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 the process of teaching your child a clear, workable way to ask for what they want, so the behavior they were using to get it becomes unnecessary. It rests on a simple premise: most difficult behavior is already communication. Screaming, grabbing, dropping to the floor, hitting. Each one is doing a job. FCT identifies the job and hands your child a better tool for it, whether that tool is a word, a sign, a picture, or a tap on a speech device.
At Achieve ABA Therapy Group, this is among the most-requested goals families bring to us, and it is built into most of our ABA services across Colorado. Below is how the process works, where it commonly stalls, and what you can start doing at your own kitchen table this week.
What Functional Communication Training Is
The term sounds technical, and the idea underneath it is not. Before getting into procedure, it helps to be clear on what FCT sets out to do and how it sits alongside the other supports your child may already have.
Definition of FCT
Functional communication training teaches a child a specific communicative response that produces the same result their challenging behavior was already producing. If pushing a plate away ends a meal, we teach a way to say “all done” that also ends the meal.
It is a well-established practice rather than a new idea. The AFIRM module on functional communication training, from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC Chapel Hill, lists FCT among the focused interventions identified as evidence-based by the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence and Practice.
Why Behavior Is Already Communication
A child who has no reliable way to say “this is too loud” will find another way to say it. The behavior we get called about is usually the most efficient option that child has available.
Once you see behavior this way, the goal shifts. We are not trying to eliminate something. We are trying to make a better option so easy and so effective that your child prefers it.
How FCT Differs From Speech Therapy
Speech therapy and FCT overlap and work well together, but they answer different questions. A speech-language pathologist focuses broadly on communication development, articulation, and language structure.
FCT starts from a specific behavior and works backward to the request that behavior was making. In practice, the strongest results we see come from a BCBA and an SLP coordinating on the same target. Families of minimally speaking children should expect both professionals at the table.
Finding the Function Before You Teach the Words
The most common reason FCT fails is that the teaching starts before anyone has confirmed what the behavior was for. Teaching a child to ask for a snack does nothing if the behavior was about escaping a noisy room.
The Four Common Functions of Behavior
Behavior analysts generally sort maintaining consequences into four categories. Most behavior serves one or two of them, and the same behavior can serve different functions in different settings.
- Access to something tangible: a toy, a food, a device
- Escape or avoidance: getting out of a demand, a task, or a setting
- Attention: interaction from a parent, sibling, or teacher
- Sensory or automatic: the behavior produces a feeling the child seeks
The first three respond well to FCT because there is a request that could replace them. Behavior maintained by sensory input is usually addressed differently, since there is nobody to ask.
What a Functional Behavior Assessment Involves
A functional behavior assessment is the structured process of identifying the function. It typically combines caregiver interviews, direct observation, and antecedent-behavior-consequence data collected across several days and settings. Our overview of what happens during assessment walks through the steps in more detail.
The output is not a label. It is a working hypothesis about what your child is getting from the behavior, which then determines what we teach.
Why Guessing the Function Backfires
When we teach a replacement that does not produce what the child was after, the old behavior stays, and now there is a new response nobody uses. I have inherited a number of programs like this.
There is a second risk worth naming. Teaching a child to request attention when the behavior was about escaping a task can increase the original behavior, because the demand never went away.
Choosing a Response Your Child Can Use Right Away
Once the function is clear, the next decision is what form the new request takes. This choice does more to determine success than almost anything else in the plan, and it is frequently made too ambitiously.
Match the Effort to Your Child’s Current Skills
The replacement has to be something your child can produce reliably today, not something they might manage after six months of practice. A child who cannot yet imitate sounds should not have a spoken word as their first target.
Start below where you think your child is. You can always shape the response into something more complex once it is established.
Options Beyond Spoken Words
Speech is one option among several, and choosing another does not close the door on talking. Research has consistently found that aided communication supports spoken language rather than suppressing it.
- A single sign, such as “help” or “more”
- Handing over a picture card
- Touching a symbol on a communication board
- Selecting a button on a speech-generating device
- A gesture your child already uses, formalized and responded to consistently
Many of the children we support in Aurora and Lakewood begin with a single picture card and move to a device later, once requesting itself is a habit.
Making the New Response Easier Than the Old Behavior
This is the mechanical heart of FCT. If screaming takes one second and produces a snack, while the new request takes five steps and sometimes produces a snack, your child will keep screaming. That is not stubbornness, it is arithmetic.
So we make the request low-effort, and we make it work every single time at the start. Efficiency is what moves a child from one response to the other.
Teaching the First Request, Step by Step
The early teaching phase is short and repetitive, and it usually looks less like a lesson than parents expect. Most of the work happens inside ordinary moments rather than at a table.
