Most families start the search for an ABA provider under pressure. You have a new diagnosis, a waitlist number, a school asking what you are doing about behavior, and a stack of provider websites that all say roughly the same warm, reassuring things.
The websites will not tell them apart, but the answers to these ten questions will.
Ask every provider you are considering the same list and write down what you hear. The differences show up fast.
1. How often will a BCBA actually supervise my child’s program?
A Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) is the person who will spend the most hours with your child. Under the Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s current requirements, an RBT must be supervised for a minimum of 5% of the hours they spend delivering services in a calendar month, including two face-to-face contacts, at least one of them individual.
Run the math on your own child. At 20 hours a week, roughly 86 hours a month, 5% is about four and a half hours of supervision per month. That is the regulatory minimum.
Your child’s programming will likely be supervised much more at the start of services when behavior planning is still very fluid and the clinicians are still heavily learning about your child and family. The BCBA fading back should be positive and due to your child’s RBTs no longer requiring as much supervision with your child’s programming, not because they don’t have time.
If the roles are still fuzzy, our post on what BCBAs and RBTs actually do breaks down who does what.
2. What is your RBT turnover rate?
Turnover is the question providers least want to answer, and the one that most affects your child’s day-to day-experience. Behavior technician turnover is a known problem across the industry. A 2025 exit survey of former RBTs pointed at pay, workplace treatment, limited growth, and lack of supervisory support as the leading reasons people leave.
For your child, turnover means starting over–new person, new rapport, new tolerance for someone in their space. A provider who has kept technicians for two and three years has built something. A provider who cannot answer the question at all has told you something, as well.
3. How many hours are you recommending, and what is that number based on?
There is no universal correct “dose” of ABA. The recommendation should come out of an assessment of your specific child, not a template.
Ask what the recommendation is based on: which assessment, which skill areas, which goals. Be cautious with any provider who leads with a number before they have met your child, and equally cautious with one that treats a high hour count as automatically better. More hours are not a quality signal. Matching the hours to the goals is.
4. Can I watch a session?
The answer should be “Yes!” without hesitation and without conditions.
Some clinics have practical constraints, like observation windows instead of sitting in the room, or a request that you schedule it so the day is not disrupted. Those are reasonable. A flat denial is not.
Watch what happens in the room. Is your child engaged or enduring? Does the technician follow their lead at all, or is every minute directed? Does anyone laugh? Our walkthrough of what a typical session looks like will give you a baseline for comparison.
5. What does parent training actually involve here?
Every provider says they do parent training. Ask what that means in practice.
The useful version is scheduled, has its own goals, and teaches you to run the strategies yourself in your own kitchen at your own dinner time. The less useful version is a five-minute handoff in the parking lot.
Ask how often it happens, who leads it, whether it is billed, and whether it is optional. Ask what happens if your work schedule makes weekday sessions impossible. This matters more than families expect, because the hours your child spends with you dwarf the hours they spend in therapy. That is also why ABA parent training tends to be where the real change compounds.
6. How do you handle when my child says “No?”
This question tells you the most about a provider’s philosophy, and it is the one families most often skip.
The BACB’s Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts includes a standard on obtaining assent from clients when applicable. Assent is different from consent. You give consent as the parent. Assent is your child’s own willingness to participate, communicated however they communicate, and it can be withdrawn at any moment.
Ask the provider how they define assent withdrawal for a child who does not speak. Ask what happens when a child pushes materials away, leaves the table, or shuts down. A thoughtful provider has an answer ready, because they have had to write it into treatment plans. A provider who has never thought about it will tell you they redirect and continue.
Related, and worth asking directly: “Do you try to stop stimming?” Research with adults diagnosed with autism describes stimming as self-regulation and describes being told to stop as distressing rather than helpful. The defensible position is to leave harmless self regulatory behavior alone and to intervene only where there is genuine risk of injury.
