Important Reasons to Get Early Help If Your Child May Have Autism

Although a parent might not have a diagnosis early on, it is imperative to start intervention early if you suspect your child may have autism. As any parent knows children acquire huge amounts of information while they are the youngest. From crawling, to walking, to talking, to toilet training those first three to five years are packed and when a child seems to learn the fastest. Because of this ability to learn fast it is important to start with therapies as young as possible.
In this manner it is easier to build on strengths. One of the ways a child with any disability will learn to cope is to strengthen the skills that they find easy. Those early strengths can be used to motivate children as well.
In the case of poor behaviors it is easier to learn acceptable behaviors first of course. Learning how to teach a child with a different way of understanding is important. Nest it is easier to stop unwanted behaviors and teach replacement behaviors before they become ingrained. Unfortunately many people only look for help after everyone seems to be locked into a system of unproductive behaviors, whether the behavior is the parent’s or the child’s.
Equipment or tools are also easier to develop while a child is young. Teaching a child to use a communication board or communication cards while younger is critical. In the process the young child is taught to make choices. Later when or if a system of communication is needed it will be easier and quicker to go to the next step.
One of the surprising reasons that you will want to get help if you child might have autism is to help yourself. Parents of children with asd need to be able to think outside the box. Whether responding to odd behaviors or figuring out a different way to teach a concept, we need to be able to think in a different way.
Finally the last reason to get help is to develop the systems that will support you and your child early. Some of these systems will take years to fully develop so getting an early start no matter what the diagnosis is critical.

People First Language

People First Language is a concept where people use a thoughtful and considered way of talking about people with disabilities. It is also considered polite and respectful.

Typical people have learned many things form people with disabilities. It has only been in the past roughly 20 years that people with disabilities have consistently been living to retirement age. Surprisingly one of the things we have learned by people with disabilities approaching old age is that they consider their disability as only part of who they are. Just like a hobby or job or any other role they may have in life.

After all I do not want to be only known by some of my characteristics. How much fun would it be to only be known at that short grey headed square lady with glasses! I am so much more than that and so is my child. She likes animals, she works, she likes to go to the local soccer games, and she happens to have autism.

The technique of using People First Language is to put the person first and them the disability. An example is the child with autism, not the autistic child. Another example is the man who uses a wheelchair for mobility, not the wheelchair bound man.

Another benefit of people with disabilities aging has been changes in the fabric of government agencies. Many federal and state agencies are now required to use People First Language. People with disabilities have risen to different levels in agencies and have made their mark at least in the way they are referred to.

One of the tales of how People First Language was started goes back to World War I. After that war and other wars some veterans returned home with various degrees of disability. It is believed that men would be on streets with their hat in their hands asking for help. People passing would throw a few coins into the cap, hence the term handi-capped. Later people took exception to the term handicapped especially when applied to people. Even later came People First terminology.

As the parent of a child with autism and also a person who works in the system I choose to use People First Language. Not everyone I come into contact makes the same choice. Some of the parents I run into do not know or understand the concept.

At first I have to admit that I would get upset. I suppose as I have gotten older I have developed a different outlook. Modeling People Fist Language without being upset has been very effective. Some parents even automatically start using that way of speaking about their children. With professionals and other parents I wait till I know them better. Then I choose a good time to mention I want to talk about it. To date I have never gotten a bad response with this technique. As a matter of fact some of the professionals I know consciously work at it and ask me for help!

Things I Wish I Knew In the Beginning

1. Get as much Speech Therapy as I could for my daughters, as often as I could get it.
2. Touch my children with autism as much as I could. I wish I knew to hold them around the middle with hand to skin touch. I would have stroked their cheeks and hands more. I would have given my children as much skin to skin contact as possible.
3. If you have insurance and can afford Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Physical Therapy, do it.
4. If you have Medicaid use it to get those same therapies.
5. Each state should have an entity that provides early intervention. In Louisiana it is called EarlySteps. Sometimes you can find it at the State Department of Education. Sometimes you can find it at the Department of Health and Hospitals. States provide some or all of the services free.
6. If your child is older than 3 check with your local department of education. They can provide specially designed instruction and all those therapies free.
7. Call your local United Way. Some United Ways provide monies for agencies to provide free services.
8. Contact your states Parent Training and Information Center to speak to other parents and ask about resources for therapy.
9. The Department of Health and Hospital in your state may have funds to help pay for therapies. It is sometimes located in the Office for Developmental Disabilities and Mental Health. In Louisiana it is in the Office for Citizens with Developmental Disabilities (OCDD).
10. Plan for your child, no matter how sever their disability, to have a job at better than minimum wage with benefits. A person needs a job to hang their day around.

