Everything parents ask us

The resource library and every course are free for parents, with no account, no trial period, and nothing asked in return. Those two have no conditions on them and never will. Video observation is the one service that does have a condition, and it is not money: you grant behavioral research (B), the research permission, so your footage joins the research corpus while a BCBA spends their time watching yours. You are neither charged nor paid for it. Operating costs are covered by licensing behavioral video contributed by opted-in participants in our pay-for-data program, under permissions those families grant one at a time. Families are paid for the grants where somebody profits.

No. A BCBA watches your footage and writes down what they observe: what happened before the behavior, what your child actually did, what followed, and which patterns are visible in those few minutes. It is not advice, a recommendation, a plan, a diagnosis, or treatment. You will not be told what to do. A behavior analyst who has never met your child cannot responsibly tell you that, and we would rather hand you a clear observation than a confident guess. What you do with the observation is yours to decide, ideally with the people who already know your child.

Access is an exchange rather than a giveaway. You grant the research permission (B), your footage joins the research corpus, and in return a BCBA gives you their observation. You are not paid for this, and you are not charged for it. We would rather name that condition than advertise the service as unconditionally free and collect the footage quietly. The resource library and the courses stay free either way, and you can use them without ever granting anything.

No. The guides and courses are written for parents of children with autism, ADHD, and related diagnoses, but the underlying behavioral principles help with challenging behavior in any child. No diagnosis, referral, or registration is required to read everything on this site.

No. We provide parent education based on the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis. It is educational information, not clinical treatment, and it is not a substitute for individualized care from a BCBA, physician, or licensed clinician.

The full course syllabi are already published. Enrollment and the observation portal open once our consent and privacy framework is finalized with legal counsel. Email us and we will notify you at launch.

Opted-in families contribute everyday home videos through a secure portal, and trained reviewers check each one against the published usability criteria. Payment is attached to the two commercial grants: commercial use (C2) and the Institute’s own technology (C3). Granting either one puts you in the paid program at $10 per 15 minutes of usable footage. Research (B) and nonprofit tools (C1) are unpaid. Universities and nonprofits do pay us a licence fee for those, but their licence bars them from selling anything built on your child’s footage, so there is no sale to share with you. Commercial research sits in C2, not B, so nobody can buy commercial access at an unpaid rate. Payment details, the usability criteria, and which grants are paid will all be in the program terms before enrollment opens.

commercial use (C2) and our own technology (C3). Somebody profits at the end of both, so the family whose child is in the footage gets a share: $10 per 15 minutes of usable footage. Research run by a company sits in the commercial grant rather than the research one, which is deliberate, so no business can buy commercial access at an unpaid rate. behavioral research (B) and nonprofit tools (C1) earn nothing. Granting either paid permission puts you in the paid program at the same rate; there is no sliding scale and no bonus for granting both.

Yes, and some families will want to. Granting behavioral research (B) and nonprofit tools (C1) is a real contribution that earns you nothing, and we would rather say that out loud than attach a token payment to it. You keep every withdrawal right either way, and your footage never crosses into a commercial dataset because you did not grant that.

No. Refusing commercial use (C2) and our own technology (C3) does not remove you from the pay-for-data program, change the review your footage gets, or cost you anything in the resource library or the courses. You will not be paid, since payment follows commercial use, and that is the only difference. We will not pressure you about it later either; the grants are answered one at a time and any of them can be withdrawn for future use.

Unpaid. Universities and nonprofit institutions do pay us a licence fee, and we are not hiding that. What they cannot do is sell a product built on your child’s footage; their licence forbids it, and their output is published research. Because nobody at the end of this chain is selling anything, there is no sale to share with you. If one of those institutions later wants to commercialise, they need a commercial licence instead, and then you are paid. The nonprofit tools grant (C1) sits on the same footing, and the Data Transparency page prints the reasoning for every grant side by side.

The paid program will open in 43 states. It will not be offered in Illinois, Texas, Washington, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon. Each of those has a statute that conflicts with paying a family for behavioral video and licensing it onward: some bar a private company from profiting from biometric identifiers at all, which parental consent cannot cure, and others bar selling the personal data of a minor even when the parent agrees. Where the wording is ambiguous we exclude the state rather than test it. The specific provision behind each exclusion is listed on the pay-for-data page. None of this touches the free side of the Institute: the resource library, the courses, and video observation are available in all 50 states.

