I was the kid who won. Constantly. I was the kid who loved the reward system, figured out exactly how it worked, and became incredibly successful within it. If there was a sticker chart, I wanted the stickers. If there were points, I wanted the points. If there was praise, recognition, a prize, or some kind of special privilege attached to a behavior, I learned very quickly what I needed to do to get it. I wasn’t the child who made adults say, “Rewards don’t work for her.” I was almost the opposite. I was the child adults could point to as evidence that rewards did work. I responded to them, I sought them out, and I was good at figuring out the rules of the system. For a long time, that was simply the story of my childhood as far as I understood it. I was a successful kid who liked rewards.

Recently, I was talking to my mom about some of these experiences, and she said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Well, you loved rewards.” And she was absolutely right. I did. I genuinely loved them. I am not rewriting my childhood to pretend that I hated every sticker, prize, compliment, or recognition I received. I didn’t. I enjoyed winning. I enjoyed being recognized. I enjoyed knowing I had done something that adults considered successful. If someone had asked little me whether the reward system was working, I probably would have enthusiastically said yes. From my mother’s perspective, that is a completely reasonable observation. If your child is happy, engaged, earning rewards, and demonstrating the behaviors adults are trying to encourage, why would you assume there is a problem?

That conversation with my mom actually made me think more deeply about what we mean when we say an intervention “worked.” Because there are two completely different questions hiding inside that phrase. The first question is, “Did the intervention change the behavior?” In my case, yes. The second question is, “What else did the child learn while that behavior was changing?” That is much harder to answer. A reward system can successfully increase a behavior and still have effects that aren’t captured by the behavior chart. It can teach a child what adults value, what behaviors receive approval, which parts of themselves receive positive attention, and which behaviors are better kept private. Those lessons may not show up until years later, and sometimes the child doesn’t have the perspective to recognize them until adulthood.

That is the lens through which I now look at my own experience with PBIS and reward-based systems. I am not claiming that PBIS single-handedly caused every social difficulty I have experienced, nor am I claiming that every reward I received was harmful. That would be an oversimplification of both my childhood and the research. Human development is much too complicated for us to isolate one educational practice and attribute an entire adult experience to it. Autism itself shaped my communication and social development. My family, teachers, peers, environment, expectations, culture, and countless individual experiences all played a role. But I can look back now with the perspective of an adult, an autistic person, and an educator and recognize patterns that I did not have the developmental ability to recognize when I was six or seven years old.

One of those patterns involves internalized echolalia. Today, I understand that echolalia is not simply meaningless repetition that needs to be eliminated. For many autistic people, echolalia can serve communicative, linguistic, social, and regulatory functions. It can be part of language development, a way of participating in interaction, a way of processing language, a way of expressing something when spontaneous language is difficult, or simply a natural feature of autistic communication. The research base around interventions for echolalia is still developing, and there are significant limitations in the existing literature. A systematic review found that many interventions have focused on reducing echolalia, while the evidence is much less developed when it comes to understanding the communicative function of the echolalia being reduced. That distinction matters because reducing a behavior and improving communication are not automatically the same outcome.

When I look back at my own development, I think about what happens when a child repeatedly receives information about which forms of communication are rewarded and which are not. Nobody has to sit a child down and explicitly tell them, “The way you naturally communicate is unacceptable.” Children are extraordinarily good at noticing patterns. If one form of communication consistently gets praise, positive attention, access to something desirable, or social approval while another form receives correction, redirection, or simply less positive attention, a child can learn the difference. Eventually, the adult does not have to be there. The child can begin monitoring themselves.

That is what I mean when I talk about internalized echolalia. I am not using that phrase as a formal clinical diagnosis or claiming that there is a scientifically established pathway showing that PBIS causes internalized echolalia. I am talking about my own lived experience of what happened when I learned to monitor my communication. The language could still be there, the repetitions could still be there, the scripts could still be there, but there was an increasing awareness of whether they were socially acceptable to express.

The external correction can eventually become an internal filter. You don’t need someone else to tell you not to do something because you have already learned what will happen socially if you do.

That is where the issue of social status becomes incredibly important to me. Children are constantly learning where they fit socially. They learn who receives attention, who receives praise, who gets invited to participate, who is considered funny, who is considered annoying, who is considered mature, who is considered difficult, and who is held up as the example everyone else should follow. For an autistic child, especially one who is already trying to understand social rules that may not come naturally, those signals can be incredibly powerful. If the school environment repeatedly communicates that certain behaviors make you more socially successful while other behaviors make you less acceptable, you don’t need to be explicitly punished to learn the lesson. Social approval itself can become the reward.

And I was very good at earning that reward.

