Specify all the aspects and recommendations in the extinction procedure that are being correctly implemented and all the aspects that are not. Provide specific recommendations for any aspects not being correctly implemented.

Scenario

Sarah has a 7-year-old son with mild intellectual disability son who will not sleep in his room.Whenever she puts him down to sleep, he starts crying and will not stop until she returns and allows him to leave his room, where he typically watches TV until he falls asleep, and which can last anywhere from 2-5 additional hours. As a result, he is typically very cranky during the day and often falls asleep while in school, leading him to fall drastically behind on his schoolwork and learning. Sarah goes to a doctor who confirms there is no medical reason for her son's sleep avoidance and recommends that she receive some behavioral support for the issue as her son's health and academic progress will continue to suffer due to a lack of sleep.

To assist with this concern, Sarah receives consultation from a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) who conducts a series of interviews and assessments and determines that the most likely function of her son's crying and sleep avoidance is socially mediated positive reinforcement in the form of access to preferred activities.To reduce this problem, they implement an extinction procedure in which Sarah will not respond to her son's crying to leave his room and not allow him any access to television or other preferred items once he's put to bed. In addition to the extinction procedure, the BCBA also has Sarah implement an antecedent intervention where she puts her son to bed 2 hours later than normal to increase the likelihood of him actually being tired and provide him with a special preferred breakfast cereal each morning when he wakes up if he didn't cry when he's put to bed.

Before implementing the procedure, Sarah first explained all of the new instructions to her son so that he knew what the contingencies were. Once she got going, Sarah was fairly consistent with the extinction portion of the intervention, though on some nights she decided not to implement it, such as when her son had a particularly long day. After the first few nights of implementing the procedure, her son started emitting new behaviors besides simply crying, such as kicking the door and knocking things off of his shelf. She was not prepared for these new behaviors and found herself going into his room and yelling at him to stop. If he wouldn't stop these behaviors after a few minutes, Sarah would give in and allow him out of his room so that he wouldn't break anything.So far it has been 3 weeks and her son's sleep avoidance hasn't gotten any better.