Resource library

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.

Your child’s autism diagnosis does not expire, but the documentation supporting it does. In Texas Medicaid, an evaluation older than three years requires a full comprehensive re-evaluation before ABA is recertified, and nobody sends a notice when that date passes. Here is what the manual requires, component by component, and the dates to get onto one calendar.

An autism diagnostic evaluation produces a document with required components, and a standardized tool is one of them. A comparison score is not a DSM severity level, and an ADOS classification is not a DSM diagnosis. What the instrument establishes, what the other six components ask for, who can complete the evaluation, and a nine-item checklist for the report before it reaches a payer.

A denied Extended School Year request and a loss of skills over the summer are one connected sequence under 19 TAC §89.1065, not two separate events. Here are the six provisions, who owns each one, what the rule counts as a critical skill, and why several of these obligations are keyed to the first eight weeks of the school year.

The gap between the note in the backpack and the kitchen floor at 3:40 has been studied more carefully than most of what gets written about it. What the research on masking and parent-teacher discrepancy actually establishes, where your own observations already carry formal standing, and what to do with the first thirty minutes after pickup.

An autism evaluation is a process rather than a single test, and the report it produces is what school teams, therapy providers and insurance plans read afterward. A BCBA walks through the components a complete diagnostic report should contain, how the DSM criteria and severity levels should appear, which instruments are diagnostic and which are only screeners, the questions worth asking before the appointment, and a checklist for the report when it arrives.

Someone asks whether you're just paying your child to behave, and the standard answer never quite lands. The real difference is structural, not moral, and you can describe it out loud.

Texas Education Code §25.087(b-3) names applied behavior analysis directly, and TEA guidance says a school must excuse absences that fall within it. Here are the five requirements, who owns each one, the same-day condition most likely to disqualify an otherwise valid absence, and the separate 90 percent credit rule this provision does not change.