ABA, the way it should be done — naturalistic, parent-led, dignified.

ABA, like every long-running clinical discipline, has versions. The version published in the late 1980s — forty hours a week of seated trials, compliance as the metric, hand-flapping as a target to extinguish — caused real and enduring harm to autistic children, and the autism community has been right to say so loudly.

The version we practise looks materially different. It’s naturalistic, child-led, and grounded in the science of how skill acquisition and regulation actually work in young children.

What we are trying to teach

We’re trying to teach a child the skills that increase their access to the things they want. Communication ranks first: requesting, refusing, commenting, sharing attention. Self-regulation ranks alongside it: emotion-naming, transition tolerance, recovery from overstimulation. Daily-living independence comes shortly after — eating, dressing, sleeping, toileting.

We are not trying to teach a child to suppress autistic ways of being. Stimming is not a target. Eye contact is not a target unless it has been functionally stripped from the child by repeated negative experiences.

We measure success in functional independence and family-reported quality of life — not in the number of trials completed.

How a session is structured

A session opens with a greeting routine the child can predict. The therapist then sets up the play environment to embed today’s targets in activities the child already enjoys. Skill teaching happens inside the play. When the child requests a toy correctly, they get the toy. When the child uses a regulation strategy independently, the therapist comments but doesn’t disrupt the moment.

Each session ends with five minutes of parent coaching: what we worked on, what improved, one specific small thing to repeat at home this week. By month three most families report that their entire week looks different — not because therapy is taking up the week, but because therapy has changed how the family reads each other.