Most of the mistakes on this list were made by people who cared a great deal. That is what makes them worth writing about. Nearly every item below has come up in an intake call or a session since we opened our doors in Colorado. A parent describes something they have been doing for months, […]
A mother in Fort Collins described her four-year-old this way: he does not use words, he uses lines. Whole sentences from a cartoon, delivered with the original intonation, often in situations that seem unrelated to the show. Then she asked the question that brings most families to this topic. Someone in a Facebook group had […]
There is one question worth asking after any hard moment with your child: what did they learn about what to do next time? If the answer is only that a behavior produced an unpleasant outcome, that moment is coming back. Probably Thursday. A consequence can end a behavior in three seconds and still leave your […]
A mother in Longmont called us about her four-year-old and opened with an apology. She thought she was overreacting. He had always mouthed things, she said, and lately it had shifted to gravel from the driveway. That morning she found a small rock in his diaper. She was not overreacting. What she described is pica, […]
“How do I get the tablet back down to an hour a day before school starts?” That question has come up in almost every parent training session I have run this month at Achieve ABA Therapy Group, and the honest answer is that the hour is rarely the problem. What tends to matter is what […]
A dad in Greeley told me he had tried potty training four times. Each attempt lasted about three days and ended with everyone in tears. What he needed was not a fifth attempt with more resolve, but a plan that accounted for why the first four came apart. Toilet training a child with autism generally […]
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 […]
