Neurodiverse-Affirming: What does it mean at TLBC and how did we get there?

The whole premise behind building The Language and Behavior Center (TLBC) was to create something different. When Dominika and I talked about opening our own ABA company, we kept coming back to the same question: If we could build a company from scratch, what would it look like? What kind of culture would we create? What kind of clinicians would we hope to attract? What kind of experience would we want families to have? Those conversations became the foundation for TLBC.

We knew that if we wanted children to have positive experiences in their ABA sessions, we had to start by creating an exceptional place to work. We invested heavily in mentorship, collaboration, flexibility, and professional development of our staff because we believed supported clinicians provide better care.

As TLBC grew, so did our questions. Once we had built the kind of workplace we envisioned, we found ourselves asking the same question about our clinical work: If we could design therapy from the ground up, what would it look like? What would we teach? How would we teach it? And perhaps most importantly, how could we make sure children felt respected throughout the process?

Around the same time, my own perspective was changing. I was pursuing my PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology, becoming a parent, and intentionally listening to autistic adults describe their experiences with therapy. Those three experiences challenged me in different ways, but they all pushed me toward the same realization:

The goal isn't to change who a child is. It's to help them thrive as themselves.

That realization became the lens through which we started evaluating everything we were doing at TLBC. If the purpose of therapy was to help children thrive as themselves, then every clinical decision had to answer the same question:

Is this helping the child, or is it simply making them appear more neurotypical?

Sometimes the answer reaffirmed what we were already doing. Other times, it led us to make meaningful changes. We moved away from extinction procedures whenever there were effective alternatives that respected children's attempts to communicate. We stopped targeting harmless self-stimulatory behaviors that weren't interfering with learning, choosing instead to focus our energy on communication, independence, safety, relationships, self-advocacy, and the skills that make a meaningful difference in a child's everyday life.

Just as importantly, we built a team that shared this philosophy. We searched for RBTs and BCBAs who were thoughtful, compassionate, and willing to question long-held assumptions in pursuit of better outcomes for the children and families we serve.

So here we are, nine years later, and "neurodiversity-affirming" has become a bit of a buzzword in our field. When I first heard the term, I was excited to learn more about what it meant. At its core, neurodiversity-affirming care recognizes autism as a natural variation in human development rather than something to be "fixed." It means helping children build meaningful skills that improve their quality of life while respecting their individuality, autonomy, and the ways they naturally experience and interact with the world.

As I learned more about neurodiverse-affirming care, I realized that many of the values we'd been building TLBC around from the beginning, including respecting children, prioritizing play, and focusing on meaningful outcomes, fit naturally within that philosophy. We just hadn't had a name for it.

At TLBC, being neurodiversity-affirming isn't just a buzzword we put on our website or marketing materials. It's a commitment to continually examining our practice, listening to autistic voices, and making thoughtful changes when we believe they'll lead to better outcomes for the children and families we serve. It's the philosophy that guides our decisions today, and the one that will continue to shape where we go next.