Explaining a Strategy Is Not the Same as Coaching a Parent
A parent can understand reinforcement and still struggle with what to do at bedtime.
They can understand prompting and still end up doing everything for their child because the morning is rushed.
They can understand why communication is important and still miss the moment when their child needs help communicating because three other things are happening at the same time.
Knowing the concept and using it under real conditions are different skills.
That distinction is important in ABA parent training because it is easy for a session to become mostly explanation. The BCBA teaches a concept, gives examples, answers questions, and the parent says they understand.
That may be exactly what the parent needs if the problem is knowledge.
But if the parent already understands what to do and is having difficulty actually doing it, more explanation may not help very much.
Research on behavioral skills training and caregiver coaching gives us a much better picture of what happens after explanation.
Parent education and parent coaching are not the same thing
Information has a place in parent training.
Parents often need to understand why a recommendation is being made, what to look for, and what they are trying to accomplish.
But information alone does not tell you whether the caregiver can use the strategy.
One large randomized clinical trial illustrates the distinction. Bearss and colleagues randomly assigned 180 families of young autistic children with disruptive behavior to either behavioral parent training or parent education. Parent education provided information about autism but did not teach behavioral management strategies. The parent-training condition taught specific strategies and included opportunities to practice and apply them. Children whose parents received behavioral parent training showed greater reductions in disruptive behavior and noncompliance than those in the education condition (Bearss et al., 2015).
That study does not tell us that one specific coaching component caused the difference. The interventions differed in several ways.
But it does illustrate something clinically important: providing information to parents and teaching parents to use behavioral strategies are different interventions.
Understanding the concept is only one part of the job
This is something I talk about in the video below.
A technically accurate explanation is not automatically a useful explanation. Parents generally do not need the same depth of terminology BCBAs use with one another. They need enough understanding to make useful decisions with their own child.
And even then, understanding is only part of it.
As I put it in the video:
“Understanding the concept and being able to use it are not the same thing.”
[EMBED VIDEO HERE: Explaining ABA to Parents / current video]
The live parent-training session is especially valuable for the things that cannot be accomplished just by giving someone information: listening, observing, practicing, giving feedback, figuring out why something did not work, adjusting the strategy, and connecting what the parent learned to what is actually happening with their child.
Behavioral skills training gives us one useful model
Behavioral skills training, or BST, typically includes four components:
Instruction → Modeling → Rehearsal → Feedback
There is a substantial research base supporting BST for teaching caregivers behavioral procedures.
Schaefer and Andzik reviewed 20 single-case studies representing 67 individual parent cases. Parents were successfully taught a range of evidence-based practices using BST, with parents of children with autism or intellectual disability making up most of the participants (Schaefer & Andzik, 2021).
A newer systematic review by Ampuero and Courtenay examined 14 studies specifically using BST to teach caregivers to implement mand-training procedures with autistic children. The results supported BST as an effective caregiver-training approach in that context, while the authors also identified unanswered questions about training dosage, setting, booster training, and whether the child should be present during training (Ampuero & Courtenay, 2026).
So there is good reason for BCBAs to know how to use BST.
But simply saying “use BST with parents” still misses part of the clinical decision.
What happens when you add practice and feedback?
One study is particularly relevant to the difference between explaining and coaching.
Drifke, Tiger, and Wierzba taught parents to implement three-step prompting and differential reinforcement. They introduced components of BST progressively: written instructions, modeling, and then rehearsal with performance feedback.
Written instructions improved parent performance. Adding modeling improved some aspects further.
But the parents did not reach the study's mastery criterion until the full package, including rehearsal and performance feedback, was available. The trained skills also generalized to untaught tasks (Drifke et al., 2017). ScienceDirect
That does notmean every parent needs every BST component for every skill.
The study involved a small number of parents learning one particular intervention, and BST component-analysis research does not justify assuming the same sequence is necessary in every situation.
What it does show is that a caregiver can improve after receiving instruction and seeing a model without yet being able to perform the skill at mastery.
Sometimes you do not discover that until you ask the caregiver to try it.
Practice gives you information that discussion cannot
Imagine Maria is learning to prompt Eli to request a break.
You explain the strategy.
Maria tells you when she should prompt the request and why.
She answers every question correctly.
If the session ends there, you know Maria understands the strategy.
Now have her practice.
