Why I Stopped Pushing My Students to Practice (And What I Do Instead)

For twenty years, I've worked with children with autism as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. I've sat on living room floors, I've worked in classrooms, I've watched parents exhaust themselves trying to get their child to practice a skill until it sticks.

And for most of those twenty years, I thought repetition was the answer.

Then I got certified in Tiny Habits® — a behavior change method developed by Stanford researcher BJ Fogg — and I had to quietly rethink everything.

Not because I was wrong about behavior science. But because I finally had language for the part I'd been doing right all along without fully understanding why it worked.

Here's what I know now: repetition without positive emotion just builds resistance.

You can drill a skill fifty times. But if the child — or the adult, for that matter — ends each attempt feeling frustrated, pressured, or exhausted, you're not building a habit. You're building an association between that skill and feeling bad.

BJ Fogg, Stanford researcher and author of Tiny Habits, found that emotions are what wire behaviors into place. When a behavior is followed by a genuine feeling of success — even a tiny one — the brain encodes it. That's not pop psychology. That's how learning actually works.

I'd been using this in my ABA practice for years. We celebrate small wins. We follow a child's lead. We make sure therapy feels good — not just once it's working, but from day one. What I didn't realize was that I was doing behavior design — the science of creating conditions where the right behavior becomes easy and feels good.

So now when a parent asks me "how long until my child learns this?" I answer differently than I used to.

I don't talk about repetition. I talk about the conditions — is the skill small enough to feel winnable? Is there something your child actually wants on the other side of it? And does doing it feel good, or does it feel like pressure?

Get those three things right, and the practice takes care of itself.

This is true for children with autism. It's also true for every parent reading this who has tried to build a new routine and abandoned it by week two.

The science is the same. The person is different. That's the only variable.

If you're a parent of a child with autism in the Tampa area and this way of thinking resonates with you, I'd love to connect. This is exactly how we approach therapy at Happy Luna ABA Therapy — and it's the foundation of everything I teach through my habit coaching practice, Venti Habits.

Small wins make big changes. For your child. And for you.

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— Michelle Ventimiglia, M.S., BCBA | Happy Luna ABA Therapy & Venti Habits