Does Imagination ABA Therapy have a waitlist?

No. We provide in-home ABA therapy with no waitlist, so your child can start care quickly.

What insurance do you accept?

We accept most major insurance plans and all NJ Medicaid (NJ FamilyCare).

What areas do you serve?

We serve families throughout New Jersey, from Atlantic City to Newark and everywhere in between.

Do you offer services in Spanish?

Yes. Our team provides ABA therapy and family support in both English and Spanish.

Beyond the Data: How BCBAs Build Genuine Rapport with Parents (Part 2 of 3)

Hans Nakdimen

Sep 3

6 min read

Part 2 of 3 in our series on rapport across the ABA team. In Part 1, we named the problem: rapport gets treated as optional at every level of an ABA team, not just between the BT and the client. This post and the next one are about the fix, starting with the relationship that shapes everything a family experiences: the one between a BCBA and a parent.

What Parent Training Actually Is

Before discussing rapport itself, it's worth clarifying what parent training actually is. At its core, it's a clinical discussion between a BCBA and a parent: what's happening in session, what the data shows, and where real progress is being made.

The real work lies in translating what's succeeding in session, or at school, into the home environment. A client is often comfortable, structured, and closely supervised in those settings; at home, none of that holds. A child is at ease in their own house in a way they aren't anywhere else, the structure is different, the oversight is different, and the intervention itself usually has to be adapted rather than copied over to get the same result. Differentiating between environments while still landing on the same outcome is the real clinical challenge of parent training, and doing that well starts with the same thing we keep coming back to: the relationship between the parent and the BCBA.

The Power Structure Problem

That relationship is where a lot of BCBAs get tripped up, because it's easy to bring the wrong instincts to it. A BT reports to a BCBA. That's the nature of clinical supervision, and it's appropriate; BTs are supposed to follow the BCBA's direction. The trouble starts when a BCBA carries that same top-down structure into parent training. Parent training isn't a therapy session, and a parent isn't a client in the same sense a BT is a supervisee. A parent has their own emotions, their own needs, and their own life outside the time you have with them each week. They don't want to be lectured. They want to be heard, and once they trust you, they'll actually follow through on what you're asking of them.

What “Relationship” Actually Means Here

None of this means dropping the professional role, just aiming it at the right target. To be clear: when we talk about a BCBA building a relationship with a parent, we mean trust, understanding, and connection, not anything resembling a personal or social relationship. The BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts is explicit that the therapeutic relationship carries a real power imbalance that behavior analysts are responsible for protecting, and that boundary matters. But protecting a professional boundary and building genuine trust aren't in conflict; they're both part of the same job. A BCBA who is only ever directive, who never actually listens to a parent, doesn't have a bad relationship with that family. They just don't have one at all. And without it, even a clinically sound plan won't get implemented consistently at home.

Why the Relationship Sometimes Has to Be Forced (and Why That's OK)

That kind of trust rarely shows up on its own, which leads to an uncomfortable truth: a lot of that initial rapport has to be forced. In a real friendship, forcing the relationship is a bad sign. In ABA, it's often necessary, and it's fine. Forcing it here doesn't mean anything artificial or insincere. It means the BCBA has to be the one who consistently shows up: showing the parent that they care, that they have the parent's back, that they're available, and that they'll give real direction and guidance. A parent won't know any of that up front. They learn it because the BCBA keeps showing it, whether or not the parent was asking for it that particular week. And once a parent sees that the guidance actually works, they follow it, not because the relationship was organic from day one, but because it was consistently and deliberately built.

Avoiding the Bull in the China Shop

When that deliberate work never happens, this is usually what fills the gap instead. Most BCBAs don't love doing parent training. It's common, if underdiscussed. Because of that, parent training often gets treated as optional: pushed off, minimized, done inconsistently, until a BCBA shows up sporadically, delivers a lot of feedback at once, and disappears again. That's the bull in the china shop: abrupt, disruptive, with no groundwork laid beforehand. Both sides usually find it aversive. Parents dread the meeting, BCBAs avoid scheduling it, and that mutual aversiveness is exactly what a lot of families are picking up on when they say their BCBA “doesn't really talk to us.”