You may discover that Maria:
waits until Eli is already very distressed before prompting;
prompts several times in rapid succession;
provides the break before Eli has an opportunity to communicate;
gives more help than the agreed prompting procedure calls for;
or performs the procedure easily in role-play but struggles when Eli is actually upset.
Those are completely different coaching problems.
You would not have found them by asking Maria whether she understood the procedure.
That is one of the most useful functions of rehearsal. It is not just another teaching activity.
It gives you assessment information.
Caregiver coaching is broader than BST
BST is especially useful when a caregiver needs to acquire a specific observable skill.
But caregiver coaching includes more than skill rehearsal.
Pellecchia and colleagues described five major components of effective caregiver coaching:
authentic learning experiences within real routines;
collaborative decision-making;
demonstration;
in-vivo feedback; and
reflection and problem solving (Pellecchia et al., 2023).
That broader definition matters.
Sometimes the parent does need to practice a skill.
Sometimes the more important work is figuring out which skill makes sense to teach in the first place.
Sometimes the parent can already perform it accurately, but it does not fit their life.
Sometimes the intervention needs to change.
That is coaching too.
BCBAs may be talking to parents more than they are coaching them
Pellecchia and colleagues observed 25 typical early-intervention sessions and coded providers' use of established caregiver-coaching strategies.
They found low overall use of coaching strategies and considerable variation between providers. The authors identified collaboration and in-vivo feedback as areas particularly important to strengthen (Pellecchia et al., 2023). Sage Journals
That finding is worth thinking about because a session can feel very active without containing much coaching.
The BCBA might:
explain a behavioral concept;
discuss the child's week;
answer questions;
make recommendations;
give examples;
review progress.
All of those things may be appropriate.
But if the caregiver never practices, the BCBA never observes implementation, and the family never examines what happened when they tried the strategy at home, the BCBA may know very little about whether the caregiver can actually use what was discussed.
Know, Do, or Fit?
A useful way to decide what kind of support the caregiver needs is to ask whether the problem is Know, Do, or Fit.
Know
The caregiver does not yet understand something important.
Maybe they cannot identify when to use the strategy.
Maybe they do not understand why reinforcement needs to happen quickly.
Maybe they cannot distinguish a communication opportunity from a situation where another response would make more sense.
This is where explanation, examples, visuals, scenarios, or parent-facing teaching materials may be especially useful.
Do
The caregiver understands the strategy but cannot yet perform it independently.
This is where modeling, rehearsal, observation, and feedback become especially important.
The parent may know exactly what they are supposed to do and still need practice doing it when things are happening quickly.
Fit
The caregiver understands the strategy andcan perform it.
But they are not using it in daily life.
That does not automatically mean they need more training.
Maybe the strategy has six steps and needs to happen during the most difficult ten minutes of the family's morning.
Maybe the parent is trying to implement it while caring for several other children.
Maybe two caregivers are expected to coordinate their responses but rarely see each other.
Maybe the parent can perform the strategy perfectly with the BCBA but thinks the effort is not worth the benefit.
In those situations, another round of BST may be beside the point.
The intervention may need to change.
Practice should eventually look like real life
Role-play can be very useful.
It allows a parent to practice without having to manage the child at the same time, and it gives the BCBA a chance to isolate a specific skill.
But eventually you want to know what happens under the conditions where the caregiver actually needs the skill.
Pellecchia and colleagues specifically include practice within authentic daily routines as a component of caregiver coaching. They note that incorporating intervention into existing routines can support usefulness and generalization while avoiding the burden of creating separate activities for the family (Pellecchia et al., 2023).
Frost and Ingersoll's recent work on caregiver coaching identified a similar set of potential active ingredients: collaborative goal setting, didactic material, demonstration/modeling, practice and feedback, planning for practice, and reflection on practice. Caregivers and providers described concrete practice plans tied to daily routines as making implementation feel more feasible and achievable (Frost & Ingersoll, 2026).
So coaching may progress something like this:
Explain → Model → Role-play → Practice with the child → Practice in the routine where it matters
That is not a required sequence for every family.
It is a progression you can use when the caregiver needs increasing levels of support.
“They can do it in session” is not the same as generalization
Suppose Daniel reaches 90% fidelity while the BCBA is sitting beside him.
That is useful.
But the family did not ask for Daniel to perform the strategy in front of the BCBA.
They need him to be able to use it at dinner, when the BCBA is not there, another child needs something, food is cooking, and everyone is tired.
