What is ABA?
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a therapeutic intervention that promotes positive change for individuals on the autism spectrum. Behavioral specialists support children and young adults to improve their social skills, communication abilities, and behaviors, while enabling them to function more independently. ABA services have been proven to help children with autism meet meaningful goals and benefit from enhanced quality of life at Aim Higher ABA.
ABA therapy uses techniques including natural environment teaching, positive reinforcement, prompting and fading, task analysis, functional communication training and discrete trial teaching. In our Atlanta sessions these rarely look like drills: a technician might teach requesting at snack time, turn-taking during a game, or handwashing one step at a time. Which techniques your child's sessions use is set by their plan of care.
Evidence Based
Individualized
Long Lasting
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Home-Based ABA Therapy
You'll have a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) visiting your home regularly to help your child gain critical skills through various exercises. They might do learning games, household chores, or activities to help manage emotions as part of In Home ABA therapy.
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The Results:
Your child gains awareness and independence that will help them to interact better with family and friends.
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Insurance Management
Let us answer all your questions about ABA Insurance and handle the process of getting approval for services. Our knowledgeable staff will monitor your insurance coverage and patiently guide you to the information you need.
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The Results:
Get the highest quality services for your child at a price you can afford.
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Parent Training
Our clinical staff provides guidance and consultation to parents at every step of the therapeutic process through ABA Parent Training. We educate and empower parents so they can appropriately respond to their child's needs and behaviors.
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The Results:
Integrating therapy goals in the home environment creates consistency and stability for the child.
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Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Together with your child's pediatrician, service providers, and educators we take a holistic approach to develop a care plan. With a full scope of your chlid’s world, we can work towards progress outside of sessions, as well.
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The Results:
Working as a team, we maximize your child’s opportunities for success.
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School-based ABA Therapy
Your child will meet with their RBT while they are at school, conveniently maximizing his allotted ABA service hours in his primary learning environment through school based ABA therapy.
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The Results:
The daily learning experience at school is best tailored to your child's needs and supported by ABA specialists who are on-site with your child.
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Three Settings for ABA Therapy, and How to Choose
We offer ABA therapy in three settings. They are not tiers, and one is not the premium version of another. They suit different children and different goals, and most families end up using more than one.
- In-home ABA therapy happens in your house, around your real routine. It is usually the stronger choice when the goals are daily living: mealtimes, sleep, dressing, toileting, transitions, getting along with siblings. It removes travel, which matters more than people admit when you are also managing work and other children.
- Center-based ABA therapy happens at our clinic at 1549 Clairmont Rd #103, Decatur, GA 30033. It is usually the stronger choice when the goals are social or school-shaped, because other children are there. Peer interaction, group routines, waiting for a turn, coping with a shared space and preparing for a classroom are all things a center can offer that a living room cannot. Having our own clinic sets us apart from most providers in the areas we serve, who offer in-home therapy only.
- School-based ABA therapy happens in your child’s classroom, alongside their teachers and support staff. It is the right choice when school is where the difficulty concentrates, and what is possible depends on what the school will support, so we involve them early.
Every setting runs from the same individualized plan of care, written by a Board Certified Behavior Analyst after a full assessment and delivered by registered behavior technicians under that BCBA’s supervision. Your BCBA will recommend a setting or a combination, explain the reasoning, and revisit it as your child changes. You can push back on that recommendation at any point, and we would rather you did than sit on a doubt.
If you would like help thinking it through, call us on (678) 400-5040 or email [email protected].
ABA interventions have helped children with autism in many areas:
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Personal Care Skills
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Pragmatic Language Skills
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Social Skills
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Sensory Processing
What Actually Happens in an ABA Session:
The Techniques We Use
Parents often picture a child at a table being drilled with flashcards. Some ABA looked like that once. Ours mostly does not.
Most of a session is built around natural environment teaching, which means teaching skills inside activities your child is already doing rather than in a separate exercise. If the goal is requesting, the technician arranges the snack so there is a genuine reason to ask. If the goal is tolerating change, the session contains changes, with support built in.
Positive reinforcement runs underneath all of it. When your child does the thing we are working on, something good and meaningful to them follows. What counts as meaningful is decided by your child, not by a chart.
- Prompting and fading is how a new skill gets started and then handed over. We give as much help as is needed at first, then deliberately reduce it, because the point is independence rather than a child who performs well only when someone is standing beside them.
- Task analysis breaks a large skill into its actual steps. Handwashing is not one skill, it is eight, and teaching it as eight is what makes it learnable.
- Functional communication training gives a child a workable way to express a need. A lot of difficult behavior is communication that has not yet found a better route, and teaching that route is usually more effective than trying to suppress the behavior.
- Discrete trial teaching, the structured, repeated format most people associate with ABA, still has a place for certain skills that need clean repetition. We use it where it earns its place and not as the default shape of a session.
Alongside all of this we collect data continuously, and your BCBA uses it to decide what to keep, change or drop. Which techniques appear in your child’s sessions depends on their assessment and their plan of care, and we are happy to walk you through the reasoning for any of them.
Getting Help Is Simple.
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Get In Touch
We’ll give you an overview of the ABA process and address your questions or concerns.
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Get Evaluated
A BCBA will evaluate your child with research-based tools, then design an individualized care plan.
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Get Approved
The care plan is submitted for review and approval by your insurance provider.
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Get Services
Your child has 1:1 sessions with a friendly ABA therapist who implements the care plan, under BCBA supervision.
Assessment, Insurance and Getting Started
Every service we offer starts the same way, whichever setting you end up in.
First, a conversation. Tell us about your child, what a hard day looks like and what you want to be different. There is no cost to this and no obligation.
Second, insurance. We accept Medicaid and most commercial plans, and our own team verifies your benefits and prepares any authorization needed. We will explain what your plan appears to cover and what is still outstanding, and we will keep you updated. We will not promise you an approval or a timeline, because that decision sits with your insurer.
Third, the assessment. A BCBA spends time with your child, uses research-based assessment tools and talks with you properly. The result is an individualized plan of care: goals, how progress will be measured, and the recommended setting or combination of settings.
Then therapy begins, with caregiver coaching built in from the start. We serve children and teenagers ages 2 to 18.
Call (678) 400-5040 or email [email protected] when you are ready, or when you just want to ask a question.