nhiều chuyện, by angel lin

What’s in my bag?

What’s in my bag, you wonder. Oh well, I’m so glad you asked.

After spending half a year working as a full-time Behavioral Therapist, I have become a proud owner of what has become colloquially known as a ‘Mom Bag.’ That’s right. I’ve graduated from the trendy canvas tote bag adorned with sassy minimalist designs and catchy political statements. Exchanged it for a double-lined, eight-pound, over-the-shoulder diaper bag that is filled to the brim with treasures and treats from your wildest dreams.

And on a typical day, my bag contains the following:

  • Pocket hand sanitizer
  • My favorite claw clip
  • My Airpods case (missing one Airpod since Thailand, 2023; may she rest in piece)
  • A 24-piece Paw Patrol puzzle
  • Clorox Wipes
  • An Icy Mint Pebble
  • 4-pack of crayons and a pocket coloring book
  • 2 foam balls (both of which have been reported missing since February 2024 and are suspected to have been stolen by my client’s 3-year old little sister)
  • 1 bubble wand
  • Plastic utensil set (for lunch on the go, when I’m commuting between clients’ homes)
  • Kleenex
  • 2 sticker packs (toy poodles and kitty cats, in case you were wondering)

At this point in my life, the inside of my bag looks more like the remains of a Preschool Back-to-School sale, than what a 20-something year old would equip in her bag in order to pretend to do work on her laptop at a coffee shop all day. It’s not necessarily what I was expecting either, but when life throws you lemons and snot-filled children, you have to stay ready.

Behavioral Therapy is a relatively new field, so don’t be too alarmed if you’re not sure what it is. It’s a form of clinical psychotherapy that uses techniques derived from cognitive psychology to teach children how to strengthen positive behaviors and eliminate maladaptive ones. It’s built on classical conditioning theory: reinforce good behaviors, punish the bad ones. It’s also the leading form of treatment for children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. For the past six months, I’ve been teaching kids with autism aged 3-7 how to participate in societally adaptable behaviors—things like using words to ask for food, taking deep breaths to offset the buildup to a tantrum, or using your finger to point. Hence, the bubble wand and Paw Patrol puzzle.

If that sounds intense, I’ll be the first to tell you that it is. I want to preface these insights by saying that this wasn’t exactly the career path that I anticipated I would be taking after graduating last year from Santa Clara University. Don’t get me wrong—I know what an incredibly honorable and arduous feat it is to dedicate one’s life to working in childhood development. These therapists, who I am humbled to call my colleagues and supervisors, are some of the hardest working, clever, emotionally intelligent, creative, and resourceful people I know.

But, I also know myself enough to realize that I am someone with too weak of a capacity for patience and resilience to last long in a role working with children with developmental disorders. When I came back from Vietnam last fall and the job market received me with folded arms and nasty side-eyes, however, I wasn’t exactly left in a position to take into account my personal weaknesses when considering my options.

So, when an opportunity to work in a field that allowed me to build real-life experience in disability justice advocacy I had taken on at the Office of Accessible Education, I took it. And I took it head on with the confidence and naïveté of a recent college graduate.

I cannot emphasize enough how much valuable insight I have learned in these six months. I’ve learned things that I couldn’t learn sitting in a meeting with company executives or studying an org chart. These are gems of wisdom one can only gain by spending days playing outside in the warm sun with screaming 4 year-olds.

I’m coming to the end of my term as a Behavioral Therapist. I’m about to take on a new opportunity—one that involves more time at a desk on a computer and less time playing with race cars. I’m excited for it. But it’s bittersweet. I’ve been feeling especially reflective about my time in ABA. And I miss the kids. A lot. So I wanted to take some time and share some of the topics that I’ve been thinking about, skills I’ve learned, and insights about life I’ve had the chance to stumble upon while playing tea party in the backyard.

What does it mean to learn?

One of the most intellectually fascinating aspects of working with young children is learning about learning. You get to actually see firsthand what it’s like to teach kids a new concept. The other day, I literally taught one of my kids what a panda was.

Behavioral science is rooted in concepts like Pavlov’s Dog. You associate a particular behavior with a reward, then your brain begins to automatically create the neural pathway between that behavior and the reward. For example, if you give a kid the ball every time he says the word “ball,” they’re going to begin to realize that the word “ball” will get them the ball. You do this over and over again with different items and objectives until the kid begins to understand that everything in this world has a socially constructed label and socially appropriate means of obtaining it. You get to see in real time how humans begin to learn language, socialization, and, eventually, transitive reasoning.

(On a side note—this is especially interesting when you think about how large scale AI models learned how to use and manipulate language. What started out as huge, jumbled, and incoherent data sets become, over time, organized clusters made up of neural pathways that eventually could form entire sentences using proper English grammar. All because some dudes in San Francisco kept rewarding the model when it was able to finish a sentence like “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy ___” with the word “dog.” When you reinforce similar neural pathways over and over again, add in more data, and then allow it to form its own neural pathways, you get something resembling a human brain. This is what they mean when they say they’re training the model. But, I digress.)

