DRAGENkids · ABA therapy
Every behavior is doing a job.
The work starts by finding out what that job is. Not by making the behavior stop — by understanding what it accomplishes for the person doing it, and then teaching something that works better.
ABA therapy from a Board Certified Behavior Analyst with ten years of experience working with autistic children and the families and teams around them.
Approach
Function before compliance.
A child who screams when a worksheet appears is communicating something. A plan that only makes the screaming stop has not solved anything — it has removed the only tool that child had, and left the original problem untouched.
So the first question is never how do we stop this. It is what is this getting them, and what could we teach that gets it more reliably. Skills first. Dignity throughout. Compliance is not the goal and never has been.
Good intentions without data are guesses. Everything is measured, and the measurements are used — a plan that is not working gets changed, not defended.
Learn it first, free
Find the job a behavior is doing.
You do not need a clinician to start. You need a pencil, three columns and five days.
ABC data is a record of three things each time a behavior happens: what happened right before it (the Antecedent), what the person did (the Behavior), and what happened right after (the Consequence). "Consequence" here means what followed, not a punishment. Write it the way a camera would.
Almost every behavior is doing one of four jobs:
- Get attention. Someone looks, talks, laughs, comes over.
- Get away from something. A task, a noise, a room, a demand ends or is delayed.
- Get a thing or an activity. The tablet, a snack, the swing, the front seat.
- It feels a certain way on its own. Rocking, humming, picking. No one else is needed.
A: "Put the tablet away." B: drops to the floor, screams. C: "Fine, five more minutes."
A: Tablet taken at the door. B: screams, kicks the door. C: Dad hands it back for the car.
A: "Tablet off, dinner." B: screams. C: eats with the tablet on the table.
After five days, seven of eight rows start with the tablet going away and six end with him keeping it. The job is keep the tablet. The skill to teach is asking for more time, and the adults' job is to make "one more minute" real, and the ask easier than the scream.
How to do it yourself, this week
- Pick one behavior and write it so a stranger could spot it. "Screams for more than three seconds," not "melts down."
- Print the sheet below. Keep it where the behavior happens.
- Every time it happens for five days, fill one row within a minute. Facts, not reasons.
- Read the A column, then the C column. The job is the one that keeps repeating.
- Teach a way to get the same thing that is faster and easier than the behavior. Then make sure it works every time, at first.
Practice: which job? Sam (made up) hums loudly during quiet reading. The teacher sends him to the hall, where he keeps humming, alone. Open for the answer and why.
Answer: most likely "it feels a certain way on its own." Why: the humming carries on with nobody there, so attention is not the job. But notice the consequence: the humming also ends reading every time. Two jobs can be true at once, which is why you take five days of data before you decide, and why the fix for the second job would be different (make reading shorter or easier, and teach him to ask for a break).
What is settled, and what is judgment. The four jobs and ABC recording are settled: they have been the basis of behavior assessment since the 1960s. Deciding which job a behavior is doing, and what to teach instead, is professional judgment, and that is what a behavior analyst is for. If a behavior can hurt someone, get help now; a data sheet is a start, not a substitute.
Source: Cooper, Heron & Heward, Applied Behavior Analysis, 3rd ed. (2020), chapters on functional behavior assessment; Iwata et al., Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (1994), on the functions of self-injury. Nothing on this page is for sale.
Services
What this looks like in practice.
Functional behavior assessment
A structured process for working out why a behavior happens, using interviews, direct observation, and testing the explanation rather than assuming it.
- Indirect and direct assessment
- Hypothesis development and testing
- A written behavior intervention plan
- Training for the people who will run it
Intervention design
Individualized programming for skill acquisition and behavior reduction, written to be run by the people who are actually there — parents, teachers, technicians.
- Individualized assessment and planning
- Skill-building programs
- Measurement and progress monitoring
- Revision when the data says so
Caregiver training
Parents and caregivers are not an audience for the plan, they are the people who deliver it. Training is hands-on and built around practice and feedback.
- Individual coaching sessions
- Practical strategies for the actual home
- Communication and reinforcement
- Follow-up, not a one-off handover
Case consultation & supervision
A second set of eyes for complex cases, program review, and supervision for practitioners working toward certification.
- Case review and clinical decision support
- Program design and evaluation
- Supervision and mentorship
- Ethics and professional practice
Autism
A starting point, not a limitation.
Autism has been the center of this work for ten years: assessment, skill-building, behavior support and caregiver training, with the child and the adults who are there every day.
Most of this work is with autistic children and the teams around them. The posture is straightforward: build skills that make life bigger, respect the person while doing it, and involve the family as partners rather than as recipients of a plan they had no part in writing.
Transitions get planned for early — between settings, between school years, and toward adulthood — because the goals that matter are the ones that still matter in ten years.
Learn it first
Start with the lesson, then the consultation.
Three free lessons cover the first three things I would teach any family or team: how to write down what happens, how to work out what a behavior is doing, and how to aim reinforcement instead of stumbling into it.
Start with a conversation.
Tell me about the person, the setting, and what has been tried. That is usually enough to say whether this is the right kind of help.