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10. Ball pits can be found online, but get well-reviewed ones.

11. Avoid autism toys that say therapy on it. Usually you can buy the same exact thing at a much cheaper price by surfing www.amazon.com.

12. Indoor hammocks, mini trampolines and rocking chairs could be purchased on www.ebay.com cheap or gotten for free from www.freecycle.org.

13. Homemade play dough can be used in sensory activities, and egg-less cookie dough can also be used if they put play dough in their mouth. It’s cheaper than therapy play dough and better for your child if they put it in their mouth.

And Again...

Yes, I know it is taking me a while to get this together. I will be more diligent about it...

6. Avoid surfing the Internet too much. There is a lot of misinformation on the web. Nothing you did or didn't do caused your child's autism. You are not to blame.

7. Use your library before deciding which books go into your home. Check with local disability organizations like Families Helping Families to see if they have free lending libraries. Some books are by parents whose children really had much milder autism than they realized and some books are very negative.

8. "1001 Great Ideas for Teaching and Raising Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders" by Veronica Zysk and Ellen Notbohm is great. This book is a surprisingly thin book for all the wealth of information it has. The book has loads of budget sensory therapy ideas and more.

9. If your child can read, you can spend hundreds of dollars on specially made social stories or
www.frsd.k12.nj.us/autistic/Parent%20Training/social_stories%20notes.htm
explains how to make them for free.

Autism Therapy on a Budget continued

3. Play therapy can be a lot of fun and it doesn't have to cost a lot. Autism Games has a lot of low cost ideas at http://autismgames.googlepages.com/.

4. Evaluate relatives for the characteristics needed to help. If grandma is healthy, loving and can handle your child, you could have grandmother trained to do therapy at home. Nieces and nephews might be glad to help, with your supervision of course. You might want to pay a little, if you can. Books like "Engaging Autism" can be a place to start.

5. There are inspirational interviews with famous Temple Grandin on www.npr.com for free. Just search her name.

Be patient this is a work in progress!

Autism Therapy on a Budget

I can remember, when my child was diagnosed with autism, investigating all the therapies and options available for her. And boy, were some of them expensive! I was a single mom and I had to so the best I could with what I could get. I would have loved a list like this back then. There are a lot of suspicious ‘therapies’ out there, be careful. In one treatment, that cost $5,000, you were given activities which you could have gotten from a $13 sensory integration book and a booklet of $5 scratch and sniff stickers.

Although many people with autism will need lifelong care, they can work, marry, and lead normal lives on a variety of levels. There are even people with autism who are geniuses, but have problems with sensory pain which causes outbursts. The future of your child still lays open before them!

1. Use free school resources like early intervention classes. Use the school speech therapist or any other therapist your child needs. Some people have moved because the school cannot provide the speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy which their child needs.

2. ABA can be expensive but you can do matching games on your own and add that to a school based play intervention with speech therapy. You can mix this with other free and low cost therapies. You can make your own flash cards by searching the internet. Laminate the cards for wear and tear.

I will add to this list in the upcoming days...

Autism Therapy On A Budget Continued

And Again

More of My List

Getting To the End

Autism and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

The full spectrum lights seem to be helpful for people with Autism and Seasonal Affective Disorder. Some of the professionals working with the people who have autism call these lights ‘Seven Spectrum Frequency Lighting’. Unfortunately these lights are very expensive on the order of $15,000 for the set. A relatively inexpensive solution is ‘grow lights’ that would be used on a planetarium or fish tank. You might be able to buy one every so often until you had a bank of these to use in the mornings.