Hello!
I would love to introduce myself 🙂
My name is Kaylyn Weber, and I own Small Steps ABA. If you are interested in learning more about my story, you are welcome to click here, but in this post, I won’t talk about myself.Â
No, I would rather spend my time talking about Small Steps, specifically what kind of things we love to do daily and what services we love to provide around Olympia.
Small Steps’ mission has always been to support young children and teens, helping children grow their communication, support their development, and ultimately provide a safe and neurodivergent affirming environment.
At Small Steps ABA, we take that mission seriously. One of the ways we do this is by giving all of our staff significant in-person training.
In-person staff training
At Small Steps, we take your safety seriously. We take it so seriously we ensure that every single staff member gets over 40 hours of training with me, and 40 hours of training with our other staff members.
During those many hours of training, some of the most important things we talk about are assent, child autonomy, and Trauma Informed Care.
Why? Because we believe that to help support your child in their overall development, we need to start with safety, ensure joy, and build trust from the very beginning.
Training on Child Autonomy
By focusing on autonomy, we ensure that at every point, your child knows they are safe and have control over what is happening to them and around them. Our staff shows this support of autonomy by letting the child teach us about what is important to them.
Rather than stepping in and pulling your child to the next activity, we will encourage, support, and follow your child’s lead so that when they are ready to learn, we are right there to teach them.
As providers, we need to ensure that we teach the proper lesson. That means when your child tells us they are not working on something, we seek to learn the why before asking them to complete difficult things. This allows us to ensure that your child is willing and ready to learn what we are trying to teach them!
Training on Child Assent
When we train on assent, it is very similar! The critical thing our staff are trained to do during this period is notice and understand your child’s actions. By getting to know your child, we can understand when they want to hang out with us and when they want to be alone.
By respecting your child’s voice, especially when they want to be alone, we can teach them that they have a voice. Once they have trust that we can hear them, teaching them to communicate in other ways flows even faster!
Child assent-based care will look like our therapist first watching, listening, and following your child’s lead. Before we step into making changes and asking your child to work with us, we first learn how they play, what makes them smile, and how we can best contribute to their play!
Training on Trauma Informed Care
Finally, a primary step in the training process is extensive instruction on trauma-informed care. Trauma-informed care is simply an approach that many providers take to ensure your child feels safe and secure with us. This means that whether we are on day one of therapy or day 100, we are constantly making sure your child feels secure with us.
What trauma-informed care therapy looks like is first noticing and being aware of your child’s specific needs. That does not mean your child has trauma, but rather getting to know their preferences. We want to know what makes your kid smile wide and what things they might look to avoid.
Next, after we learn more about your child, the next step is to work around any specific needs so we can still make lots of progress on those big goals we set! This will look like our staff encouraging, coaching, and comforting your child through the hard moments.
The Small Steps Mission
All of the training provided to our staff is for one purpose… We want to help you and your child feel safe and secure in our care. By diving headfirst into training, we can ensure you and your family receive high-quality care.
From day one, our passionate Small Steps staff will get to know you and your child so we can provide compassionate and professional services.
We do this because our mission has always been to support young children and teens, helping them grow their communication, support their development, and ultimately provide a safe and neurodivergent affirming environment.
And we do that by teaching from joy.