There is no single yes. Reviewing your footage to write the feedback you asked for is part of the service itself. Past that, there are four separate permissions: behavioral research (B), nonprofit tools (C1), commercial use (C2), our own technology (C3). Each has its own consent sentence, its own list of permitted uses, and its own withdrawal terms. Two of them pay and two do not. Paid for commercial use. Research and nonprofit use are unpaid contributions. You can grant one and refuse the rest, and refusing any of them never touches the resource library or the courses. One service does turn on a grant: video observation runs on the research permission (B), and the terms of that exchange are set out on its own page. The full ladder is written out on the pay-for-data page and the Data Transparency page.

Only if you say yes to that specifically, and it is a different question from research licensing. Agreeing that your footage can be included in research datasets does not give anyone permission to train software on it. Building tools is its own grant, and it is split three ways so you can be specific: universities and nonprofits building tools, companies doing commercial work of any kind with it, and the Institute training its own behavior-detection models. You can allow research and refuse all three, or allow the nonprofit one and refuse the commercial ones.

Two different groups, under two different grants. Research datasets go to universities and to nonprofit or public research institutions, and that grant is unpaid, though those institutions do pay us a licence fee and are barred from selling anything they build on the footage. Tool development goes to nonprofit and academic developers, to companies, and to us for our own models, and the last two of those are the paid grants. A company licenses under the commercial grant whether it is building a product or only running research, so commercial access is never bought at the unpaid rate. Everyone licenses reviewed, coded footage under contracts that bar any attempt to identify a child or family, bar resale and sublicensing, limit use to the licensed purpose, and require deletion on request. They never receive names, contact information, or raw un-reviewed footage. A licensee only receives footage covered by a permission the family actually granted, so a company building a product never receives footage from a family who allowed research alone.

No, and we will not claim otherwise. We remove what can be removed: names spoken aloud, addresses, school insignia, paperwork in the frame. Your family is referred to by a code, and the key linking that code back to you stays with us. But a child's face is identifying on its own, and blurring it would destroy most of what makes the footage worth studying. The accurate word for the result is coded. Anonymous would be the wrong word, and we would rather you plan around the real thing: the protection here comes from the contracts licensees sign, our ability to audit them, and the fact that we can name and pursue anyone who breaks one.

No. Reading guides and taking courses does not feed the research datasets. Footage enters the program only when a family opts in and uploads it deliberately, under grants they answered one at a time.

Yes, at any time, and here is what that actually does. Future use stops. Your footage is deleted from our storage and pulled from any dataset we license going forward. Current licensees are notified and required by contract to delete their copies. Here is what withdrawal cannot do: research already published stays published, and software already trained on your footage cannot be untrained. If a model has learned from your video, that learning is in the model and there is no way to reach in and remove it. That is why training permissions are presented separately, with their own consent sentence, so you can refuse them and keep the rest.

Guides and courses are prepared by the Institute's editorial team from established, uncontroversial principles of Applied Behavior Analysis, then dated and reviewed. Where a topic requires individualized clinical judgment, the content says so and directs you to your care team.

This site is educational and is not monitored for urgent situations. If your child is at immediate risk of harming themselves or others, contact your local emergency number or crisis line, and follow up with your clinical team.

One way only: licensing behavioral video contributed by consenting program participants, and only for the uses each family separately allowed. Every licence carries a fee, including the ones universities and nonprofits sign, and those licensees are barred from selling anything built on the footage. Families are paid for the commercial grants, which are also where most of the revenue comes from. The full lifecycle, from consent and review through coding and licensing to how that revenue funds the free tier, is documented on the Data Transparency page.

No. The MMF Behavioral Institute is a for-profit corporation, and Institute is our registered corporate name rather than a claim to charitable status. We take no donations and hold no tax exemption. Most of what we do is commercial: we build behavioral technology to sell and we license data to companies that pay for it. We do not think that undercuts the mission. Research into how children actually behave at home needs sustained funding to happen at all, and commercial revenue is what pays for the collection, the review, and everything we give away. You are entitled to know which it is before you decide anything, so we put it on the About page rather than leaving you to guess.