Is My Child's Therapy Actually Working?
Therapy is a big investment of your time, your energy, and your trust, and you deserve to know it's actually making a difference for your child. At our Burlington clinic, we don't think that should be something you have to wonder about. So here's an honest look at what progress looks like early on, and how you can tell your child's therapy is working, because it's often not what parents expect.
What early progress actually looks like
Most families start seeing something within the first few weeks. But it's rarely dramatic, and that catches people off guard.
It looks like a little more eye contact. A few more attempts to make a sound or say a word, even if it isn't clear yet. Handing you something instead of hitting or crying. Staying at the table thirty seconds longer than last week. Turning toward their name a beat faster.
These signs of progress are easy to miss, and easy to dismiss as coincidence. They're not. Each one is a building block. A child who looks at you more often gets more chances to see how words are made. A child who tries a sound more often gets more chances to be understood, and being understood is what makes them try again. Small changes compound into big ones, which is exactly why we track them.
If you're waiting for one big breakthrough moment, you may miss the twenty small ones that get you there.
Why we don't let ABA and speech work in silos
At elemenoe, your child's behaviour therapist and speech-language pathologist aren't working from two separate playbooks, they're building one plan together.
This collaboration matters because communication and behaviour are so often tangled up with each other. Most of the kids we see are working on functional communication: the words, gestures, or AAC skills to ask for what they need. That work sits right at the overlap between ABA and SLP. A child who's melting down is very often telling us something they don't yet have another way to say. And building that communication usually needs a behavioural strategy in place first, so your child is regulated enough to actually practise it.
When the ABA and SLP teams set goals separately, those connections get missed. When they set goals together, the plan reflects your whole child.
In practice, that means your child's BCBA and SLP talk to each other regularly, not just share a file. Goals are written jointly. Strategies are aligned, so your child hears the same cues and the same expectations whether they're working on a communication target or a behaviour target.
So how do we know if it's working?
This is the part that matters most to parents, and it's fair to want more than "they seem happier" as an answer.
Daily data, graphed. Every session, our team is collecting data on the specific goals your child is working on. That data gets graphed, so trends are visible over time, not just remembered anecdotally. This is what lets us catch it quickly if a strategy isn't working, rather than waiting months to notice a plateau.
Joint goal setting with both disciplines at the table. Goals aren't set by one clinician in isolation. Your child's ABA and SLP team sit down together to decide what to target next, based on where the data says your child actually is, not just where the calendar says we should be.
A collaborative reassessment every six months. Twice a year, we step back from the day-to-day data and take a fuller look: what's changed, what's stuck, and what should shift in the plan. This is done collaboratively across disciplines, so the reassessment reflects both the communication picture and the behavioural picture together, not two separate reports stapled together.
The biggest factor is you, and we know your time is finite
Here's the part we're always honest with families about: the single best predictor of progress is a parent who's part of the therapy process.
Not because you need to become a therapist. Because you're the one who's there for the other 160 hours of the week, at the grocery store, at bedtime, in the car. When you know what we're working on and how we're prompting it, your child gets to practise in the places that actually matter to them. That's how skills stick, and that's how they generalize beyond the clinic room.
And we know that looks completely different from family to family. Some parents can be in the room every session. Others are working two jobs, managing other kids, or barely holding the schedule together. Both are okay. Neither one makes you a better or worse parent.
So we've built involvement to fit around real life:
Monthly written updates you can read at 10pm on your phone, in plain language, with the graphs, so you can see the trend yourself.
Asynchronous learning modules so you can learn the actual strategies we're using on your own time, in ten-minute pieces, and try them at home.
A team that makes itself available. If you have a question, ask it. You don't need to wait for a scheduled meeting to find out how your child is doing.
Do what you can with the time you have. Ten minutes of a module and one strategy used at bedtime is real involvement, and it shows up in the data.
What this looks like for you as a parent
Whether you're with us or with another clinic, it's fair to expect:
Goals you can see progress on, described in plain language, not clinical shorthand.
A team that can point to the data when you ask "is this working," instead of answering from memory or general impression.
A six-month checkpoint where the plan is genuinely revisited, not just renewed by default.
A realistic way to be involved that fits the life you actually have.
If you're not getting clear answers about your child's progress, raise it directly with your clinic. You're entitled to know what's being tracked, how often, and what it shows. A good team should be able to answer that without hesitation.
And if you're curious what this would look like for your own child, our Burlington team is always happy to walk you through how we'd track progress for your family's specific goals. Just ask.
