This one paragraph renders the rest of this study completely meaningless and of no use whatsoever except if taken as guidance to question every early “intervention” for autism.
We also noted interventions focused almost entirely on skill development, whereas quality of life outcomes were rarely assessed. This should be an issue of major concern for families, researchers and policy makers alike, because, clearly, if an intervention has negative long-term consequences on the child’s quality of life, it’s not something families would want their child to experience.
Setting aside (for the moment) whether the behaviorist lens through which many early interventions are judged is a morally just lens, the fact that we have so little data on long-term effects of early inventions is a moral stain on psychology.