Generalization and maintenance should not be assumed.
Hong and colleagues reviewed 34 studies of caregiver-delivered social-communication interventions for autistic children. Although many baseline-to-generalization and maintenance comparisons showed positive effects, intervention-to-generalization and maintenance comparisons were more mixed, with some effects becoming smaller or deteriorating over time (Hong et al., 2018).
So reaching fidelity during a coached session should not automatically end the assessment.
The next question is:
Can the caregiver use the skill where they actually need it?
Feedback should tell the caregiver what to do next
Feedback is not useful because it lets the BCBA score the parent.
It is useful because it helps the caregiver refine the skill.
If Maria completes four of five steps correctly, the point is not to say:
“Maria demonstrated 80% fidelity.”
That may be useful data.
But the coaching question is:
Which step is still difficult, and what support would help?
Maybe Maria consistently forgets to pause after the prompt.
That gives you a very specific thing to practice.
Maybe she performs every step correctly until Eli begins crying, then abandons the procedure.
That tells you something different.
Maybe she performs all five steps but says she would never realistically use the procedure during the morning routine.
Now you are back to Fit.
Good feedback helps you decide what to coach next. It should not turn parent training into an evaluation of whether the caregiver is a “good” implementer.
Reflection is part of coaching too
After a parent practices, there is value in asking them what they noticed.
What felt easy?
What was difficult?
What happened when they changed their response?
What did the child do?
What would make this easier during the week?
Frost and Ingersoll found that caregivers and providers described reflection as helping parents identify what worked and what did not, while giving coaches information they could use to adapt and individualize the intervention (Frost & Ingersoll, 2026).
Reflection may also become an outcome in its own right.
Siller and colleagues studied a family-centered parent-coaching intervention with 70 families of young autistic children. Among parents whose reflective capacity was still emerging at baseline, coaching produced greater growth in reflection and self-evaluation than the comparison condition. The authors suggested that this capacity may help parents apply and adapt strategies flexibly across contexts and routines (Siller et al., 2018). PubMed
That moves us beyond the idea that successful parent training means getting the parent to implement a growing collection of procedures accurately.
The goal is not to make the parent dependent on coaching
A parent should not need the BCBA standing beside them indefinitely.
Over time, you want caregivers to become better at noticing what is happening, identifying patterns, deciding whether a strategy is helping, recognizing when something does not fit, and solving new problems with less support.
That does not mean turning parents into behavior analysts.
The BCBA still brings the deeper clinical analysis.
But the parent can increasingly understand their child and make useful decisions in the situations that occur between sessions.
Frost and Ingersoll's caregiver-coaching model reflects both learning and motivational processes, including caregiver empowerment and self-efficacy. Practice, feedback, planning, and reflection were described not only as ways of improving implementation but also as processes that may increase caregivers' confidence in using strategies outside coaching sessions (Frost & Ingersoll, 2026).
That is a much bigger outcome than procedural fidelity alone.
What might a coached parent-training session look like?
Consider this session:
Daniel reports that Noah has been having difficulty when screen time ends.
BCBA explains why a transition warning may help and describes how to use it.
Daniel says he understands.
At that point, the BCBA knows Daniel understands the recommendation.
Now coaching begins.
BCBA models the procedure.
Daniel practices it in role-play.
During practice, he gives the warning correctly but immediately begins repeating the direction instead of allowing Noah time to respond.
BCBA gives feedback and Daniel tries again.
Later, Daniel practices during an actual transition with Noah. He uses the warning and waits, but when Noah begins protesting, Daniel starts negotiating for several minutes.
That gives the BCBA another piece of information to work with.
Daniel and BCBA talk about what happened, why waiting became difficult, and what would make the strategy more manageable during the evening routine.
Now the session has produced much more than “Daniel verbalized understanding.”
It has shown:
what Daniel knows;
what he can do;
where he needs coaching;
what happens when Noah responds;
and whether the strategy fits the routine.
That information gives the next session somewhere to start.
Not every session needs every coaching component
It would be easy to read the BST research and conclude that every parent-training session should contain instruction, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback.
That is not what the evidence tells us.
BST is well supported for teaching specific caregiver skills, but there is much less research identifying exactly which components are necessary for every caregiver, skill, and context.
Drifke and colleagues found that the full package was necessary for mastery in their study. That does not mean full BST is always necessary (Drifke et al., 2017).
A parent may already know and perform the skill.
