How do people afford ABA therapy

[JoyfulJoyful]

Hello

After asking around for a good ABA Consultant and tutor, I've been told that my 4 year old non verbal son who was recently diagnosed with ASD would probably require 25 hours of therapy a week at about £20 an hour so this has led me here to ask how people are able to afford it.

most people cannot afford such a thing. I know people who did it for a while (self funded - some people just have more money than others after all everybody's circumstances are different) and then went to tribunal to get programmes funded. but you have costs upfront.

Some charities give some funding for ABA and you can use this to build up evidence for a tribunal.

We did a smaller programme in the early days funded with DLA. we only paid the consultant and I did most of the hours myself.

but there is no easy/cheap/simple route to ABA.

My dd is the same age. Through a charity we could've done something called attention autism. Similar to aba. If I'm honest I'm not a fan. It's a bit too close to conditioning for my liking but yes it's very pricey and tutors are hard to find.

We used savings for the initial consultant workshop, and initially I did the tutoring myself. I used DLA to cover the monthly consultant workshops.

After a few months I decided I couldn't do it all myself (some people can, but with a young baby too I was pushing myself a bit too far) so used more savings (and family contributed too) to have an ABA tutor come to us 3 times a week for 2 hours each time, and in (pre) school holidays we upped it to 3* 3 hours.

6 hours a week doesn't sound like much but made a huge difference to DS1, but then he responded incredibly well to ABA techniques. I also use ABA techniques in a gentle way at times throughout the day which has massively helped in areas such as improving speech sounds so he can now be understood by strangers. When we started just before he turned 4 he was also nonverbal. He is now 5.5 years and doesn't stop talking.

However sadly my savings are running out, so we will be stopping 'formal' ABA in a few months time, as even 6 hours a week obviously costs a lot when you add it up (approx £500 a month).

Very similar to PunkyBubba (down to the 5.5 yrs). Started doing it myself, but hard to maintain so bought in the services. Ds extremely responsive and so made massive progress which made it impossible for us to abandon. We got into huge debt, but luckily won funding at Tribunal just in time.

You can do a cheaper version. I started off with about twelve hours and built up over time but never did more than twenty hours. I did not pay 20.00. I did six hours myself. I trained with a consultant myself and two other local mums who applied to be tutors. They both had experience with kids but were not aba tutors. They were paid about 7.00 per hour. The consultant was v expensive but I used dla to pay for her. I did also eventually employ a more experienced tutor as well to do my hours but she was about 15.00 an hour but that was later on.

www.peatni.org/

PEAT is a parent-led charity that provides practical behaviour support to all families across Northern Ireland who wish to avail of behaviour analytic intervention in their home environment. PEAT also provides training to organisations/agencies working directly with individuals with autism spectrum disorder."

Even though it is an NI charity, there is a lot of infomation which could be helpful.

www.simplestepsautism.com/?lang=uk
The Online Teaching Platform for the treatment of Autism.

Caudwell children will put £400 towards ABA if the household earns less than £45K.

I think Caldwell stopped recently giving funding for ABA. real shame.

www.caudwellchildren.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Core-Services-Information-Booklet.pdf

Page 15 is about the ACT program.

Things change though, before paperwork is updated.