I am 23 years old. I have a five-year-old pitty great dane mix, and I am in my senior year of undergraduate school at UNCW. I am expected to graduate with my Bachelor's in Psychology, minoring in ABA (applied behavioral analysis). I plan to apply to graduate school for a master's in ABA to become a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. When I was seventeen, I got a position as a nanny. This was not new to me, as I had worked with children since I was old enough to babysit. When I showed up on my first day, he was the most adorable two-year-old boy. After about fifteen minutes, I realized something was up. He was licking the windows, nonverbal, picking his LED toys up, and shining them directly in his eyes. All while tiptoeing around. My only experience with special needs children was the PEPI program my teachers had nominated me for in high school. I had no experience with young children with disabilities. The parents had not mentioned this to me, and I could tell they did not plan to. The next school day, I went to the SPED teacher's classroom and asked him for advice. Does he think this child has ASD? If so, is it respectful or not to mention this to the parents? He advised me to research ASD and disabilities and to let the parents tell me if they wanted to. A couple of months later, the parents had still not told me, and the father of this boy was very off-putting. He had cameras in every room, even though he worked from home. He would tell me he could "see what I had been doing" on the cameras some days, which made me very uncomfortable because all I wanted was to care for this child. I had bonded with this nonverbal two-year-old, learning to know what he liked, disliked, and wanted whenever he made a peep or cried. He was my tiny best friend, whom I adored and loved to see every day. One day, a woman named Andrea walked in. "You're the nanny?" She asked. I nodded, confused why she was present. She told me she was an RBT, that she had just graduated, and this was her first client on the East Coast. I had never heard of ABA before. I was insanely intrigued. Within two months, little Z, we'll call him, had begun to say syllables and master simple goals we worked on with him. One of them was that if he wanted to watch Elmo, he had to say "ba". I remember the morning I was waiting for Andrea, and the father was home. Z picked up the remote, handed it to me, saying BA! I was literally jumping for joy, reinforcing him. His father came around the corner, took the remote, and said, "No. Say TV." My stomach dropped. I watched all of the work and progress Z had made fly out the window. I told Andrea when I saw her. A week goes by, and the mom informs me that the father fired Andrea because he believed she was "skewing the data" and little Z was not making any progress, he claimed. I ended up having to leave little Z for my mental health due to ongoing issues with the father. But little Z and Andrea opened the door to my future. I chose this path to watch children with ASD grow, and to be an advocate for those who cannot use their voice yet. I've worked beside wonderful PT's and OT's throughout my field experience.