A family in Arvada tracked their daughter’s bedtime screaming for eleven straight days. It climbed from six minutes to nearly twenty in the first week, then dropped off sharply. It now runs about four minutes on most nights. That climb was an extinction burst, a short-term spike that happens when a behavior stops producing what […]
A mother in Westminster once asked me, almost apologetically, whether she should be stopping her son from flapping his hands. A relative had told her it made him look different. She had also noticed that on the days she stopped him, the rest of the afternoon fell apart. Stimming, short for self-stimulatory behavior, refers to […]
If your child gets anxious about the first day, the fix is smaller than you think. Shorten the morning to its essential steps, keep the order identical every time, give a warning before each transition, send one object your child can carry through the day, and end the goodbye in under thirty seconds. That short […]
A four-year-old I worked with in a Denver apartment used to drop to the floor and scream every time his tablet battery died. His parents had tried every consequence they could think of. What none of us had done yet was give him a faster way to say “I need help.” Functional communication training is […]
Who has to be in the room. What you’re allowed to ask for. Whether you can say no to something the school proposes. These are the questions parents bring to us most often before an IEP or 504 meeting, and most of them don’t get answered until the meeting is already underway. If your child […]
The letter usually says something like “not medically necessary” or “services exceed authorized limit,” and it can feel like a full stop right when you’d finally gotten your child’s care moving. It isn’t a full stop. Colorado gives you a real, structured right to appeal an ABA therapy claim denial, and a meaningful share of […]
Few things are harder to watch than your child standing just outside a group of kids, clearly wanting in, with no idea how to make that happen. It’s not a motivation problem. It’s usually a missing skill, specific enough that once it’s taught, it tends to click fast. Social skills strategies are built around finding […]
I still remember a little boy who sat on the floor across from me during our very first in-home ABA therapy in Arvada and hadn’t said a single word to anyone, not “mama,” not “no,” not even a sound that resembled speech. His mother asked me the question I hear more than almost any other […]
A classroom in Aurora and a classroom in Fort Collins look nothing alike, different buildings, different schedules, different noise. But the sensory math a lot of autistic kids are doing all day is the same everywhere: fluorescent lights, a rotating cast of thirty voices, a cafeteria that sounds like a stadium, and almost no control […]
A treatment plan can be clinically sound and still stall for reasons that have nothing to do with the child. Sometimes it’s a standardized assessment tool that’s one edition behind what a payer’s system checks for. Sometimes it’s a treatment goal written in language that made sense to me but not to a reviewer reading […]
Speech Delay vs. Autism: How Parents Can Tell the Difference
