Hi everyone, my husband and I have a 13 year old autistic son and we are currently waiting for the insurance authorization for the ABA agency to conduct the initial assessment. I am 48 and my husband is 50. In an effort to be able to provide the best care to him that I can I am going back to school. I am in my 3rd year of earning my bachelor's degree in Special Education K-12. After that I am planning on then entering a master's degree program to become a BCBA.

I'll be honest, I'm not doing it because I have plans to seek employment, it is just so I can give him all of the best opportunities to be as happy and as healthy as possible. My husband and I have been home schooling him since he was 6 because the SPED program in our town was not very good at the time we chose to pull him out of Public school but during some the Practicum hours I had to do for my degree program I learned that all of the people from the school that were doing such a mediocre job were no longer there at the school.

So, we started him out with going back to school but just for speech and adaptive PE for now. In the fall he should be in school for a half day to start the semester. We were told that as long as it is OK with the school that he will have therapy some of the time at his school, which we are stoked about. But now I am afraid we are making the wrong choice to have our son do ABA.

He is very sweet and sensitive and after all of the things I have read on here about ABA I am so afraid we are making the wrong choice. I just don't want to do anything that will be to his detriment. When he was in his second year of preschool he was supposedly doing ABA but I discovered that the activities that the school school referred to as being ABA were basically like our son was in dog training sessions.

They would consist of the Para at school redirecting certain behaviors and then giving him one tiny Goldfish cracker. This direction to do that this way came from the school psychologist at the time who was not a BCBA. Instead she took the suggestions we had personally read about in some books we had bought on the subject to try to find therapeutic interventions for him and somehow thought she was qualified to provide ABA supervision for our son.

All of that being said, let me get back to what I said about being afraid we are making the wrong decision to have him start ABA. I have spoken online to many autistic people who have done ABA and most of them said that it was a bad experience for them. They said it was like they were being told that who they were was not OK, that it was wrong so they were trained how to present as "more normal" but no matter how much time passes by they said they always feel like they appear "normal" but they are suffering by doing so.

I'm worried that we will be subjecting our son to something that is going to make him feel unhappy. And, since I've been on this sub I have read some things that are troubling about the industry. I just want him to continue to be as happy and secure in himself as he always has been but hopefully also gain some skills to be a little more self sufficient in the future. I thank all of you in advance for any thoughts you have regarding this.