That is something I think we need to be willing to talk about when we discuss autistic children who appear to be thriving in highly structured behavioral environments. Sometimes the child who looks like the biggest success story is the child who has become exceptionally skilled at understanding what adults want. That can absolutely be a valuable skill. Learning expectations, navigating routines, communicating effectively, and participating in a classroom are not inherently bad things. The question is what happens when the goal quietly shifts from expanding a child’s skills to making a child more socially acceptable. Those goals can look remarkably similar from the outside, but they are not the same.

There is a significant difference between teaching a child additional ways to communicate and teaching them that their existing communication is wrong. There is a difference between helping a child understand social expectations and teaching them that acceptance depends on performing those expectations perfectly. There is a difference between supporting regulation and rewarding a child for suppressing visible signs of distress. There is a difference between helping a child build relationships and teaching them how to make themselves easier for other people to interact with.

I think some of my childhood experiences existed somewhere in that complicated middle ground.

I learned how to perform well socially. I learned what adults wanted. I learned what made people happy with me. I learned how to navigate expectations. And because I was rewarded for those things, I had an incentive to keep doing them. Again, I am not saying that every one of those skills was bad. Some of them have helped me tremendously throughout my life. The complicated part is that I also learned that social success was something I could lose. If I did the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, communicated differently, or behaved in a way that didn’t fit the expectations of the environment, there could be consequences. Sometimes those consequences were tangible. Sometimes they were simply social.

That can create an internal system that follows you long after the external reward system is gone.

The sticker chart disappears. The classroom token economy disappears. The teacher who used to praise you graduates you to the next grade. The prize box is gone. Nobody is handing you a point anymore. But the rules you learned can remain. You can continue monitoring yourself even when nobody is asking you to. You can continue calculating whether what you are saying is appropriate. You can continue wondering whether you are being too much, too loud, too repetitive, too emotional, too direct, too interested, too different, or simply too autistic.

The reward doesn’t have to be a physical object anymore.

It can become approval.

It can become acceptance.

It can become being perceived as “good.”

And the fear of losing those things can become powerful enough to maintain the behavior on its own.

This is where I think we have to be particularly careful with the idea that a child who responds well to rewards must therefore be doing well. Those are not synonymous statements. A child can respond to reinforcement and still have unmet needs. A child can earn every reward and still be exhausted from constantly monitoring themselves. A child can demonstrate excellent behavior at school and fall apart somewhere they feel safe enough to stop performing. A child can appear socially successful while having very little sense of what they actually want or need because they have become so focused on what everyone else wants from them.

And I think this is one of the reasons social outcomes matter so much.

If I am looking only at my childhood behavior chart, I might conclude that the intervention was a tremendous success. I responded to reinforcement. I followed expectations. I earned recognition. I changed behaviors when the environment gave me a reason to change them. But if I am looking at the entire person, I have to ask additional questions. What happened to my communication? What happened to my sense of autonomy? What happened to my relationship with mistakes? What happened to my understanding of my own needs? What happened to my ability to distinguish between authentic connection and social performance? What did I believe I had to do to be accepted?

Those questions don’t have simple data points.

That does not mean they are unimportant.

In fact, I think they are some of the most important questions we can ask.

Research on autistic children has consistently identified challenges with peer acceptance and rejection, although those experiences vary tremendously between individuals. Longitudinal research has shown that autistic children’s peer relationships can change over time and that social functioning and peer experiences are connected in complex ways. That research cannot tell us that PBIS caused my social experiences, but it does reinforce the idea that social belonging is a meaningful developmental outcome that deserves to be considered when we evaluate educational interventions.

I don’t want to throw out social skills instruction. I don’t want autistic children to be denied opportunities to learn how to navigate social situations. I don’t want to pretend that every expectation is oppressive or that children should never be challenged. I actually believe strongly in teaching skills. But I want us to become much more precise about what skill we are teaching and why.

If we are teaching a child how to ask for help, that can increase independence. If we are teaching them how to communicate a boundary, that can increase safety. If we are teaching them how to enter a conversation, repair a misunderstanding, or navigate a conflict, those skills can support meaningful relationships. But if we are teaching a child that their natural communication needs to disappear because it makes other people uncomfortable, I think we have to stop and examine that goal.

The goal should not be to make autistic children indistinguishable from their peers.

The goal should be to give them more options.

That distinction has become incredibly important to me as an educator. When I work with students now, I ask myself whether I am expanding their communication repertoire or replacing their natural communication with something adults simply prefer. I ask whether I am helping them regulate or simply making them quieter. I ask whether I am helping them build relationships or teaching them how to perform social acceptability. I ask whether the behavior I am reinforcing is actually useful to the student or primarily convenient for the adults around them.