Set Up Moments Where Your Child Wants Something
You need motivation for teaching to work, so we build small, deliberate opportunities into the day. Put a preferred snack in a clear container your child cannot open. Pause a favorite video. Hand over the bubbles without unscrewing the lid.
These contrived moments are the backbone of natural environment teaching, and ten of them across a morning teaches more than one long session.
Prompt Immediately, Then Fade
At the very beginning, we do not wait for the child to struggle. We prompt the new response right away, before frustration builds, so the first dozen repetitions are all successful.
Then the prompt fades: full physical help becomes a light touch, becomes a model, becomes a pause. This gradual fading is the same principle used in discrete trial training, applied inside real routines.
Honor Every Request at the Start
For the first stretch, when your child makes the new request, they get what they asked for. Every time, immediately, with no conditions attached.
Parents often worry this means saying yes to everything forever. It does not. Dense reinforcement is a temporary teaching phase, and the thinning comes later, once the response is solid.
Common Mistakes That Stall Progress
When a family tells me FCT is not working, the plan itself is rarely the problem. Four patterns account for most of the stalls I see, and all four are fixable.
Waiting for a Better Version of the Response
A parent hears an approximation and holds out for a clearer one. The child, having tried and gotten nothing, returns to the behavior that used to work.
Accept the rough version early. Clarity is shaped over weeks, and requiring it too soon teaches your child that communicating is unreliable.
Responding to the Old Behavior Instead
This one happens to everyone, usually in a grocery store, usually when you are exhausted. The child screams, you hand over the item, and the old response gets topped up.
Occasional lapses will not undo the work. Consistency across most opportunities is what matters, and planning for the hardest settings in advance helps more than resolving to try harder.
Teaching Only During Therapy Sessions
A skill practiced two hours a day and ignored the other fourteen does not become a habit. The families who see the fastest change are the ones running these opportunities at breakfast, in the car, and at bedtime. That is the whole purpose of parent training in an ABA program.
Introducing Waiting Too Early
Adding a delay before honoring the request is a real part of FCT, and it belongs in phase two. Introduced in week one, it teaches your child that the new response does not reliably work.
Moving From One Word to Real Conversation
A first request is a foundation, not a finish line. Once your child is asking consistently, the program shifts toward flexibility, patience, and range.
Building Tolerance for Waiting
Life cannot honor every request instantly, so we teach waiting deliberately and gradually. It starts with a two-second delay, paired with a clear response such as “yes, in a moment,” and grows from there.
The delay stretches only as fast as your child can handle without returning to the old behavior. If the behavior comes back, that is the signal to shorten the wait rather than to push through.
Expanding What Your Child Can Request
Early FCT usually targets one or two high-value requests. From there we add breadth: asking for a break, for help, for attention, for a different choice, for something to stop.
Requesting a break is often the highest-value addition, because it gives your child a legitimate exit from a hard moment that does not require a meltdown to produce.
Generalizing Across People and Places
A request that only works with mom is a partial skill. We build it out across caregivers, grandparents, siblings, teachers, and settings, which is why coordination with school and childcare is part of the plan. Our daycare-based ABA therapy and school-based ABA therapy teams exist largely to make this transfer happen.
Paying for Communication Devices and Services in Colorado
Families almost always ask about cost before they ask about method, and the answer in Colorado is more workable than most parents expect. The details differ by age and by plan, so it is worth knowing the landscape before you start.
What Health First Colorado Covers
Speech-generating devices are covered as durable medical equipment under Health First Colorado, Colorado’s Medicaid program, when medical necessity is documented. The DMEPOS billing manual from the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing spells out the requirements, including prior authorization and a minimum five-year replacement timeline on a speech-generating device.
The practical implication is that the evaluation supporting the request needs to be thorough, since the device you get is the device you will have for a while. A speech-language pathologist typically leads that evaluation, and behavioral data from an ABA team can strengthen it.
Early Intervention for Children Under Three
If your child is under three, Early Intervention Colorado provides evaluation and services at no cost to families, with no income requirement, no diagnosis required, and no need for a doctor to refer. You can make the referral yourself. Our guide to early intervention in Colorado covers how the timeline works and where ABA fits alongside it.
Communication delays are among the most common reasons families in Thornton, Westminster, and Arvada reach out to us before a formal diagnosis is in place. Waiting for paperwork is rarely the right call when requesting skills are the concern, and early intervention ABA therapy can begin while the rest is sorted out.
