A family in Pikesville gets the call in late spring: the evaluation is finished, the diagnosis is confirmed, and now there is a name for what they have been noticing since their son turned two. Then comes the second call, the one nobody prepares parents for, the one that says the earliest opening for services is ten weeks out. The waiting is its own kind of hard, not because nothing is happening, but because so much feels like it should be happening and isn't yet.
Parents ask the same question in different words: what am I supposed to do until the wait is over? The honest answer is that the weeks before therapy starts are not empty time. They can be used, deliberately, to make the eventual work land faster and go further, especially in a household that already runs on its own rhythms: meals, bedtimes, the walk to the mailbox, the fifteen minutes before school pickup.
Building a Record Before Anyone Arrives
A behavior analyst who has never met a child still needs to understand that child, and parents are the ones who hold the details a chart cannot capture. Writing down what a typical morning looks like, what triggers a meltdown at the grocery store, which words or gestures already get a response, gives the eventual BCBA a running start instead of a blank page. Simple notes on a phone, a few lines a day, tend to be more useful than one long essay written once and forgotten.
School records matter here too. If a child already has an IEP or is partway through an FBA at school, gathering those documents now means the intake conversation starts from what is already known rather than repeating it. Families in Baltimore and Pikesville working through Maryland's public school system often find that the school's documentation and the eventual home-based program need to speak the same language, and that alignment is easier to build before the first session than after.
Keeping the Routines That Already Work
The instinct during a wait is often to try something new: a different bedtime, a new reward chart, in case it helps before help arrives. In practice, consistency tends to matter more than novelty. A household routine that a child already tolerates, even imperfectly, is a foundation an RBT can build on later. Changing it right before therapy begins can erase information a professional would otherwise use to see what already works and what does not. For a closer look at what that stretch of time is really for, see Able Minds ABA, whose team spends a good part of every intake call walking families through exactly this kind of preparation.
Parents can also start noticing, without judgment, what happens in the natural environment: which requests get ignored, which transitions cause the most friction, whether a sibling's presence changes behavior. None of this requires training. It requires attention, and a little patience with the fact that answers are still weeks away.
What the First Weeks of Services Actually Look Like
Once services begin, the pace is rarely dramatic. The first sessions are largely about the RBT and BCBA observing, gathering baseline data, and testing which reinforcers actually motivate a specific child rather than a hypothetical one. Parents sometimes expect visible change within days and feel let down when the early sessions look more like careful watching than active teaching. That watching, though, is what makes the teaching that follows accurate instead of generic to any family.
The transition from waitlist to active services also tends to go more smoothly for families who used the wait to get their own household ready, not just their paperwork. A parent who has already practiced sitting through a short, structured activity with a child, even five minutes of it, gives the incoming team something concrete to shape rather than starting from zero. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, early and consistent developmental support is one of the more consistently cited factors in outcomes research, though every child's course is different and no provider can promise a particular result.
The wait is uncomfortable precisely because it feels like lost time. It rarely is. Families who use those weeks to observe, document, and hold steady are often the ones who look back and say the delay did not cost them as much as they feared, because the work that mattered had already started at their own kitchen table.
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