Behaviour is communication
This sentence gets repeated so often that it has almost stopped meaning anything, so it is worth being concrete. A child who screams when the television goes off may be telling you they did not know it was coming. A child who hits at the same point every afternoon may be telling you the room is too loud, or that they are hungry, or that they have run out of ways to say they need to stop.
Applied Behaviour Analysis starts by taking that seriously and investigating it properly. Before anything is changed, we watch: what happened immediately before, what the behaviour was exactly, what happened straight after, and what the child got out of it. That last part is the crux. A behaviour that keeps happening is working for the child somehow, and until you know what it is achieving you cannot offer a better route to the same thing.
What good ABA looks like, and what it does not
ABA is discussed critically, including by autistic adults who experienced older forms of it, and those criticisms deserve a straight answer rather than a defensive one. The versions that caused harm were compliance-driven: hours of repetitive drilling, rewards for suppressing self-soothing behaviours like hand-flapping, and a goal of making a child appear typical rather than helping them function and feel safe.
That is not what behaviour support should be, and it is not what we aim to practise. The goal is a child who can communicate what they need, cope with what is difficult, and take part in family and school life. Not a child who has learnt to sit still and mask distress.
In practice that means: we do not target stimming that harms no one. We treat distress as information rather than as non-compliance. We build communication first, because most challenging behaviour drops away once a child has a faster way to say the thing. And we consider it our failure, not the child's, when a programme is not working.
Teaching the replacement, not just removing the behaviour
Removing a behaviour without replacing it leaves a child with a need and no way to meet it. Something else always fills the gap, and it is often worse than what you started with.
So every behaviour plan has two halves. One reduces what is unsafe or is blocking learning. The other teaches the skill that makes it unnecessary: asking for a break, requesting help, choosing between two options, waiting for a short and predictable time, tolerating a small change. The second half is the real work and it is where most of the sessions go.
Skills are taught in small steps with plenty of success built in, and then deliberately practised in different rooms, with different people, at different times of day. A skill that only appears in the therapy room has not been learnt yet.
Parents are part of the programme
A behaviour plan that only operates during therapy hours will not hold. Children are consistent about testing whether the rules have changed, and they are right to, because a rule that applies in one room and not another is not a rule they can rely on.
So we teach you the plan. Not as homework, but because the difficult moments happen at bedtime, in the bazaar and at family gatherings, and you are the one who will be there. We also want to hear what is genuinely workable in your household, because a plan that assumes a family structure you do not have will quietly fail and nobody will say why.
In practice
What a session looks like
Observation and data first. Before a plan is written, we record what is actually happening rather than what everyone assumes is happening.
A functional assessment: identifying what the behaviour achieves for the child: escape, attention, access to something, or sensory input.
Teaching the replacement skill in short, high-success trials, with reinforcement your child genuinely cares about rather than what an adult thinks they should.
Practising the skill in real situations (a real transition, a real refusal, a real wait) because that is where it has to work.
Reviewing the data with you every few weeks. If the numbers are not moving, the plan changes.
What progress looks like
Every child moves at their own pace, and none of this is a timetable or a promise. These are the changes families most often notice first.
- Difficult episodes get shorter before they get less frequent. That is the normal order, and the first sign the plan is working.
- Your child starts asking for the thing instead of escalating to get it.
- Transitions and changes of activity stop being flashpoints.
- Your child can wait, briefly and predictably, without distress.
- Family life widens: outings and visits that had become impossible start being possible again.