DRAGENBooks
Behavior science,
written down.
Four books by Chase Alexander Hought, M.S., BCBA. A children's story. The same story for adults. A book for parents. A book about the field.
None of them is on a shelf yet. Each one says below exactly where it stands.
A children's story · and its adult edition
Julius and the Drage
Julius is a cub who wants to become a Lion. The Drage is the one who tells him he cannot.
The story is identical in both editions — every word. What changes is how much of it gets explained.
Cub's Edition
The children's version. The story, and nothing else. No explanations — a child does not need them.
Lion's Edition
The adult version. The same story, with raw, unfiltered explanations layered in about the realities of life and death.
From the story
“I could never do that,” said Julius.
“Of course you cannot,” said the Drage.
“Take the first step.”
“Keep going and going... until you find... YOU.”
“Drage” is Danish and Norwegian for “dragon.” “Dragen” is “the dragon.”
For parents First draft
The Fortunate Few and Misfortunate Many
Two children. Two families. One variable.
Elias and Marek are composites, built out of a decade of clinical work. Same age at intake. Same language level. Same hours approved. Same behaviors, scored with the same instrument, by the same clinician, in the same month.
The one thing not matched was the family. That is the book.
Fourteen years later, one of them rides a public bus with a pass in his wallet and argues with his mother about curfew. The other has a behavior plan that runs to thirty-one pages.
The book does not claim a family can guarantee an outcome. Biology gets a vote no parent can overrule. It claims something narrower: the distance between those two boys is not mostly medical. It is behavioral. It is arithmetic.
It is not written to condemn the second family. It is written to get them back.
Thirty-two minutes. That is the whole gap.
From the draft
“Belief is the number of times a parent runs a program when no one is watching.”
“Do it again tomorrow, when it did not work.”
“Your child is not broken. Your child is waiting.”
Where it stands: a first full draft exists — five parts, twenty-six chapters.
About the field Outlined
The Illusion of ABA
An Inside Look at a Failing Field
One image, carried from the first page to the last: the stage illusion. Not a metaphor of fraud — a metaphor of construction.
A stage illusion is not a lie told by one person. It is an engineered system in which the performer, the lighting, the angle of the seats and the audience's own hope all work together. Nobody in the theater is being stupid.
That is the argument about applied behavior analysis. Nobody designed an illusion. They built one anyway.
It is written from inside the field, by someone who intends to stay in it. The last chapter is called The Field Worth Saving.
- Part one
- The Setup. How the stage was built.
- Part two
- The Misdirection. Where you are told to look.
- Part three
- What Is Actually in the Box. The reporting.
- Part four
- The Reveal. What is left when the lights come up.
From the outline
“The field is not failing because bad people entered it. It is failing because the structure was built so that good people would produce the wrong result.”
“The field did not lose its evidence base. It lost the conditions under which its evidence base was ever true.”
“I am not writing an obituary.”
Where it stands: outlined — four parts, seventeen chapters. Every factual claim gets checked against a primary source before a chapter is written.
Questions about the books?
Same address as everything else. One person reads it.