Your teenager doesn't want to do ABA anymore. Here's what their BCBA is required to do with that.
Your fourteen-year-old shuts the bedroom door when the session starts. Or sits down, answers in single words, and waits it out. Or says the thing out loud: I don’t want to do this anymore.
You’re not failing at this, and it isn’t a discipline problem you have to solve before the session can work. 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 somewhere other than on you.
The word to know is assent
The Behavior Analyst Certification Board defines assent as "vocal or nonvocal verbal behavior that can be taken to indicate willingness to participate in research or behavioral services by individuals who cannot provide informed consent (e.g., because of age or intellectual impairments)" (Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts, Glossary).
Vocal or nonvocal is doing most of the work in that sentence. Your teenager does not have to say anything for it to count, because leaving the room is behavior, and so is going quiet, and so is the closed door.
That is worth knowing, because most families never get the clean version where a young person announces a position and everybody deals with it. What you get instead is an accumulation. The session that keeps starting ten minutes late. The answers getting shorter over a few weeks. The afternoon that turns out to be unexpectedly full. None of that is a tantrum and none of it is a conversation, and it is all still behavior.
The definition exists in the first place because your child cannot legally consent. You are the one who signs. Assent is the separate question of whether the person actually receiving the service is willing, and the code treats that as its own obligation rather than as something your signature already covered.
Here’s the encouraging part. Assent is not the only place the code speaks to a young person who does not want to be there. Four standards in the same document bear on this, and read side by side they describe something closer to a process than a standoff.
The four standards that apply here
- Standard 2.09, involving clients and stakeholders. Behavior analysts make appropriate efforts to involve clients and relevant stakeholders throughout the service relationship, including selecting goals, selecting and designing assessments and interventions, and continual progress monitoring.
- Standard 2.11, obtaining informed consent. After several sentences about obtaining and documenting consent from clients and stakeholders, the standard closes with this: "They are responsible for obtaining assent from clients when applicable" (Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts, 2.11). The subject of that sentence is the behavior analyst. Not the parent, and not the teenager.
- Standard 2.14, selecting, designing, and implementing behavior-change interventions. Interventions have to best meet the diverse needs, context, and resources of the client and stakeholders, and the standard lists client and stakeholder preference among the relevant factors a behavior analyst considers.
- Standard 2.19, addressing conditions interfering with service delivery. Behavior analysts actively identify and address environmental conditions that may interfere with or prevent service delivery, remove or minimize those conditions, identify effective modifications to the intervention, or consider recommending assistance from other professionals, and document the conditions, the actions taken, and the outcomes.
What number two does not say
Two limits, and both of them matter more than the headline does.
It does not mean a teenager can unilaterally end services. The person who provides informed consent is still you, and nothing in the standard moves that.
It also does not define exactly when assent applies. The sentence says "when applicable," and the code leaves that judgment to the professional. If anyone tells you the code is more specific than that, they are reading something into it.
What it does mean is that willingness is a thing your child’s BCBA is answerable for, and that a program running only on a young person going along with it is not meeting the standard the certification carries. That is a smaller claim than the one circulating online, and it is the one that actually holds up in a meeting.
What number one changes about a teenager’s program
Selecting goals sits at the front of that list in 2.09, ahead of designing assessments and ahead of monitoring progress. It is easy to read past. For a teenager it is often the whole story.
A young person who had no say in what they are working on has no particular reason to want the hour, and that is a different situation from a young person being difficult. It is also one of the more workable things you can come away with, because goals get revisited throughout the service relationship rather than set once at intake.
Where refusal actually lands, and it is number four
A teenager who consistently will not start a session is a condition interfering with service delivery. That is not a rhetorical move on my part. It is the plain reading of what 2.19 covers.
What follows from that in the code is a sequence rather than an escalation. Identify what is happening. Remove or minimize it where that is possible, find a modification to the intervention where it is not, and consider bringing in another professional if neither of those works. Then document the conditions, the actions taken, and the outcomes.
