Pairing in ABA Therapy: Why Your BCBA “Just Plays” for the First Two Weeks

By Jessica Lentz, LBA, BCBA — Clinical Director, Sunshine Advantage Clinically reviewed by Shani Slater, LBA, BCBA

Last updated: May 28, 2026

The first two to three weeks of ABA therapy often look like “just playing” — and that is exactly the point. Behavior analysts call this pairing, and it is how your child learns that the therapist is fun and safe. Once your child wants to be near the therapist, every other part of ABA therapy works faster, kinder, and with fewer tears. Skipping pairing is the #1 reason ABA therapy programs fail in the first month.

This is the call we get from many new parents around session four or five. The therapist is sitting on the floor with their child. There are no flashcards, no demands, no obvious lessons. The child is laughing while playing with bubbles or a favorite toy. And the parent — exhausted, stretched thin, watching the clock — is wondering if anything is actually happening.

The honest answer: yes. Something very important is happening. We just have not explained it well enough yet.

This article exists to explain it.

In ABA therapy, pairing (also called rapport-building or instructional control through reinforcement) is the deliberate clinical process of making the therapist — and eventually the therapy environment — a strong, reliable source of good things before any real teaching begins.

The technical term for what we are doing is conditioned reinforcement. The therapist starts out as a neutral stimulus — just another adult in your child’s life. Through repeated, consistent association with preferred items, preferred activities, and zero demands, the therapist becomes a secondary reinforcer. In plain English: the child starts to like, want, and seek out the therapist.

That sounds obvious. Of course we want kids to like their therapists. But the clinical reason pairing matters goes deeper than that.

Three things happen during a well-executed pairing phase:

1. The therapist becomes someone worth listening to. A child will not respond to instructions from someone they associate with frustration, demands, or fear. They will respond to instructions from someone they associate with iPad time, tickles, and bubble play. We do not skip the second relationship to get to the first.
2. The therapy room (or your living room) becomes a place worth being in. If every time your child sees the therapist’s bag come through the door, the next two hours are demands and corrections, your child will start protesting before the bag is even open. We are building the opposite association. The bag means good things.
3. The child’s reinforcer profile becomes visible. During pairing, we are taking quiet, careful data on what your child actually likes — not what the assessment form said, not what their last therapist used, not what their sibling likes. This child, on this week, finds this specific toy reinforcing for about four minutes before it loses value. That data is the fuel for every later teaching session.

Five things parents will see during a well-run pairing phase:

1. No demands. The therapist is not asking the child to do anything they do not want to do. No “say ball,” no “touch red,” no “clean up.”
2. High-rate delivery of preferred items. Bubbles, songs, snacks, favorite videos, tickles, chase games — whatever this particular child loves, delivered freely.
3. Therapist as the gateway. The therapist controls access to the most-preferred items. The child learns: good things come through this person.
4. Approach behavior recorded. Does the child move toward the therapist, away, or stay neutral? Does the child make eye contact, share toys, smile? These approach behaviors are the data telling us pairing is working.
5. Slow, careful introduction of small demands. Once pairing is solid, we introduce one very easy, almost-guaranteed-success demand and pair it with massive reinforcement. Then another. Then another. This is how instructional control is built without coercion.

Skipping pairing is one of the most expensive mistakes in ABA therapy. It is also one of the most common, because clinicians sometimes feel pressure to “show progress fast” and parents sometimes feel pressure to see drills happening.

What happens when pairing is skipped:

• The child cries when the therapist arrives. Then cries harder.
• Every session starts with elopement, refusal, or aggression.
• The therapist is forced into a demand-then-give-up cycle, which actually reinforces the protest behavior.
• Data is poor because the child is dysregulated for half the session.
• Parents lose faith, drop hours, or quit ABA therapy entirely.

We have seen this. We have fixed this in cases where a previous agency rushed it. The fix is always the same: go back to pairing. There is no shortcut.

A family came to us last year with their five-year-old, B., after eight months at another agency. B. screamed when his old therapist arrived. He hid behind the couch. He had bitten on three occasions. His mother described session start as “the worst hour of every day.”

The previous agency had moved into demand-heavy DTT in week one. They had run reinforcement schedules that called for praise rather than tangibles. They had documented “non-compliance” in their notes for months.

Our team paused the entire ABA therapy program for sixteen days. The Behavior Technician arrived, sat on the floor near (not next to) B., and read his favorite truck book aloud while he stayed behind the couch. On day three, he peeked. On day six, he sat at the edge of the rug. On day eleven, he handed her a truck. On day fourteen, he led her into the playroom. On day sixteen, we ran our first single demand: “high five?” She held her hand up. He gave a high five. She gave him the truck.

Within two months, B. ran to the door when his BT arrived. He is now eighteen months into a full ABA therapy program, mastering programs at a normal rate.

This is what pairing buys you. It is not lost time. It is invested time, and the dividends are enormous.

Pairing is a team activity. Parents can speed it up by doing five things:

1. Stop introducing demands during pairing. If the therapist is pairing, do not be the one running “say please” or “clean up” while they are there. Save those for outside session.
2. Let the therapist have the good stuff. Restrict access to one or two highly preferred items so they become therapist-delivered. Yes, this means the iPad lives in a different room for two weeks.
3. Stay nearby but not in the middle. Your child knows you are the safest person in the room. If you sit at the play table, they will come to you instead of pairing with the therapist. Be near enough to feel safe; far enough to let the bond form.
4. Resist the urge to ask “is this working?” on day three. Ten to fourteen days is normal. Some children need three weeks.
5. Trust the process — and tell your BCBA if you do not. If something about pairing feels wrong to you, say so. A confident BCBA will explain the plan, show you the data, and adjust if needed.

Pairing is never fully done — we re-pair every session, every staff change, every long break. But the intensive pairing phase is complete when:

• Your child reliably approaches the therapist
• Your child responds to one or two easy demands with reinforcement
• Crying, eloping, or protest at session start has reduced significantly
• The BCBA can confidently introduce additional programs without losing the relationship

That is the moment the rest of ABA therapy unlocks.

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• Carbone, V. J., Morgenstern, B., Zecchin-Tirri, G., & Kolberg, L. (2010). The role of the reflexive conditioned motivating operation (CMO-R) during discrete trial instruction of children with autism. Journal of Early and Intensive Behavior Intervention, 7(1), 23–37.
• Sundberg, M. L., & Partington, J. W. (2010). Teaching Language to Children with Autism or Other Developmental Disabilities. AVB Press.
• Behavior Analyst Certification Board. (2022). BCBA Task List (5th ed.). Littleton, CO: Author.