At Community Behavior Consulting, we work with any child (or young adult) whose family is seeking out ABA services. ABA has demonstrated effectiveness across the age span and we truly believe ABA is for all. However, there is a considerable amount of evidence that Early Intensive Behavior Intervention (EIBI) can produce significant gains, with research showing some children meeting the same learning milestones of same age peers after treatment. These results often spotlight early intervention ABA programs for small children.
The research has consistently demonstrated that EIBI produces the most benefits when the child is engaged in therapy full time for up to 3 years. However, there are criticisms to this type of therapy. Traditional EIBI programs often require children to attend for upwards of 40 hours a week. These programs may require children to skip or push their developmentally appropriate naps or encourage parents to forgo public preschool. So we decided we wanted to approach EIBI differently. We believed that we could foster optimal outcomes for our clients while still ensuring they had opportunity to be with same age peers in preschool and keep a developmentally appropriate schedule.
Well, the results are in! Over the past 1.5 years, we have worked with some children starting at age 3 or below. While this population is only a small percentage of our clients (reasons for why that is would be another blog entry!), the progress across the these children is undeniable. These children all received speech and occupational therapy services in addition to ABA and only 1 child received ABA for over 30 hours a week as we prescribe ABA hour individually.
Here are the results across only 1 year!
We are thrilled with the achievements of our clients! Across 1 year of services, our clients cut the gap between their score and the score of same age peers in half, on average. This means that our clients made significant gains catching up to same age peers while being able to attend preschool with their peers.
We hope that parents that are questioning ABA for their child under 4 can see the benefits for both full time and part time ABA programs. We will continue to collect data to show the overall effects of our services for children that come to us after trying something else or when they are older.