Pivotal response treatment (PRT) is an evidence-based intervention (Koegel and Koegel, Pivotal response treatment for autism spectrum disorders. Brookes Publishing Company, 2019; National Research Council, Educating children with autism. National Academies Press, 2001; Wong et al., J Autism Dev Disord 45(7):1951–1966, 2014) that broadly targets social communication and other areas. Children with autism often lack the pivotal area of social motivation or exhibit apparent learned-helplessness, which can be a barrier to many areas of development. Social motivation drives people to orient to the social world, seek and receive pleasure from interactions, and work to create and maintain social relationships (Chevallier et al., Trends Cogn Sci 16(4):231–239, 2012), and thus, it is an important consideration for intervention. As motivation is crucial in the process of learning, PRT, which focuses on implementing specific variables to improve motivation, creates opportunities for developing skills more rapidly while decreasing interfering behaviors.