Hello, my name is Melissa and I am a Board Certified Behavior Analyst at Achieve Beyond. Today I’m going to talk to you about involving your child’s siblings in ABA therapy sessions. Siblings are the perfect peers to practice new skills with, and you never even need to leave your home. This is a great opportunity to work on social, play, and communication skills without your children even realizing it. This may look like playing board games, imaginative play, structured recreational activities, or the behavior therapist facilitating appropriate social interactions.
For example, playing a game with a sibling may be the perfect way to target taking turns appropriately, or making contextual comments like my turn or your turn. Within these activities, not only is it a good way to target these numerous skills, but it is a great way to help build relationships amongst your children while also teaching them the basics of applied behavior analysis. Your behavior therapist and BCBA will be more than happy to incorporate the whole family into sessions so you can all learn and have fun together.
So here is an example of how you can involve a sibling when playing a game together. You can definitely work on reciprocal play, so one sibling can give the clues while the other is guessing. Here, you can swim in the ocean when you come here. People often come here to surf or play volleyball, and you can build sand castles here. Now the siblings will take turns trying to guess the correct location. When one of them gets beach, you’ll move on to the next one. Okay, so now it’s your turn to give me clues so that I can guess.
