FirstSteps for Kids appreciates the wonderful personalities and individual differences of all the children we serve. Of course, every child is beautifully unique and will present with individual learning strengths and areas of concern. As such, FirstSteps clinicians will assess each area of concern and will develop an individualized treatment plan that consists of two main areas:
Instructional Programs
Specialized learning programs will be implemented to teach your child new skills, with a focus on remediation of skill deficits and development of age-appropriate skills.
Behavior Reduction
Behavior Intervention Plans will be implemented to address your child specific barriers to learning with the goal of reducing the frequency, duration, and/or intensity of challenging behavior.
Instructional Targets + Curriculum
While each child’s intervention program is unique and driven by individual deficits and challenging behavior, Instructional goals are generally selected from several target areas, beginning with the earliest skills to emerge in typical development, and advancing in a stepwise developmental order. As you can see below, the Instructional Program targets are similar to the commonly observed skills deficits described previously. Instructional Programs are implemented to remediate skill deficits and replace challenging behaviors that historically have hindered learning.
click through our Curricula
How Do We Ensure Success?
Simply put, we use what the scientific research has demonstrated to result in optimal learning and re-create those conditions to create an enriched environment for your child. We start by learning all we can about your child; what makes them smile, motivated, excited to learn, and what does the opposite. We take that information and create a custom learning environmentthat is most likely to support rapid acquisition of new skills and ensures that your child’s preferences are always prioritized.
Learning MUST be fun!
Since our children often come to us without having had many positive experiences learning new things, we work to change that history immediately and show them they can learn! Complex skills and behaviors are broken into smaller individual skills that we are confident your child is ready to master. As they progress with lots of praise and reinforcement, we gradually increase the complexity of the skill being taught and praise and reinforce those new skills, ensuring they keep progressing forward to learn more and more each day.
Consistency matters!
We want your child to have hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities per day to learn and practice new skills. To ensure forward progress, everyone teaching your child must be on the same page and working towards the same goals. It is also critical that your child receives “therapeutic levels of service” as explained in the research literature.
Science supports ABA!
Research has consistently demonstrated a strong predictive relationship between service hours received and treatment response. Specifically, these studies demonstrate significant benefits for children who begin ABA services soon after diagnosis and at a dosage that exceeds 25 hours per week with parents highly active in their children’s intervention.
Our goal is to ensure a better today and tomorrow for your child by teaching them the skills and behavior they need to live as independently as possible and to access what makes them happy in life. We do this by assuring:
Our treatment services are always individualized and fun for your child
That we collaborate with you and your other service providers to utilize our collective expertise for your child’s benefit and increase consistency of our intervention across people and settings
That we work together to help your child develop the skills and behavior that will make a difference in their lives immediately and as adults