Another may need only a brief model.
Another may need repeated rehearsal.
Another may be performing the skill perfectly and need help modifying a plan that does not work in the home.
The intervention should match what the caregiver needs.
Parent-facing education can free the live session for coaching
This distinction is also one of the reasons parent-facing resources can be useful.
If every session requires the BCBA to spend 30 minutes recreating an explanation of reinforcement, prompting, communication, or transitions, there is less time available to observe, practice, problem-solve, and individualize.
A parent-facing lesson can provide some of the Know.
The live session can then focus more heavily on Doand Fit.
That does not mean the parent has to complete homework before every session. Some parents will review material independently. Others will go through it with the BCBA.
The point is not to replace the BCBA.
It is to preserve more of the BCBA's time for the work that requires clinical judgment.
Coaching gives you better data too
Once the caregiver actually practices, you have much more meaningful information to measure.
Instead of documenting:
Parent verbalized understanding of transition strategies.
you may be able to document:
Daniel independently implemented 4 of 5 steps during three practice opportunities and required feedback on allowing adequate response time before repeating the instruction.
That information can guide the next session.
It can also help you see whether a caregiver's difficulty is improving over time.
For more on choosing caregiver measures—including fidelity, implementation outside sessions, parent stress, self-efficacy, child outcomes, and family outcomes—see What Should You Measure in ABA Parent Training?
And for examples of turning caregiver practice and performance into stronger documentation, see What to Include in an ABA Parent Training Note.
Use the Session Companion to plan for more than discussion
The free ACHIEVE Session Companioncan help you decide what you actually want to accomplish during the parent-training session.
You can identify the caregiver goal, capture what happened since the last session, document practice and performance, record barriers, and decide what needs to happen next.
That helps keep parent training from becoming either a lecture or a series of unrelated conversations.
Download the Free ACHIEVE Session Companion
Explaining a strategy is sometimes exactly what a parent needs.
But when the parent already knows what to do, the next step may be to see them do it.
And once they try, you often learn much more about what kind of support they actually need.
References
Ampuero, M. E., & Courtenay, S. J. (2026). Using behavioral skills training to teach caregivers to implement mand training with their children with autism spectrum disorders: A systematic review of the single case research. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. doi:10.1007/s10803-026-07434-w.
Bearss, K., Johnson, C., Smith, T., Lecavalier, L., Swiezy, N., Aman, M., McAdam, D. B., Butter, E., Stillitano, C., Minshawi, N., Sukhodolsky, D. G., Mruzek, D. W., Turner, K., Neal, T., Hallett, V., Mulick, J. A., Green, B., Handen, B., Deng, Y., Dziura, J., & Scahill, L. (2015). Effect of parent training vs parent education on behavioral problems in children with autism spectrum disorder: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 313(15), 1524–1533. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.3150.
Drifke, M. A., Tiger, J. H., & Wierzba, B. C. (2017). Using behavioral skills training to teach parents to implement three-step prompting: A component analysis and generalization assessment. Learning and Motivation, 57, 1–14. doi:10.1016/j.lmot.2016.12.001.
Frost, K. M., & Ingersoll, B. (2026). Theory of change of caregiver coaching for an early parent-mediated autism intervention. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 56(7), 2815–2831. doi:10.1007/s10803-025-06767-2.
Hong, E. R., Neely, L., Gerow, S., & Gann, C. (2018). The effect of caregiver-delivered social-communication interventions on skill generalization and maintenance in ASD. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 74, 57–71. doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2018.01.006.
Pellecchia, M., Mandell, D. S., Beidas, R. S., Dunst, C. J., Tomczuk, L., Newman, J., Zeigler, L., & Stahmer, A. C. (2023). Parent coaching in early intervention for autism spectrum disorder: A brief report. Journal of Early Intervention, 45(2), 185–197. doi:10.1177/10538151221095860.
Schaefer, J. M., & Andzik, N. R. (2021). Evaluating behavioral skills training as an evidence-based practice when training parents to intervene with their children. Behavior Modification, 45(6), 887–910. doi:10.1177/0145445520923996.
Siller, M., Hotez, E., Swanson, M., Delavenne, A., Hutman, T., & Sigman, M. (2018). Parent coaching increases the parents' capacity for reflection and self-evaluation: Results from a clinical trial in autism. Attachment & Human Development, 20(3), 287–308. doi:10.1080/14616734.2018.1446737.