For me, the really interesting part is the behavioral analysis. This is when you have to do some trickier investigative work. Because, according to behavioral psychologists, all human behaviors serve one of three functions:

  1. Attention
  2. Avoidance
  3. Access to tangibles

And if a kid happens to want one of these three things, but they haven’t developed the behavioral tools or language to tell you, they’re going to try whatever else they can to get to these functions.

So when you’re in the middle of a lesson and the kid starts screaming or hitting her little sister or putting crayons in his mouth… you have to take a step back and try to figure out why exactly they’re doing this. What function are they trying to accomplish? Has this behavior, in the past, been able to result in a desired outcome? Something like the lesson ending early, a teacher asking them to leave the classroom, or dad intervening to talk to them? If that’s the case, it’s likely that this particular behavior’s function is escape. And once you figure that out, your job is to help them learn how to use more adaptive behaviors to obtain this escape: like, for example, saying, “Can I have a break?”

It’s repetitive and, oftentimes, frustrating work. It’s hard to be playing detective all the time, trying to decode these kids. And humans are not computers, so their behaviors aren’t exactly uniform or predictable. But learning these concepts and working with these kids has made me surprisingly introspective. It’s made me think about all the not-so-great behaviors I’ve picked up in my own life. Like how I overcompensate and over-apologize to escape confrontation. Or how I act passive aggressive when I’m feeling insecure because I want attention from my partner.

Doing this investigative work has taught me to be more empathetic. To these kids and to myself. It’s been really cool; I’m uncovering the root of some of my worst behaviors, doing my best to learn more adaptive alternatives, and expanding my capacity for patience and understanding.

Playing pretend.

Think about it. When was the last time you did it? Unless you were a theater kid or an overexcited debate kid (guilty as charged), it’s likely been a while.

Playing pretend is one of the most effective practices when it comes to childhood development. It’s an opportunity to force kids to make improvised decisions, allow them to practice dialogue and vocabulary, introduce them to new concepts, and help them follow a sequential storyline. One second, you’re a band of pirates looking for buried treasure. The next, the pink sea turtle you were keeping on your ship as a pet turns out to be a pirate sea turtle who has been plotting to steal your treasure this entire time! Now what do you do?

Nowadays, this type of unstructured play is becoming rarer and rarer. Screen time has gone up exponentially in the past five years. 3-year-olds are spending hours on Youtube Kids watching overstimulating candy-unboxing videos and rollercoaster POV’s. For single parents and working class parents, regulating screen time is an almost impossible task. Tablets pacify kids faster than an industrial dose of morphine. They’re spend their days consuming predatorily addicting content. I mean, how can you blame these kids when we’re doing the same thing?

That’s why it feels like playing pretend is now more important than ever. Playing pretend exercises the same part of your brain that lights up when you’re freestyling with friends, or riffing off someone else’s joke, or giving an improvised speech. When we play pretend, we force ourselves to be creative. We have no choice; there’s no content to distract us (I can’t help but quote the beloved @Glamdemon2004 when she so eloquently asks: “What hobbies do you have other than consuming content?”). Playing pretend teaches you how to act on the fly and interact with the environment around you.

A good play-pretend session feels like a good jam session—all the band players are in tune, anticipating each other’s moves, but still giving each other the space to try something wildly new and unpredictable. And if that something-wildly-new crashes and burns? The others pick them back up right where they left off.

Now I don’t have the science to back this up, but I think that one of the most beneficial aspects of playing pretend is that it builds your confidence. It gives you a chance to try on new personas, and do it with the pizazz you might not normally have in real life. Because, if you want to pretend that you’re the fastest pirate swimmer in the world, you better say it like you mean it. When we play pretend—when we allow ourselves to be creative with nothing at stake—we can surprise ourselves with how real it actually feels.

You need to leave your problems at the door.

The kids don’t care that you got your second flat tire in the span of two weeks or that you’ve just broken up with your longterm boyfriend. They will throw tantrums and scream and kick and still expect you to bring your best energy to the tea party.

That being said, it also applies in the reverse. Just because you spent the day having to pick dried Play-doh out of your hair because some conniving little 4 year-old thought it would be fun if she added some unsolicited turquoise to your hairstyle, does not mean that you shouldn’t enjoy a Friday night out with your friends.

I’m, like, really good at Play-doh.

Apparently, hand-building sculpture skills transfer really well to Play-doh. All of my clients and their parents were very impressed by my ability to make miniature clay cats.

Snotty fingers.

Children are gross and lack concepts of boundaries. You need to teach them that they’re supposed to close the door when they use the potty and that people don’t want to see their boogers. Keep Clorox on hand at all times.

Parents work really hard.

