There are three main goals of treatment for young children with autism in the Early Start Denver Model:

Bringing the child into coordinated, interactive social relations for most of their waking hours, so that social attention, imitation and communication can be developed and learning through social experiences can occur;

Increasing the reward value of social engagement with others by choosing materials, activities, and routines that are enjoyable and interesting for children, by reading children’s cues and following children’s interests as we choose activities, and by developing play routines that add meaning and predictability for children.

Developing play activities into joint activity routines designed to build skills and “fill in” current  learning deficits.  The main skills that we focus on include teaching imitation, developing awareness of social interactions and reciprocity, teaching the power of communication, teaching a symbolic communication system, teaching more flexible, conventional and creative play with toys, and making the social world as understandable as the world of objects.  Just as the typically developing toddler and preschooler spend virtually all their waking hours engaged in the social milieu and learning from it, the young child with autism needs to be drawn into the social milieu - a carefully prepared and planned milieu that the child can understand, predict and participate in.   

The Early Start Denver Model draws extensively from previous work in two well-known models, the Denver Model and Pivotal Response Training.  Our approach to young children with autism is based on an empirically-validated set of beliefs and practices, described below.

• Families should be at the helm of their children's treatment.
• Each child with autism and family is unique; goals, interventions and approaches must be individualized.
• Children with autism can be very successful learners.  Lack of progress generally signals problems with the design and implementation of the educational activity, rather than the inability of the child to learn.
• Autism is at its core a social disorder; treatment for autism must focus on the social disability.  This requires that relationships be at the core of treatment of children with autism and their families.
• Children are members of families and communities and need to have a role in family life and family and community activities.
• Children with autism have minds, opinions, preferences, choices, feelings; they have a right to self-expression and some control of their world.
• Autism is complex disorder affecting virtually all areas of functioning; interdisciplinary professional guidance is needed to address the wide range of challenges that autism presents.
• Children with autism are capable of becoming intentional, effective, symbolic communicators and most children with autism can have useful, communicative speech when provided with appropriate interventions of sufficient intensity during the preschool years.
• Systematic instruction is a powerful tool for young children with autism. It involves concrete, well written objectives that are accomplished through pre-planned instructional activities.  Progress is measured through ongoing data collection on each targeted objective.
• Several intervention approaches for children with autism have demonstrated their effectiveness in certain instructional methodologies; a comprehensive, contemporary treatment approach must be able to draw from all the expertise available in the field.
• Play is one of the young child’s most powerful cognitive and social learning tools.  Building play skills in young children with autism will maximize their capacity for independent learning.  
• Successful intervention for young children with autism requires that most of their waking hours be spent in socially-oriented activities. Providing more than 20 hours per week of targeted intervention is necessary for optimum progress. However, optimal intervention can be delivered in various settings and by various people. There is no one best formula for all children. The ingredients for success are: (a) lots of opportunity for 1:1 intervention; (b) from people who are skillful at delivering interventions; (c) careful delivery of target objectives; and (d) use of progress data and ongoing assessment to adjust interventions in order to maximize rate of gain. 

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