Autism
My son was diagnosed with Autism at the age of 2 years and 3 months. A month later he was on intensive one-on-one home-based therapy. By five, he was in a regular mainstream school, totally indistinguishable from his peers.
I soon found there was very little software available to teach children with Autism. This document outlines the information on Autism I have acquired over the years and the computer software I used to aid my son’s recovery.
It is important to understand that without any Autism therapy or intervention, a child with Autism or PDD will absorb far less information and knowledge from the environment than a typical child. A typical child will start to talk at 1.5 to 2 years with almost no help from his parents or siblings. He will then acquire around 6 new words a day and will have a vocabulary of an amazing 10,000 words before the age of seven. A child with Autism may become verbal much later and have poor language and social skills if he is not given speech and behavior therapy. At least initially, a child with Autism must be given a strong knowledge base i.e. he must be taught speech, language and age-appropriate behavior.
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If you even suspect your child has Autism or ASD, you must begin work with him immediately. Do not waste vital time waiting for a formal Autism diagnosis. I met one mother who waited six months for a formal Autism diagnosis before beginning any treatment. Imagine how much she could have taught her child in that time. You will find out for yourself that most doctors know very little about Autism and will simply recommend speech therapy, special education or an early intervention center. The worst thing some doctors will do to a parent is to take away hope. You will acquire more information on Autism from other parents of children with Autism than you would from any general practitioner. As you work with your child and see the results, you will soon find other parents of newly-diagnosed children with Autism coming to you for advice. Start working with your child now, even if it means just trying to communicate with him through play. This time will never ever be wasted. Even if tests show that your child does not have an Autistic disorder, you’ve lost nothing. Trying to teach a child with Autism at the table could be difficult at first, as the child may resist learning and lots of positive reinforcement and encouragement is vital. There are many structured teaching methods for children with Autism such as ABA, TEACCH, PECS and Greenspan to name a few. Many parents adopt their own, often very successful strategies for teaching their children at home.
Many parents will simply not believe their child has an Autistic disorder and will not even seek a diagnosis. Too often, they ignore the clear signs of Autism in their child and somehow hope he will improve on his own. They often wait until it is too late to start work with their child. Some of the excuses I’ve heard are: “He looks fine – it’s just the terrible twos”, “My son started talking at five”, “Einstein had Autism and he started talking at nine”, “He’ll just grow out of it” (and the list goes on…).
Although an early Autism or ASD diagnosis for this potentially devastating disorder is critical, children with Autism rarely receive a diagnosis before the age of 3 or 4 years. There are no outward physical differences between Autistic kids and typical children – in fact most children with Autism are very good-looking. The only differences are behavioral. Autistic kids will exhibit at least some of the following:
Poor speech and language skills
Inappropriate play eg. child may continuously spin the wheels of a toy car rather than push it
May line up toys or other objects
Trouble interacting with others
Poor eye contact
Walking on toes
Hand flapping
Tendency to have narrowly focused and odd interests
Not asking for things in the same way as other children
Failure to show objects to others
Failure to orient to one’s name being called
Failure to engage in reciprocal play where there is a back-and-forth between two people
Failure to copy others’ motor movements
May not use pointing to direct another person’s attention
May resist social touch such as hugging
A child with Autism can be anywhere in the broad Autism ‘spectrum’. At the upper end, the child could appear almost normal and have few autistic traits. He may perhaps be the quiet child in the classroom with few or no friends and a couple of quirky habits. He may not even be diagnosed having Autism until much later in life. At the lower end of the Autism spectrum, the child would be termed low-functioning, have poor speech and language and would require much more intensive Autism therapy. No matter where a child is in the Autism spectrum, he can and must be helped.
Pervasive Developmental Disorder or PDD is actually a bit of a misnomer. Many doctors who would not like to commit to giving a diagnosis of Autism will tell the parents that their child has PDD or PDD NOS when in fact the child is in the Autism or ASD spectrum.
Some children are born with Autism while others develop the condition usually in their second year. The latter is known as late-onset Autism. The child starts life normally and gradually develops the symptoms of Autism, losing speech and gradually showing more and more of the symptoms if Autism. If diagnosed and treated early with one-on-one therapy, Autistic children will show remarkable improvement, often to the point of being termed “recovered”. This is where the child with Autism is indistinguishable from his peers.
Asperger’s disorder, also called Asperger’s syndrome is a type of pervasive developmental disorder (PDD or PDD NOS) as defined by the American Psychiatric Association. Asperger’s disorder is similar to high-functioning Autism in how it affects a child’s mannerisms and socialization traits. A distinction between Asperger’s syndrome and Autism is that young children with Asperger’s often have normal language development, although the rhythm, pitch, and emphasis are irregular. Unlike Autism, Asperger’s disorder does not delay other aspects of development; a child usually has age-appropriate self-reliance and an interest in the world around him or her. However, like Autism, children with Asperger’s syndrome have abnormal social interactions, facial expressions, and gestures. Asperger’s disorder affects males 9 times more than females. Its cause is unknown. More research is needed to confirm whether Asperger’s disorder is a condition that is genetically related to Autism.
A common mistake is to assume that speech therapy is the solution to Autism. Speech therapy certainly has it’s place in prompting and refining a child’s speech and vocalization but it takes many hours a week of intensive one-on-one work to teach the child with Autism compliance, new concepts, language and age-appropriate behavior. A child with Autism will probably see a speech therapist for 1 or 2 hours a week. It takes a lot more work to get a child with Autism ready for school and to ensure he succeeds at school once he gets there. Once your child is in school, it would be wise to continue the speech therapy sessions. Some schools have a speech therapist that works with the children at the school itself. More on Autism and schools later.
The frustration of a child with Autism was once described as that of being in a maze where the walls are made of glass, trying to communicate with someone on the outside and only being able to bang on the walls. There is no doubt that much frustration and temper tantrums can be reduced and even avoided when communication and language is encouraged and developed. A typical child works out very early that it is in his own interest to acquire language whilst a child with Autism may not. He needs to be taught that language will get him results. On this point, if your child asks for something, give it to him immediately or at least respond to his request immediately. Ignoring him will certainly not encourage his speech.
If a child has Autism, the clock has already started to tick even before any formal diagnosis. The most gains will be made when the child is in his very early years. Although children as young as 18 months are on Autism therapy, most are diagnosed after 2 years of age and start treatment even later. Whatever you do, don’t leave it until it’s too late. Quite simply, the sooner you start teaching a child with Autism the better.
Of all the therapies around for Autism, ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) has attracted the most attention. The system pioneered by Dr. Ivar Lovaas at UCLA in the sixties is a teaching program that works on systematically removing the “traits” of Autism until the child does not satisfy the criteria for the condition. The system is very intensive but proven to be extremely successful in almost all cases of Autism. The Applied Behavior Analysis teaching system basically breaks down any task into subtasks and places a very high emphasis on rewarding the child for working well. There is no physical punishment at all in the system. Autism therapy starts off in a very rigid structured form but gradually takes the shape of a typical school environment. Those who know little or nothing about ABA may say it is too rigid and turns the child into a ‘robot’ by rote learning. This would appear so at the start but as the child learns to