What Changes at Age Three
At three, responsibility shifts from Part C early intervention to preschool special education through your school district’s Child Find team. Colorado also offers an Extended Part C Option for children whose third birthday falls within a range published annually, which lets early intervention continue in defined circumstances. The Colorado Department of Education posts the current guidance and the eligibility range each year.
Coverage and authorization vary by plan and by child, so nothing here is a guarantee for your family. We are glad to check your benefits directly, and can help if you are still navigating the autism diagnosis process.
How We Build Functional Communication Training Into a Program
FCT is rarely a standalone service. It sits inside a broader plan, and where the teaching happens influences how quickly a request becomes automatic.
Where the Teaching Happens
Requesting is learned in the moments a child wants something, and those moments live at home. Our in-home ABA therapy teams work in the kitchen at snack time and the living room at screen time, in Denver, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Pueblo, and communities in between.
For families whose weekdays are full, weekend ABA therapy provides the same teaching without adding a weeknight, and summer programming keeps requesting skills active through the long break.
Coaching Caregivers to Carry It
You will create more communication opportunities in a week than any clinician will. Parent training ABA therapy focuses on giving you the prompting and reinforcement mechanics so the skill holds when we are not in the room.
Measuring Whether It Is Working
Two numbers tell most of the story: how often the new request occurs, and how often the original behavior occurs. When the first climbs and the second falls, the plan is working.
If they move together, or neither moves, the function was probably misidentified and we go back to assessment. Progress is reviewed regularly with your BCBA, and the same tracking applies for older learners in group home ABA support.
Giving Your Child a Faster Way to Be Understood
Functional communication training works because it takes your child seriously. It treats the screaming and the grabbing as attempts to say something, and it answers them with a better tool rather than a correction.
Progress tends to be uneven. Many families see a first reliable request within a few weeks and then spend months building range and patience around it. Some children move faster, some slower, and neither pace predicts where a child lands in the long run.
The boy in Denver eventually learned to bring his tablet over and tap a symbol for help. The screaming did not vanish overnight, but it had competition, and within a couple of months the competition was winning.
If your child is struggling to be understood, that is worth addressing sooner rather than later. Achieve ABA Therapy Group supports families throughout Colorado, including Boulder and Centennial, with no waitlist and scheduling built around your family. See how we get started or explore back-to-school support.
Reach out to our team. Tell us what your child is doing when they can’t get their point across, and we’ll tell you honestly whether we think we can help.
Frequently Asked Questions About Functional Communication Training
Will Teaching Sign Language or a Device Stop My Child From Talking?
No. The research on this question has been consistent for decades: aided and alternative communication is associated with gains in spoken language, not losses. Giving a child a way to communicate now tends to support speech rather than replace it.
How Long Before We See a Change?
Many children produce a prompted request within the first week or two, and an independent one within several weeks. The reduction in challenging behavior usually lags behind the new request by a bit, because the old response takes time to lose its usefulness.
What If My Child Requests the Same Thing Constantly?
This is a good sign, and it is a normal phase. It means the response works. Once it is well established, your child’s team will introduce brief waiting periods and teach acceptance of “not right now,” which brings the rate down to something workable.
Can FCT Help an Older Child or a Teenager?
Yes. The principle applies at any age, though the targets change. With adolescents we often focus on requesting a break, asking for clarification, or declining something without escalation.
Does My Child Need an Autism Diagnosis to Start?
Not to begin working on communication generally. A diagnosis is usually required for insurance authorization of ABA services, and for children under three, Early Intervention Colorado does not require a diagnosis for evaluation.
What If the Old Behavior Gets Worse at First?
A brief increase can happen when a behavior that used to work stops working as reliably. It is worth flagging to your BCBA right away, since it often means the new request needs to be made easier or reinforced more consistently rather than that the plan is wrong.
How Does This Connect to School?
The same request should work in the classroom, which requires the teaching team and the school to use identical prompts and honor the request the same way. Setting that up early prevents a lot of friction, and it also supports school social skills once your child can reliably ask peers for things.
Sources:
- AFIRM (Autism Focused Intervention Resources and Modules), UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, Functional Communication Training module: https://afirm.fpg.unc.edu/module/functional-communication-training/
- Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, DMEPOS Billing Manual, speech-generating devices: https://hcpf.colorado.gov/DMEPOS-manual
- Colorado Department of Education, Early Childhood Special Education Resources and Guidance, Extended Part C Option: https://ed.cde.state.co.us/cdesped/childfindpreschoolsped/early-childhood-special-education-resources-and-guidance
- Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, Pediatric Behavioral Therapies: https://hcpf.colorado.gov/pediatric-behavioral-therapies-provider-list
- Carr, E. G., and Durand, V. M. Reducing behavior problems through functional communication training. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1985 (foundational reference).