Coming into Autism Home Support Services, our fami...

Coming into Autism Home Support Services, our family was looking for a service that could proactively help our highly-functioning child with autism with both academic and life skills to further reinforce the skills that were already being taught at school. Initially, it seemed as if this therapy would not only meet, but exceed all our expectations. Our first meeting with the directors of the service was met with a full-fledged formal interview and grand goals for the future, along with promises to come to them no matter the problem, leading us to be immensely impressed from the get-go. However, throughout the course of 11 months we continued the service, we saw minimal improvement (if any) which can be attributed to the following reasons:

The primary problems we faced with the service all came from the same source - a headstrong BCBA who was unwilling to listen to her clients. Once we started the therapy, we felt that the service was progressing at a much slower pace than we had expected, and took this up with the BCBA at the next monthly meeting. She promised to take this into account and told us she had altered the program accordingly for the next month. However, as time went on, it seemed as if not much had changed, and we brought up this issue again at the next meeting. From that point on, that issue must have been brought up at every monthly meeting since, yet the BCBA always claimed that the data showed that our child was not ready to move on because she hadn t met a certain benchmark e.g. she hadn t answered the particular question correctly 80% of the time and, therefore, hadn t mastered the skill and could not move onto a more advanced one. The problem with this logic is that because of how many times the same questions had been posed to her, my child had grown tired of answering the same questions day after day, and therefore even if she knew them, she would not answer only out of disinterest, not because she did not know the answer. Nevertheless, this would be taken as her not having mastered the skill, and she was yet again stuck in the same curriculum for weeks.

The therapists of this service also did not prove themselves to be competent, always having to be told what to do instead of taking it upon themselves to bring creativity to their jobs. In the first couple of months, all the therapists would do for 90% of the time is take data on our child as if she was a lab rat. Only after months of bringing up this issue at monthly meetings did the constant data-collecting finally abate. It is understandable that ABA therapy itself operates on data collection, and by no means is our family opposing that. However, it was the extent to which this data collection was taking up valuable time that made it a critical issue; the therapists were acting as if their primary objective was data collection rather than helping the child.

Our family is with a new ABA company now, and doing much better than we ever could have by staying at Autism Home Support Services.

In summary, if your child is severely affected by autism and needs a therapeutic service that goes at a slower pace, then you may consider this service, but if your child is highly-functioning, then THIS SERVICE IS NOT FOR YOU.