Collaborative Partnerships with Families in ABA
How to Build Collaborative Partnerships with Families in ABA
Picture this. You wrote a technically strong treatment plan. The goals are clear, the procedures are sound, and there's a data sheet for everything. The family seemed on board at intake. Three months later, sessions start getting canceled, and then the family stops showing up.
If that has happened to you, you're in good company. And in most cases, nobody did anything wrong. The science was fine. What was missing was the partnership.
A 2024 paper in Behavior Analysis in Practice by Horbanczuk, Fettig, and Luna looked closely at what gets in the way of real collaboration between behavior analysts and families, and what helps. This post walks through what they found and the practical tools I use to build partnerships with caregivers from the very first meeting.
Why Collaboration Breaks Down (Even When the Plan Is Good)
One of the clearest findings in Horbanczuk et al. (2024) is that families often describe ABA treatment plans as too prescriptive. When a plan feels like it was written for a family instead of with them, some families never try to build a relationship with their behavior analyst at all. Some walk away from services entirely.
The authors point out that behavior analysts can lean so heavily on the science of ABA that we overlook what families already know: their routines, their culture, what a Tuesday evening at their house actually looks like. That knowledge is data. A plan that ignores it is harder to follow, and a plan that's hard to follow usually doesn't get followed.
The good news is that collaboration is a skill. It can be learned, practiced, and improved like any other part of our work.
The Three Layers of Barriers to Family Collaboration
Horbanczuk et al. (2024) describe barriers to collaboration at three levels. I find it helpful to picture an iceberg, because most of what makes partnership hard sits below the surface.
Systemic barriers. Funders shape goals and hours. The authors give the example of a family who wants to work on toothbrushing, and a funder who decides that goal isn't medically necessary. You end up caught in the middle. Families are also trying to understand a health care system that is hard to navigate, and few parents were ever taught what services exist or how to ask for what they need.
Implementation barriers. Plans that feel too prescriptive. Families who feel left out of decisions. BCBAs who feel like they can't get buy-in. Both sides end up frustrated, often without saying so.
Training barriers. Most of us got extensive training in behavior change procedures and very little in how to build a working relationship with a parent. That's a gap in how our field prepares practitioners, not a personal failing.
You can't fix the whole iceberg on your own. But you can get better at the part that's in your hands: how you communicate, plan, and share decisions with families.
Why Families Say Yes to Plans They Can't Follow
Have you ever left a session feeling great about the plan, only to learn a week later that none of it happened at home?
It's easy to read that as a buy-in problem. Horbanczuk et al. (2024) offer another explanation. Families may feel obligated to agree with everything their behavior analyst recommends, because they worry that questioning the plan could put their child's services at risk. So they say yes to strategies they already know won't fit their life.
Most of us never set out to hold that kind of power, and many of us would be surprised to hear a family felt that way. But we are the ones shaping the services, and families bring their own history into the room too: past providers, plans that didn't work, times they felt judged.
That changes how we can interpret a parent who nods along and then doesn't follow through. It may be the most useful information you get all month, because it tells you the plan or the relationship needs adjusting. (If cancellations are part of the picture, Why Caregivers Cancel (And What to Do About It) digs into that side.)
One sentence I use early and often:
"If something I suggest doesn't feel doable, I really want you to tell me. That helps us adjust the plan so it works for your family."
How to Build Collaborative Partnerships with Families: 4 Practical Steps
Step 1: Start with what the family values
Where do your parent training goals come from right now? A curriculum, the funder, the last assessment? Horbanczuk et al. (2024) encourage behavior analysts to co-construct values with families first, then build goals that honor those values along with agency and funder requirements.
Two questions I ask every family before setting a single goal:
3 Wishes. "What are three wishes you have for your child? For your family? For yourself?" The wishes for the family and for the parent show you what daily life needs to look like for any plan to stick.
The time question. "If you weren't spending these hours each week in ABA therapy, how would you spend that time as a family?" Answers like "we'd go to the park" or "we'd finally eat dinner together" point straight to goals that matter.
