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).

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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.

"Please" Is Polite, But Is It Necessary? Rethinking Politeness Markers for Kids with Autism (3 of 3)

Hans Nakdimen

Sep 8

3 min read

In our last post, we raised a question and set it aside: is teaching a child to say thank you actually high on the list of things a child with autism needs to learn? We argued that the how of teaching, behavior first, understanding later, matters regardless of the answer. Now let us actually answer the question.

Polite Is Not the Same as Necessary

Saying please and thank you is socially expected. Nobody disputes that it is polite. But polite and necessary are two different things, and for a child with autism, that distinction matters more than it does for most children.

Consider two requests: can you give me the water, and please give me the water. Both are equally polite. Both get the water. Neither one is ruder or more effective than the other. The word please does not add function, it adds a social convention layered on top of an already complete, already polite request.

The Hidden Cost of Teaching Please

Here is where it gets more complicated than it first looks. If we decide please is worth teaching, we are not just teaching one word. We are teaching a child to insert it correctly: can you please give me the water, or please can you give me the water, both valid, both requiring the child to track where in the sentence the word belongs. For a child who is already working hard to construct can you give me the water at all, adding a floating politeness marker with no fixed position is a real additional demand, not a small one.

This mirrors a pattern in augmentative and alternative communication research: AAC and language intervention consistently distinguishes between core vocabulary, the small set of high frequency, high function words that carry the most communicative weight, and fringe vocabulary, which is useful but not essential to getting a message across. Functionally, please behaves like fringe vocabulary. It decorates a request. It does not carry it.

The ABC Question Still Applies

It is worth being clear about something: teaching please and thank you the same way we described in our last post is entirely possible. The same ABCs, antecedent, behavior, consequence, that build any other skill can build these too. A child can learn to say please through consistent reinforcement, exactly like learning to say thank you, exactly like learning to dress appropriately for a courtroom. That was never in question.

The real question is not whether we can teach it. It is whether teaching it should come first. In years of working with children with more significant support needs, the pattern is consistent: limiting the language required to make a request or complete an activity tends to produce faster, more reliable success than layering in softer social norms before the core skill is solid. A child who reliably gets water by any clear means has succeeded. A child still working toward being understood at all, while also being expected to remember please, often ends up succeeding at neither.

Where Please Actually Belongs on the List

None of this means please is off limits or that we tell parents to skip it. For a child who already has strong functional communication, layering in social politeness markers is a reasonable, low cost next step, and many families understandably want it taught. The point is priority, not prohibition. If a child cannot yet reliably request water at all, spending scarce teaching time and tolerance for repetition on please instead of on the request itself is spending a limited resource on the wrong target.

This is the same logic we laid out when we talked about stripping unnecessary words from schedules and requesting systems: every word we ask a child to produce competes for the same limited attention and processing capacity. The question worth asking for any word, please included, is not is this polite, but is this the most efficient path to the child successfully communicating what they need.

A Practical Way to Think About It

A useful test: does removing this word change whether the request succeeds? Remove please from please give me the water and the request still works perfectly. Remove water from give me the water and it falls apart completely. That difference is the difference between a core, necessary word and a fringe, optional one. Teaching priority should follow that line, not our own sense of what sounds polite to an adult ear.

At Imagination ABA Therapy, every treatment plan is built around what actually helps a specific child communicate, not a generic checklist of social niceties. We proudly accept NJ Medicaid with no waitlist for eligible families, and our team offers services in both English and Spanish.