7. How do you respond to challenging behavior, and do you ever use restraint or seclusion?
Ask this plainly. You are entitled to a plain answer.
A quality response starts with figuring out why the behavior is happening before deciding what to do about it. That is the entire purpose of a functional behavior assessment. If a provider proposes a behavior plan without first assessing function, they are guessing.
Then ask about the hard edge of it. What is your policy on physical restraint? Under what circumstances? Who is trained, how are they trained, how often is that training renewed, and how are you notified when an incident that requires restraint happens? Get the notification policy specifically. “We would call you” is not a policy.
8. What is the goal, and what does leaving look like?
ABA is not meant to be permanent. Ask what success looks like for your child and how you will know when you have arrived.
A provider should be able to describe discharge criteria, a fading plan, and what a step down in hours looks like. If services are expected to continue indefinitely at the same intensity, ask why.
Ask also how progress gets reported to you. How often, in what format, and in language you can read without a glossary. You should not have to reverse engineer your child’s progress from a billing statement.
9. Does insurance cover ABA therapy in Colorado, and what will I actually pay?
Colorado law requires state-regulated health benefit plans to cover the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of autism spectrum disorders for a child, and the statute’s definition of treatment expressly includes behavioral analysis and evaluation services. The current statute does not impose a special dollar cap on that coverage.
That mandate does not reach every plan. Self-funded employer plans, which are common with large employers, are governed by federal law and are not subject to Colorado’s insurance mandates. Neither are union plans, federal employee plans, TRICARE, or plans issued in another state. If your employer self insures, your plan document controls, not the state statute.
So, ask three specific things. Are you in network with my plan? Will you verify my benefits in writing before we start? What is my expected out-of-pocket cost per month, including any deductible?
For families on Health First Colorado, the EPSDT benefit for members age 20 and under requires medically necessary services to be provided, and prohibits arbitrary service limits. We cover both routes in more detail in how ABA coverage works in Colorado and in our guide to Health First Colorado and ABA.
10. Are you licensed or working on licensing, and how much should that matter to me?
In the summer of 2026, Colorado has recently begun the process of requiring state licensing of physical ABA clinics by August of 2027. Beginning in 2028, BCBAs will require a state license in addition to their board certification. Your potential ABA provider should be doing their due diligence to become state-licensed.
What Are Red flags in ABA Therapy?
A few things should slow you down:
- Vague answers to specific questions. Especially about supervision hours, turnover, and cost.
- A recommended hour count produced before anyone has assessed your child.
- Discouraging you from observing, or scheduling observation only after weeks of notice.
- No parent training, or parent training that is purely informational.
- Cure language. ABA does not cure autism, and any provider implying otherwise is telling you something about their judgment.
- Pressure to sign the same day, or a contract with a long minimum term and an unclear exit.
- No answer on assent. If nobody has thought about what your child’s “no” means, that will show up in the room.
What should Colorado families ask that families elsewhere do not?
Three things are specific to this state.
Ask about travel and coverage area. If you are in Fremont County, Custer County, or the smaller Front Range towns, ask whether the provider actually staffs your area or whether “we serve all of Colorado” means a technician who may or may not materialize. Ask what happens on snow days.
Ask about the waitlist, in weeks. Not “we have availability,” but how many weeks until my child is receiving services, and what happens in the meantime.
Ask about setting. Clinic, in-home, school, or some combination. Each has trade-offs, and the right answer depends on where your child’s hardest moments actually happen. If mornings fall apart at home, a clinic-based program may never see the behavior it is meant to address.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
And, you are not being difficult by asking these questions. You are doing exactly what a good provider hopes a parent will do, and any provider who bristles at them has answered the most important question already.
At OGBC, we run clinics in Louisville and Florence and provide in-home and school-based services across Colorado. We would rather you interview us hard and decide we are not the right fit than for you to start and decide this later.
We’re here when you’re ready to talk.
Reach Out
Bring your list. Contact us and ask us all ten.
