The difference between misbehavior driven by dysregulation vs. misunderstanding
• Why discipline should mean teaching, modeling, and guiding — not control or compliance
• Why Autistic people can be deeply literal and deeply sarcastic (aka snarkolepsy), and why that confuses people so much

Also: this episode includes refrigerator magnets, cuckoo clocks, air fryers, AIC buttons for dogs, Amelia Bedelia logic, Hannah Gadsby wondering how she a box, and a penguin are related, Back to the Future, and a very firm rejection of authoritarian parenting. Matt and Erin don’t get to the rest of the mailbag — including PDA — because these two questions needed the space they took. And honestly, that’s kind of the point.

Note from Erin:

If you're interested in getting started on AIC buttons with your animals, I highly recommend checking out Fluent.pet and HungerForWords.com. They have lots of great info and free resources, even if you don't buy their buttons.

Some of my favorite button-pushers to watch:

Elsie at Elsie wants... (Human: Mary Robinette Kowal who is an incredible human all-around, but also happens to be a Hugo Award-winning author, celebrated narrator, and professional puppeteer)

Twiggy, Odin and Freya at Twiggy and her Cat Cat Friends (Human: Janine Marie Skunk, talking about how she got started here)

Bunny at What About Bunny (Human: Alexis Devine, who is also one of our Autistic neurokin! She tells her story and Bunny's in the book, I Am Bunny)

And, we can't forget the O.G. of interspecies button learning - Stella at Hunger4Words (Human: Christina Hunger, the speech and language pathologist who first noticed the similarities between her puppy and the pre-language toddlers she was working with. You can learn more about Stella's learning process in the book How Stella Learned to Talk)