How Much ABA Is Too Much? How Much Is Too Little? The Truth About Dosing ABA for Your Child

In this episode, I'm taking you inside a question that keeps so many parents up at night: how many hours of ABA does my child actually need, and who really decides? I open with a scene from a recent New York Times investigation, a little girl woken from her nap after exactly seven minutes because the clinic couldn't bill insurance while she slept, and I explain why stories like that reveal a system that has, in some places, started making financial decisions in place of clinical ones.I walk you through what the research actually shows about ABA dosage (the studies that found intensive 25 to 40 hour programs help some young children were real and important, but that finding got distorted into the idea that every autistic child needs as many hours as possible, which the science simply doesn't support), and more importantly, how the right number of hours should be determined for your child: their specific developmental needs, the behaviors affecting their safety and learning, and their age. I also share brand new research, an April 2026 study in the Journal of Personalized Medicine from Cortica and NYU, showing that the greatest growth across every developmental domain came from a more integrated, whole child model of care rather than from simply adding hours.And I tell you about Max, a little boy who came to me at three and a half on a required 40 hour per week program: not sleeping, melting down, and losing weight. Once we addressed his sleep, his nutrition, and his sensory needs and rebuilt his schedule around what his nervous system could actually handle, he became a different child, and on fewer hours than before. If you're weighing an ABA prescription right now, I'll give you the exact questions to ask, where the hours happen, the balance of center, home, and community, the ratio of individual to group, and whether there's still room in the week for your child to just be a child.