They really do. I don’t think we give them enough credit. Kendrick was right when he said Drake “don’t know nothin’ bout that.” And, mind you, I say this fully self-aware of the fact that I am but a measly almost-23-year-old with no children of my own. But spending the past six months in the homes of young parents with young children, I got a front row seat to the rollercoaster that is parenthood in America.

There are two types of parents that I worked with when I was in ABA: the ones who you can tell planned the conception of their child down to the minute of their ovulation for optimal fertility, and the ones who refer to their screaming two-year-old as “the one that wasn’t supposed to happen.” But the thing is, no matter how prepared you thought you were to bring a new human being into this world, you’re not.

There were a few moments I grew to anticipate with every new relationship I formed with the parents. When the kid is using their cutest puppy dog eyes to ask for another piece of candy and I can’t find the spine to say no so I look pleadingly to mom or dad, only for them to respond with soberingly resounding, “NO.” Or, when the kid starts doing something completely inane, like spraying their little sister with a water hose, and I’m met with the most unsurprised and unimpressed look of nonchalance. (I told you, I’m not cut out for this…)

Another moment I came to know, however, was one that I never fully learned how to deal with. These moments always took place after a particularly difficult day, and they would always happen with particularly young parents. A day when something may have set the kid off into a bad mood—maybe it was the weather, maybe it was because dad was late for pick up, maybe it was because spending your entire day in back-to-back appointments for occupational therapy, speech therapy, homeschooling, and counseling is draining. On these days, when tantrums and other maladaptive behaviors spiked, the parent, the kid, and I all shared a sense of exhausted defeat at the end of the session. Just as I was finishing off my session notes and getting ready to dart for the door, the parent would stop me: “Do you think she’s gonna be okay? Do you think this is working?”

And in these moments, I never had a good response. I would regurgitate some spiel about how improvement isn’t linear or show them that the data was showing generally positive trends. But I think what the parents were really sharing in that moment was more vulnerable: they were scared. Scared for their kids and scared that they were doing something wrong as parents. Because, of course, parents want the best for their kids. But how can you feel confident about what you’re doing when every parent wants the best for their kids, and not every kid ends up growing up to be their best?

Being in this role and sharing these intimate moments with parents has honestly been difficult for me. I’ve seen the ways that becoming a mother can completely upend the life of a woman. How staying at home all day with three toddlers while your husband is away at work can be socially isolating and violently frustrating. One of my clients’ moms is Palestinian. And everyday I would come over, she would share with me her anger, grief, and fears about her family in Gaza. We would discuss the news that we had seen online or what she had heard from the family members she still had contact with. Her frustration would reach a height, however, when we would receive news about a particularly atrocious event like the Flour Massacre in March: “The kids just don’t get it. They don’t know what’s happening and they just make it worse. I can’t even grieve without having to still tend to their every need.”

I want to be a mother. This is something that I’ve always known and, somehow, after being in this role, I know I want it even more. The idea of raising children and caring for a family is something that’s important to me. And, like every other parent who has come before me, I want to do it right. So I’m thankful that I have the time and the youth to wait. To wait and to prepare. To ready myself for the emotional and professional cataclysm this will have on my life. To anticipate the inevitable hormonal fate that leaves me valuing my children’s lives over my own. To reflect on how my own mother put so much of herself and her best intentions in me. And to pray that I can only do the same for my own.

How to say goodbye.

Still working on this one. (Anyone who knows me knows that I have a habit of quickly becoming overly emotionally invested in my relationships and that I struggle immensely with letting go.)

Remember when adults used to see you and say, “Oh my gosh! Look how much you’ve grown!” Well, it’s true. In these six months, I’ve seen these kids grow too tall for their pants and too mature for Paw Patrol puzzles. It’s a beautiful and exciting thing. And I’m heartbroken to think that I won’t be able to keep seeing them every week. I can’t help but worry about them. I want to wrap them in my arms so they can stay tiny and I can shield them from the scary world. But kids grow too big to be held and, at some point, you have to let them go.

It’s only been a couple days but I already miss these kids desperately. I miss the way they would play with their food and give all their stuffed animals the same name. I miss hearing what they would say every time I showed up with goofy new earrings. I miss playing Butterflies and Red Light Green Light and Tag and Pirate. I miss listening to their silly stories and asking them questions about their favorite garbage trucks. I miss eating Maqluba with the girls at the dinner table. I miss their giggles and the way their eyes lit up when I made a fool of myself in whatever game we were playing. And I miss them a lot.

But, to say goodbye, you need to have the guts, maturity, confidence to know that you were in their life for a season, for a reason. And that reason better have been good. There aren’t many people who are going to be in your life forever, but there are moments you’ll remember forever. So I hope that, when these kids are all grown up, they maybe vaguely remember the times we played pretend or, every once in a while, think back to that one therapist who was really good at making good Play-Doh kittens. Because I know I will.