Early Intensive Behavior Intervention

Our Early Intensive Behavior Intervention (EIBI) program is a journey our qualified and credentialed team will take with your child and family from start to finish. In other words, our TOTAL team will be by your side from the initial behavior assessment, until your child has mastered skills necessary to mainstream into the family, social, and academic setting.We will work hand-in-hand until your child has developed the ability to navigate independently in their immediate social world and communicate with others in their natural environment.Important goals of our program:Our comprehensive program addresses two components that affect children with disability: motivation and skill deficits.

Motivation: It is important to recognize that over-selectivity with items such as food and play items, along with a lack of social skills impedes our children’s desire to learn or interact with others. Our program is designed to help transition motivational drive from primarily objects and food (tangibles) to both social and intrinsic motivation.

Skill deficits: Skill areas such as communication, social, and play are targeted. In addition, our program takes a closer look at foundational and fundamental academic skills such as staying on task, following rules, completing tasks independently, and flexibility, which are all important for success in learning and social environments.

Behavior Assessments: Assessments are vital to understanding the behavior repertoire of a child. Our comprehensive program addresses both challenging behaviors and skill deficits. Functional Behavior Assessments identify the purpose of challenging behaviors and assist us in choosing appropriate interventions based on the reason the child is engaging in a particular behavior.

Skill deficits: We use standard tools such as The Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP) to identify skill deficits in structured settings and The Adaptive Behavior Assessment System (ABAS-3) to identify deficits skill in everyday living activities. The assessments procedures combined provide a clear picture of skill level and developmental needs.

Teaching strategies: Least restrictive strategies, such as Naturalistic Environmental Teaching (NET) and structured Discrete Trial Training (DTT), are used to teach skill deficits identified during the assessment process. Strategies such as chaining and shaping are also used wherever necessary. Strategies are individualized and based on the learning styles of the children.

Parent Participation/Parent Training: Parents know their children the best. Their participation in sessions and in training will increase their ability to facilitate skills in their child’s natural environment, a process we call “generalization”. Ongoing parent training is individualized for the parents as a part their comprehensive program.

Generalization Protocol: Generalization of the skills does not happen automatically with children with autism. Our program addresses generalization from the beginning of the treatment. This means, as we teach your child, we make sure that the skills taught are used not just with our staff during therapy, but with people in the child’s natural environment, morning, day, and night! Our staff are trained to understand the critical and non-critical aspects of our treatment procedures. In addition, systematic protocol is used to create opportunities to help the children to use the skills in different environments and people.

Team Approach: “It takes a village to bring up a child,” the proverb says, and we believe it takes a team of dedicated caregivers, staff, and supervisors helping to design and implement each program. The team participates in ongoing and periodic clinic meetings, helping to review progress and problem solve program challenges.