Those questions don’t mean reinforcement has no place in education. It absolutely can. Positive reinforcement can be motivating, and there is research supporting aspects of PBIS implementation, including improvements in some schoolwide behavioral and disciplinary outcomes. I don’t think intellectual honesty requires us to pretend otherwise. But evidence that a system can improve certain observable outcomes does not answer every question about long-term identity, communication, autonomy, or social experience. Those outcomes need to be studied separately.

That is the distinction I wish I had understood as a child.

I could love the reward and still be learning something complicated from it.

My mom’s statement—“Well, you loved rewards”—is true. I did love them. And I think that is actually one of the most important parts of this conversation because it prevents us from creating a simplistic story where the child hated the system and the adults forced it upon them. My experience was not that simple. I liked winning. I liked praise. I liked recognition. I liked succeeding. The system gave me things I wanted, and I learned how to succeed within it.

But a child enjoying a reward does not tell us whether the behavior being reinforced is ultimately serving that child’s long-term wellbeing.

That is a much bigger question.

I also think we have to consider what happens when the most socially rewarded version of a child becomes the version everyone expects them to maintain. If a child is consistently praised for being exceptionally well behaved, exceptionally mature, exceptionally articulate, exceptionally compliant, or exceptionally socially appropriate, that identity can become incredibly difficult to step outside of. The child may begin to believe that being “good” means not causing problems, not disappointing adults, not needing too much, not making mistakes, and not showing the parts of themselves that might disrupt the image everyone has built around them.

For an autistic child, that can become particularly complicated because autistic traits do not simply disappear because a child has learned to hide them. The internal experience can remain even when the external behavior changes. The effort required to constantly monitor, suppress, adapt, and perform may also remain invisible to the people evaluating the child’s success.

And I think that is the piece that matters most when I look back at my own childhood.

I was not a failed student who couldn’t respond to behavioral interventions.

I was an incredibly successful student within them.

I won the rewards.

I earned the praise.

I learned the expectations.

I figured out what adults wanted.

And now, as an adult, I am asking questions that I didn’t have the developmental ability to ask then.

What parts of me did I learn to keep private?

What communication did I learn was safer not to express?

How much of my social behavior was authentic, and how much was performance?

How early did I learn that approval could be earned?

How much did I begin to associate being “good” with being accepted?

And what would have happened if, alongside teaching me how to navigate the social world, adults had also taught me that I did not have to earn my right to belong in it?

I don’t know the answer to every one of those questions. I don’t think anyone can look backward at their childhood and produce a perfectly controlled explanation for who they became. But I do know that these questions are worth asking, particularly when we design interventions for children who may be too young to understand the long-term meaning of what they are being taught.

As educators, we have enormous influence over what children learn about themselves. We teach academic skills, but we also teach children what gets attention, what gets approval, what gets corrected, what gets ignored, and what we consider valuable. Sometimes those lessons are intentional. Sometimes they are not.

That is why I don’t want to evaluate an intervention solely by asking, “Did it work?”

I want to ask what “worked” actually means.

Did the behavior change?

Did communication expand?

Did autonomy increase?

Did the student develop meaningful relationships?

Did they become better able to advocate for themselves?

Did they learn to recognize their own needs?

Did they become more capable of navigating the world without constantly monitoring themselves?

Did the intervention help them become more fully themselves, or did it simply make them easier for everyone else to understand?

Those are very different outcomes.

My childhood taught me that a reward can be both genuinely enjoyable and incredibly powerful. It taught me that I could be motivated by approval and that I could become exceptionally good at figuring out how to obtain it. My adulthood has taught me that success within a system does not necessarily tell the entire story of what that system is teaching.

So when my mom says, “You loved rewards,” I don’t disagree with her.

I smile because she’s right.

I did love rewards.

And that’s exactly why I think we need to ask harder questions about them.

Because the question isn’t whether I loved the reward.

The question is what I learned to do to earn it, what I learned about myself while earning it, and whether the person I became still feels like she has to earn the same approval today.

That is the part that never appeared on the chart.

I think one of the strangest things about being the kid who was really good at earning rewards is that eventually, you don’t necessarily need the reward anymore. At some point, the sticker, prize, certificate, praise, or whatever the classroom system was using can disappear, but the lesson doesn’t necessarily disappear with it. You can learn to monitor yourself so well that the adult doesn’t have to tell you what is expected anymore. You already know. You can walk into a room and immediately start scanning: How am I supposed to act here? What kind of communication is acceptable? What version of me is going to be easiest for everyone else? What will make people like me? What will make me look competent? What will keep me from being perceived as difficult? And that is where I think the conversation becomes much more complicated for me. I don’t look back and think, “Those rewards were terrible and I hated them.” I loved them. I earned them constantly. I was successful within that system. But sometimes I wonder whether being exceptionally good at reading the room and adjusting myself became a skill that followed me long after the classroom reward system was gone.

