Samantha Haskins, a BCBA in Tampa Bay, Florida, chats with Jack about the use of ABA services for behaviors. While ABA is only covered by insurance for children with specific developmental disabilities, it can be effective for children with trauma as well. Sam explains the science of ABA, the process of ABA services, how it helps, and stories of success from her experience.

While ABA services have to consider each individual child, it primarily focuses on determining the environmental cause of the behavior and modeling a safer behavior to eliminate unsafe or undesirable behaviors. ABA focuses on repetition of these new behaviors in order to eliminate the old habits. We talked about how necessary this is for children in foster care who have experienced trauma and developed trauma responses that may be harmful or undesirable.

Sam also shared about why the abusive history of ABA has made a lot of people very wary of it. And here in Florida there is also a history of provider fraud. Both of these situations have caused very strict standards to be in place for ABA providers to ensure that clients are receiving services in an ethical and safe manner.

Sam was informed by Jack that the reason she is so successful at ABA with Baby Jack is that she is unknowingly also providing a very TBRI leaning version of ABA, and also there is that other matter of baby jack wanting to marry her.