Resource library

The federal Medicaid and CHIP ABA toolkit published in August 2026 sets out what belongs in a treatment plan, and two of its lines matter to a parent reading their own. Goals are expected for the caregiver as well as the child, with baselines and mastery criteria, and a plan showing no caregiver engagement is listed as a documentation flag. How to read your own plan against that list, and what to ask your BCBA.

Halloween puts every variable that makes a community outing hard into one evening, in the dark, in unfamiliar clothes. Mackenzie Condon's June 4 session on community outings names those variables one by one and gives the preparation that answers them. The piece applies that session to the 31st: walk the route in daylight and photograph it, build a visual sequence that includes the step after coming home, try the costume early, give the waiting a timer, and decide the stopping point in advance.

By October the school week is finally running, and the thing that quietly vanished while it was being built is unstructured play. Juliet King's rule from the school-year session is that once school starts, fun has to be planned rather than left to happen. Three play blocks to put back into a school week, what each one is for, and how to anchor one of them to the end of the week.

A Forta BCBA's rule is to choose prompts that lead to you doing less, and a picture fades more easily than a parent repeating every step. The piece walks one routine, getting dressed or brushing teeth, from a vocal prompt to a visual one, then through removing the visual, and names the point at which muscle memory has taken over.

A goal that can't be counted can't be reported on, and the requirement that it be measurable is written into federal regulation rather than left to a district's judgment. The five things 34 CFR 300.320 requires on the goals page, which one changes meetings, a vague goal rewritten next to the version that can be scored, the four responses families hear and what the rule says back, and the sentences to use in the room.

Your child is talking in session, and then the house goes back to how it was. You're not imagining it. What you're seeing has a name, a research literature going back to 1977, and nine specific techniques for helping skills travel home.

When an IEP team turns down a request, federal law says the refusal has to be put in writing, along with the records behind it. What prior written notice is, the one sentence that asks for it, and six things to do in the meeting and after it.

You do the thing because doing the thing takes ninety seconds and teaching the thing takes six weeks. Every parent does this. Here are ten ordinary tasks a teenager could be handed, the smallest version of each, and what a follow-up study of 779 students actually found.

Refusal in adolescence is common enough that the professional standards your child’s BCBA is certified under already have language for it, and that language puts the responsibility on the behavior analyst rather than on you. Here are the four standards that apply, what each one actually says, and what to ask at your next meeting.

Four institutions have obligations that come due around your child's eighteenth birthday, and none of them coordinate with the others. Three IEP requirements, one Social Security redetermination, the deadline on each, and the regulation it comes from. Two of the four are already past due for most families, which means you can check them today.