By Jessica Lentz, LBA, BCBA — Clinical Director, Sunshine Advantage Clinically reviewed by Shani Slater, LBA, BCBA
Last updated: May 28, 2026
“Is ABA therapy actually working?” is the most important question a parent can ask. The answer is not in how your child seems — seems is unreliable and biased by how tired you are this week. The answer is in what we can measure. Behavior analysts track 12 specific indicators of progress in ABA therapy: from how often your child asks for what they want, to how long it takes them to follow a direction, to whether new skills hold up at the grocery store. Real progress is countable.
Every six to eight weeks, almost every parent in our ABA therapy program asks a version of the same question: Is this working? Are we seeing what we should be seeing?
The instinct is to answer with feelings. She seems happier. He seems calmer. She’s hugging me more. Those moments matter, and they are real. But they are not progress data — they are mood data, and mood is shaped by a thousand variables that have nothing to do with ABA therapy.
This article is about the other answer. The one our BCBAs track every session, graph every week, and review every reauthorization. The 12 indicators below are the ones we look at when we want to know whether ABA therapy is doing what it is supposed to do.
You should be looking at them too. Here is what they are, and how to ask your child’s BCBA about each one.
A mand is a request. “Juice.” “Up.” “Help.” It is the most functional verbal operant — the one that gets the child’s needs met.
We count mands per session and per day. A child who started ABA therapy with 0–2 functional mands per hour and is now producing 15 is making real progress, even if the rest of their language has barely moved.
Ask your BCBA: How many mands per hour is my child producing now versus at baseline?
It is one thing to mand “iPad” forty times an hour. It is another to mand iPad, cookie, water, help, open, more, all done, and bathroom — across the same hour. Variety is the better measure of communicative repertoire.
Ask your BCBA: How many distinct mands does my child use now versus three months ago?
For verbal children, MLU is the average number of words per utterance. A child who started saying “juice” and now says “I want juice please” has moved from MLU 1 to MLU 4. This is concrete language progress.
Ask your BCBA: What is my child’s current MLU?
Tacts are labels — the child sees a dog and says “dog.” Tact repertoire grows over time as new categories are taught (animals, foods, vehicles, family members, emotions).
Ask your BCBA: How many tacts has my child mastered this quarter?
Intraverbals are verbal responses to other people’s words without the object being present. “How old are you?” “Five.” “What did you do at school?” “Read books.” This is conversation. It is a late-acquired skill and progress here matters enormously.
Ask your BCBA: How many intraverbal targets has my child mastered? Can we see examples?
Latency is the time between an instruction and the child’s response. A child whose baseline latency was 90 seconds for “put your shoes on” and is now responding in 12 seconds has made measurable progress — even if you have not noticed it day to day.
Ask your BCBA: What is the current average latency for routine directions?
Compliance rate is the percentage of directions followed without challenging behavior. A child at 30% compliance who is now at 70% is moving meaningfully even if your morning still feels hard.
Ask your BCBA: What is my child’s current compliance rate, and how does it compare to baseline?
We track three things for each target behavior: how often it happens, how intense it is, and how long it lasts. A behavior that has not decreased in frequency but has dropped in intensity from 10/10 to 5/10 is still progress. So is a tantrum that used to last 25 minutes and now lasts 6.
Ask your BCBA: Has my child’s target behavior decreased in frequency, intensity, or duration — or some combination?
A skill that only works with the BCBA in the therapy room is not a skill. Progress means the child uses the skill with their mother, father, grandparents, teacher, and siblings.
Ask your BCBA: Which mastered skills have generalized to people outside the therapy team?
The same logic for environments. A child who can mand “bathroom” at home but not at preschool has only partially acquired the skill. Cross-setting data tells us when a skill is real.
Ask your BCBA: Where is my child using their mastered skills outside of session?
Mastery is not the finish line. We probe mastered skills at 30, 60, and 90 days to make sure they hold up without active teaching. Skills that drop out without maintenance get pulled back into active programming.
Ask your BCBA: Which mastered skills have been probed at 30, 60, and 90 days — and how many held?
These are the skills that matter to a family’s quality of life: toilet training, eating with utensils, getting dressed, brushing teeth, sleeping through the night, accepting haircuts. They often move slower than language and play skills, but they are the ones parents feel the most.
Ask your BCBA: Which independent living skills have moved this quarter, and which are next?
We are not dismissing the feeling-based observations parents share. They matter. A child who comes home from preschool with a smile instead of a meltdown is a different child, regardless of what the data says.
But the reason we anchor in measurable data is that families’ feelings about ABA therapy are vulnerable to bad weeks. You can be doing everything right and still have a Tuesday from hell. If you only use feelings to evaluate the program, you will quit on a bad Tuesday.
The data does not have bad Tuesdays. The graph either moves or it does not. The data is what tells us whether to stay the course or change it.
We worked with a five-year-old we will call C., who had been in ABA therapy with our team for fourteen months. His mother sat in our review meeting in December and said, “I don’t think anything is changing. He still has tantrums, he still doesn’t really talk, and I’m exhausted.”
We pulled out his graphs. Here is what we showed her, across the same fourteen months:
His mother looked at the graphs and started crying. She had been counting tantrums, which had not changed in frequency, and missing every other variable that had moved enormously. The tantrums had become shorter and quieter — but they were the loud part of her week, and that was the data she was working from.
This is why we graph. Not because we doubt parents. Because the data sees what the day cannot.
Every parent in an ABA therapy program is entitled to ask for and receive their child’s progress data. A reasonable rhythm is:
If your child’s ABA therapy team cannot show you graphs, cannot tell you the rate of the target behavior, or cannot describe what mastery looks like, this is worth a direct conversation.
Look at measurable data, not just feelings. Ask your BCBA about mand frequency, latency to compliance, problem behavior rate, generalization, and maintenance. A program that is working will show movement in at least several of these indicators within three to six months.
Most families see early indicators of progress within the first 8–12 weeks of consistent ABA therapy — usually in mand frequency, latency reduction, or problem behavior decrease. Larger skill acquisition (toilet training, conversation, independent self-care) typically takes longer.
Six months without measurable movement on any indicator warrants a full clinical review with your BCBA. This includes reassessing function, reviewing dosage, evaluating staffing fit, and checking parent-side variables. ABA therapy that is not working should be changed.
No. Real progress is rarely linear. Expect plateaus, regressions, and sudden jumps. The right way to evaluate the trend is to look at six- to twelve-week windows, not week-to-week.
Yes — and we encourage it. Many parents track mand frequency or tantrum duration in a simple notes app. Sharing your data with your BCBA strengthens the program substantially.
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