That is also where I think my relationship with echolalia becomes important. When you’re young, you may not necessarily understand the difference between “this communication isn’t working for me right now” and “this communication is wrong.” Those are two very different messages. A child can learn that certain ways of communicating get a positive response while other ways result in correction, redirection, confusion, or less social attention. Over time, the child may become incredibly skilled at anticipating those reactions. For me, I think that distinction matters because I wasn’t simply learning how to communicate more effectively; I was also learning how to monitor my communication based on how other people responded to it. I learned that there were ways of speaking that were going to be received better. I learned what sounded “right.” I learned what seemed socially appropriate. And when you are a child who is already highly motivated by approval, that information can become incredibly powerful.

The research on echolalia is important here because we now have a much more complicated understanding of it than the old idea that repetition is simply meaningless behavior that needs to be extinguished. Echolalia can serve communicative, linguistic, social, and regulatory functions, and recent reviews have raised concerns about interventions that focus primarily on reducing echolalic speech without adequately examining what communicative purpose that speech is serving. That doesn’t mean every instance of echolalia should be preserved exactly as it is forever, or that supporting a child in developing additional communication strategies is harmful. It means we need to be extremely careful about the difference between expanding someone’s communication repertoire and teaching them that their natural communication is something they need to suppress to be accepted. Those are not the same goal.

And I think that distinction follows directly into social status. Because I wasn’t just learning which behaviors earned a tangible reward. I was learning which behaviors earned people.

Praise is social. Approval is social. Being called a good student is social. Being the child adults can count on is social. Being the child who doesn’t cause problems is social. Being the child who does exactly what is expected can change the way adults interact with you and, eventually, the way peers perceive you. For a child who is trying to figure out where they belong, that matters. If certain behaviors consistently result in more positive attention, more opportunities, more trust, and more inclusion, it makes sense that a child would begin repeating those behaviors. That’s not a character flaw. That’s learning.

The problem is that social status can become its own reinforcement schedule. You don’t necessarily need someone to hand you a prize because being perceived as successful becomes the prize. You don’t need the teacher to say “good job” because you can tell yourself whether you did the socially acceptable thing. You don’t need someone to correct you because you can correct yourself before anyone else gets the opportunity. And suddenly the system doesn’t live outside of you anymore. It lives inside your head. I don’t have to wonder what the teacher wants because some part of me is already asking. I don’t have to wait for someone to tell me whether I am being appropriate because I am already evaluating myself. I don’t have to be told that I am taking up too much space because I may already be thinking about whether I am taking up too much space.

That is the part I wish we talked about more when we talk about behavior interventions. We are very comfortable measuring whether a behavior increased or decreased. We are comfortable counting points, tokens, referrals, praise statements, compliance, task completion, and incidents. We are much less comfortable measuring what happens inside the child after the adult intervention has worked. Did they become more independent, or did they become better at anticipating what adults want? Did they gain communication skills, or did they learn which forms of communication receive approval? Did they develop self-regulation, or did they become exceptionally good at hiding dysregulation? Did they become more socially connected, or did they become more socially acceptable? Those outcomes can look almost identical from a distance, but they are not the same thing.

And this is where I have to be honest about my own story. I don’t know that PBIS caused my internalized echolalia. I cannot look backward and scientifically prove that a reward system created the way I experience communication or social approval as an adult. There are too many variables in a person’s development to make that kind of claim from one person’s experience. What I can say is that I was a child who responded extremely well to rewards, who learned very quickly what adults wanted, who was praised for those behaviors, and who grew into an adult who thinks deeply about communication, social expectations, masking, approval, and what it means to be perceived as “good.” I can connect those dots in my own life. I just cannot pretend that my dots automatically prove causation for everyone else.

And honestly, that is why my mom saying, “Well, you loved rewards,” has stuck with me. Because she is right. I did. I loved them. I loved winning. I loved being recognized. I loved knowing I had done something correctly. But a child loving reinforcement doesn’t automatically tell us everything about what that reinforcement was teaching them. A child can genuinely enjoy the reward while simultaneously learning that certain parts of themselves receive more approval than others. Both things can be true at the same time.

As an educator now, that is the question I keep coming back to. I don’t want to take away every reward, every celebration, every form of positive feedback, or every strategy that genuinely helps a child succeed. That would be an oversimplification of my own experience. The rewards worked for me. The question is what we do after they work. What are we teaching the child to notice? What are we teaching them to value? What happens when nobody is watching? What happens when there is no prize? What happens when the socially preferred behavior conflicts with what the child actually needs? And most importantly, can the child eventually answer the question, “What works for me?” instead of only knowing how to answer, “What do I need to do so everyone else is happy with me?”

Because those are two very different definitions of success.