The fix isn't a stricter schedule. It's changing what the interaction actually is. When parent training looks less like a mandatory formal session and more like ongoing discussion and guidance, built on an actual relationship, the friction drops out of it. That's a much more conducive environment for a child to actually grow in, because the parent and the BCBA are working from the same page instead of past each other.

Give Parents One Thing, Not Everything

Here's what that ongoing discussion looks like in practice. The instinct when something isn't working is to tell parents everything that needs to change. In practice, that backfires: an overwhelmed parent doesn't follow through, they shut down. What works instead is picking one small, specific, realistic target and building the week around it, rather than saving everything for a single meeting every one or two weeks.

Instead of one weekly or biweekly sit-down covering the whole plan, set up short, frequent touchpoints throughout the week: a 10 to 15 minute call, a few text messages, a quick email thread, all centered on that one small thing. Something concrete. Something the parent is actually willing and able to do. Not every touchpoint needs to be a formal, scheduled session either. Some parents want that structure and some don't, and meeting them where they actually are is part of removing the friction in the first place.

Examples of “One Small Thing”

What counts as a good target depends on the family and the goal, but the common thread is the same: small, doable, and specific enough that progress is obvious within a few days.

Waiting 30 seconds, then a minute, then two minutes before responding to crying or a request, instead of responding instantly every time.
Shifting bedtime 15 minutes earlier every few nights instead of jumping straight from 9:00 to 6:30.
Keeping the same bedtime routine every night, such as brush teeth, one book, lights out, instead of a routine that changes night to night. A visual routine chart can make this concrete for a child who does better with a picture sequence than a verbal one.
Putting one new, non-preferred food on the plate alongside familiar foods, with zero pressure to eat it.
Giving a five-minute warning and a visual timer before ending a preferred activity, instead of an abrupt “time's up.”
Practicing one clear, one-step direction at a time (“put the cup on the table”) instead of multi-step chains.
Modeling one functional word, sign, or AAC button consistently at one specific routine, like snack time, instead of prompting communication everywhere at once. A simple recordable button is often an easy first step for a family that hasn't used AAC before.
Letting the child attempt one step of a self-care task independently, like pulling their pants up after the bathroom, even if it's slow or imperfect.
Setting a consistent, timer-based end to screen time with a two-minute warning, paired with a preferred next activity.
Assigning one tiny daily responsibility, like throwing away a napkin or putting a toy in a bin, with immediate praise when it happens.

The Check-Ins Are the Relationship

Whatever the target, the target itself is really just the excuse. What actually builds the relationship is what happens in between: the quick check-in asking how it went, the “you're doing great, keep going,” the “is this too hard, want to try something a little easier instead?” That's how a parent gets to experience a real win, and how you get to show them, concretely, that what you're doing works.

Those short conversations end up being about more than just the one intervention, too. Something else comes up: a question about school, a hard morning, a worry they hadn't mentioned before. That's not a distraction from the work; that is the work. It's not about becoming a parent's friend. It's a fine line, but the goal is for that parent to feel like you're someone they can actually talk to when something comes up, not just someone who shows up every two weeks with a list of what to fix.

The Payoff

Do this consistently, and the difference shows up fast. When rapport with a family is strong, everything else gets easier. Parents follow through between sessions. They flag concerns early instead of after they've become crises. They trust the plan enough to stick with it through the parts that are slow or uncomfortable. None of that is possible without the relationship underneath it, which is exactly why rapport isn't a soft skill BCBAs pick up eventually. It's part of the clinical work from day one.

Everything here has been about the family side of the equation. In Part 3, we turn to the other relationship that shapes a case just as much: how BCBAs build that same trust with the Behavior Technicians they supervise. See Leading with Trust: How BCBAs Build Rapport with Behavior Technicians.