Number three sits underneath all of it. If client and stakeholder preference is among the factors a behavior analyst considers when choosing what to do, then your teenager’s stated preference is not an obstacle to the plan. It is one of the inputs to it. That is what makes refusal data rather than misbehavior, and data has somewhere to go: into the record, into the next revision, into a conversation where nobody is in trouble.
Why this shows up at thirteen and not at six
The thing that changes in adolescence is not usually the child’s opinion of therapy. It is that the opinion now has a way to be expressed and enforced.
A six-year-old who dislikes a task has a narrow set of options. A fourteen-year-old can close a door, refuse to speak, schedule something else, or simply outlast the hour. Nothing about the program has to have gotten worse for refusal to appear. Your child’s capacity to act on a preference has grown, which in most other contexts you would be glad about.
There is also the ordinary teenage layer, which is real and worth naming. Being a fourteen-year-old who has an adult come to work on skills, when your friends do not, is its own thing. That is not a clinical problem. It is a fourteen-year-old correctly noticing something about their life.
What to ask your BCBA
These are more useful than "my teenager doesn’t want to do this," because each one has an answer that can be written down.
How is assent defined in my child’s program, and how do you know when you have it? There is no single correct answer. There should be an answer.
What does my child’s refusal look like when you record it? Ask whether it is being tracked as data at all, and what the record shows over the last two months.
Which goals did my child choose? Standard 2.09 lists selecting goals as part of involving the client. If the honest answer is none, that is the most workable finding in this entire article.
What would you change if my child said no to a specific activity three sessions running? You are asking what the modification protocol is, before you need it.
Can we try a shorter session, a different time, or a different setting? Session length, time of day, and where it happens are usually easier to move than anything about the content, and they are often what is actually driving the refusal.
What would you want to see before recommending a change in services? This is the question that keeps the conversation from being about ending therapy, which is rarely what a parent actually wants and rarely the right answer at this stage.
What to do this week
Start a record and keep it to three columns: the date, what happened, and what came right before it. That third column is the one that matters and the one almost nobody keeps, because it is where a pattern becomes visible.
Note the time of day while you are at it. Right after school is a demand on top of a demand. If refusal clusters at one hour, you have a scheduling finding rather than a motivation finding, and scheduling is the easier of the two to change.
Ask your teenager one open question, and let the answer stand. Not why won’t you do therapy. Something closer to what part of this is the worst part. You are gathering information rather than negotiating, which means you do not have to respond to what you hear, or fix it, or defend anyone.
Then bring the notes to the next meeting with your BCBA. Two months of pattern is a different conversation than a bad week, and it hands your clinician the kind of thing the standards above already ask them to act on.
The thing worth holding onto
A teenager who is refusing is telling you something in the only register available to them. That is not the failure of your parenting or of their program. It is a person with a growing capacity to express a preference, doing exactly that.
The standards your child’s clinician works under already treat that as their responsibility. You are allowed to hand it to them.
Want a clinical team that treats your teenager’s participation as their job, not yours?
Forta’s BCBAs build programs with the young person in the room, not just the plan.
Forta provides Online ABA therapy in 43 states, and In-Home ABA therapy in select cities including Houston, TX.
Sources
- Behavior Analyst Certification Board. Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. Glossary, definition of Assent. Effective January 1, 2022, updated 08/2024. Link
- Behavior Analyst Certification Board. Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. Standard 2.11, Obtaining Informed Consent. Link
- Behavior Analyst Certification Board. Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. Standard 2.09, Involving Clients and Stakeholders. Link
- Behavior Analyst Certification Board. Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. Standard 2.14, Selecting, Designing, and Implementing Behavior-Change Interventions. Link
- Behavior Analyst Certification Board. Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. Standard 2.19, Addressing Conditions Interfering with Service Delivery. Link
About this article
Written by Will Africano, VP of Marketing · Clinically reviewed by Kimberly Sadovich, MA, BCBA · 2026-08-19
What this is. General information, reviewed by a BCBA. It is not clinical advice about your child. What works for one child often does not work for another, and your child’s BCBA is the person who can tell you which of this applies.
