HOUSTON – Bella Eisenhard was a toddler when her mom noticed she wasn't hitting milestones.
“At about age 2 1/2, I'm like ‘she's supposed to be saying sentences’ and I asked the doctor and she said don't worry she'll grow into it and I said ‘not really,’” her mother Kimberly Butz said. “It was like us having that depth feeling in the pit of our stomachs that something's not right.”
Butz's intuition proved correct. Bella was diagnosed with autism. When public school-based programs failed to provide the support she needed, Bella's parents enrolled her in a form of therapy known as Applied Behavioral Analysis or ABA.
“One of the things you're going to see in ABA is, if we teach new skills, the child will sit at the table, the task will be presented, if the behavior doesn’t occur, we will prompt the behavior and then we will reinforce,” program director Victoria Sanchez explained.
Often described the gold standard of therapy for autism, ABA focuses on prompting and reinforcing new behaviors and skills.
“It's very quick and fast paced and we start with the behaviors that are easy to do. So we work on them comprehending the instruction and following through,” Sanchez said.
Bella's parents said the program helped their daughter become more attentive and she communicates much better.
“She'll tell us now what she needs and wants whereas before she would just scream and we would all have to figure out what was happening in her poor little brain. We're able as parents now to actually take care of our child,” Butz said.
Positive reinforcement is one of the main strategies used in ABA when a behavior is followed by a reward, the child is more likely to repeat that behavior. Click here to read a parent's guide to autism, written by KPRC2 Meteorologist Britta Merwin. She's sharing steps parents should take before and after a diagnosis. The guide also covers insurance and school resources for parents.