The authors share an example of a family who values mealtime as a time to gather, while the funder is focused on core deficits. Our job is to find the goal that honors both. For a deeper walkthrough of this step, see Using Caregiver Values to Drive Behavior Plan Goals.
Step 2: Listen for the goals hidden in everyday comments
Parents tell us their goals all the time, usually not when we ask. Listen for phrases like:
"I just wish..."
"Maybe one day..."
"Will they ever..."
"I hope that..."
These often come out in passing: at the door, during a hard moment, while you're packing up. "I just wish we could go to the grocery store together" is a goal, and it might be the most important one you hear that month.
Horbanczuk et al. (2024) describe good communication with families as a progression from perspective-taking to empathy to compassion. Perspective-taking means hearing what a parent says through their lens instead of only through a behavior analyst's lens. Compassion is the action step, where you do something with what you heard: reshape a goal, lighten a demand, or simply reflect it back.
A few sentence starters that help: "I heard you say...", "How about we work on...", "We could try this together...", and "Would you be willing to..."
Step 3: Have the roles conversation early (and come back to it often)
This is the conversation most of us skip, and it takes about a minute. Horbanczuk et al. (2024) explain that clearly establishing each person's responsibilities helps families and practitioners hold each other accountable, and that sets the foundation for rapport and real partnership.
Here's how I open it:
"Before we jump into strategies or goals, I want to spend a few minutes talking about how we'll work together. My role here is to bring behavior science, help make sense of what we're seeing, and offer tools that are backed by research. Your role is just as important. You know your child, your family, and what actually fits into your day-to-day life."
Then come back to it. Roles shift when life does. The authors give the example of a family working on toilet training who just welcomed a new baby. What a parent could take on last month may not be realistic this month, and checking in regularly keeps the plan realistic.
Step 4: Let small behaviors do big work
Taylor, LeBlanc, and Nosik (2019) described compassionate care in behavior analysis from the caregiver's point of view. Many of the behaviors caregivers named are small and observable: regularly asking how the parent is doing, acknowledging mistakes, being patient during training, saying so when treatment isn't working, and respecting the family's cultural values and beliefs.
Nonverbal behavior matters too. Research described in Compassionomics (Trzeciak, Mazzarelli, & Booker, 2019) showed more than 1,300 people the exact same physician-to-patient message. The only difference was the physician's nonverbal cues, like eye contact, sitting at eye level, open posture, and no physical barrier in between. Physicians shown using those cues were rated about 15% higher on both compassion and competence.
That second part is my favorite. Warmth and credibility go up together. Next parent session, try sitting at eye level and moving the laptop out from between you. If you want a simple structure for these moments, The CARES Framework breaks compassionate caregiver communication into five steps.
What Families Gain When They Feel Like Partners
Horbanczuk et al. (2024) note that families who help co-construct their child's interventions tend to report less stress and more confidence. That matters for the child, for follow-through between sessions, and for whether a family stays in services long enough to see real progress.
Four values I try to carry into every session:
Collaboration over compliance
Flexibility over rigidity
Progress over perfection
Support over judgment
None of these require a new protocol. Most of them are things you already do on your best days, done on purpose. And if you want to start before the plan is even written, How to Build Buy-In Before the Behavior Plan Even Starts is a good next read.
Want to Go Deeper?
Everything in this post comes from my CE, Creating Collaborative Relationships in ABA Parent Support. Inside the Parenting with ABA CE Membership, you'll get the full recording, the slide deck, and the Working Together: Parent Support Session Guide, a one-page tool you can use with families to map out what you're working on, who's responsible for what, and one small, realistic next step.
Explore the Parenting with ABA CE Membership here.
References:
Horbanczuk, S., Fettig, A., & Luna, A. (2024). Building collaborative partnerships between behavior analysts and families. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 17(4), 996-1007.
Taylor, B. A., LeBlanc, L. A., & Nosik, M. R. (2019). Compassionate care in behavior analytic treatment: Can outcomes be enhanced by attending to relationships with caregivers? Behavior Analysis in Practice, 12(3), 654-666.
Trzeciak, S., Mazzarelli, A., & Booker, C. (2019). Compassionomics: The revolutionary scientific evidence that caring makes a difference. Studer Group.
