Naturalistic Intervention

Naturalistic Intervention is a collection of practices including environmental arrangement, interaction techniques, and strategies based on applied behavior analysis (ABA) principles, such as modeling and time delay. These practices are designed to help toddlers develop skills in the areas of communication (both prelinguistic and linguistic) and social development by responding to the toddler in ways that are naturally reinforcing, appropriate to the interaction, and build up to more elaborate behaviors. By definition, naturalistic intervention is used across settings and within routines and activities that occur throughout the day by anyone trained in the intervention processes.

Embedding the intervention into a toddler’s natural environment and daily activities encourages generalization of skills and allows the adult to use their insights about a toddler’s interests and expand upon them to reach target behaviors. Naturalistic intervention has demonstrated effectiveness with toddlers with ASD and is appropriate for toddlers of any cognitive level.

A naturalistic intervention is guided by assessment information as well as the daily routines and activities in which the toddler participates. The assessment may include toddler activities that occur at home (e.g., dressing, eating, bathing and bedtime), at a family child care provider’s home (e.g., play time, snack, nap), or at a child care center (e.g., art project, movement time). These activities provide baseline data on the toddler’s behaviors and skills. This module will provide examples of assessment tools and strategies for identifying family routines and activities, including toddlers’ interests. Conversations and structured interviews with families and other team members will help the intervention team identify appropriate activities and routines into which naturalistic intervention can be embedded. Naturalistic interventions also rely upon understanding and building upon a toddler’s interests, which will need to be assessed.

Next, assessment information is used to set target behaviors and identify the environments and interactional contexts in which the target behavior may be elicited. The first approach is to set up the environment with high interest activities to naturally engage the child in social and communication interactions. Data analysis may indicate that ABA strategies are needed to add more structure to the naturalistic context of daily routines and activities. In this instance, the intervention team modifies their naturalistic intervention to include one of these ABA strategies: modeling, mand-model, time delay and incidental teaching.

Data are collected and used on an ongoing basis to determine the success of the naturalistic intervention and/or to modify the intervention. This may include increasing the complexity of the target behavior when it has been successfully met or more intentionally using ABA strategies to strengthen the naturalistic intervention.