IF you think finding the right school can be difficult, try finding the right school for a child with autism.
It wasn't long ago schools didn't accept autism as a diagnosable disorder. Now the argument is not whether it exists, but what is the best treatment.
I found 25 different treatments online, from animal therapy to diets and behaviour therapy.
The New York State Department of Health claims there is only one treatment with scientific evidence of success – applied behaviour analysis.
ABA is an intensive one-to-one teaching method. Skills are broken into small parts and each part is taught and practised.
Life as well as academic skills can be taught using ABA. It sounds like it would work for any developmentally delayed child.
But only one Australian school is using ABA with the required intensity: independent Woodbury school in Baulkham Hills.
Woodbury opened at the start of this year and already has 21 students aged from 4 to 13 – all the more amazing because it costs parents $37,000 per student a year.
The school is costly because, even with Government funds to employ five full-time teachers, it also employs about 45 (including part-time) therapists and teachers' aides.
It was founded by parents of children with autism and former speech therapist Elizabeth Watson, who had worked with autistic children using many different methods but found ABA most effective.
No public system could afford to supply such one-on-one treatment.
The only places offering properly accredited ABA training are in the US.
NSW universities and private tertiary institutions take note – parents want this treatment for their autistic children and are prepared to pay. Teachers trained in ABA will be in increasing demand, I can promise.
When Kathleen Cahill and her husband Tony Macris' son Alex, now 4, was diagnosed with autism, their lives changed.
Tony now works 80-hour weeks and Kathleen works full-time to pay school costs. Mr Macris said he thinks every day about parents of children like Alex who will never be able to afford a place in Woodbury.
Excerpt from the australian daily telegraph.
I found this part interesting "But only one Australian school is using ABA with the required intensity: independent Woodbury school in Baulkham Hills."
There are now levels of ABA stretching from Lovaas' true style that uses aversives, and is very intense, to those that don't use aversives directly but still withold food, and lock the child into the room, to people who are not properly trained and simply use play therapy techniques with the child and call it ABA so that they can charge more.
The ones that use simple play therapy are the ones that are most vocal about how nice ABA is.
Wait until they find out it doesn't work.
Better if one of the parents stayed home and homeschooled the child for a while.
I remember what a great feeling of security I got from my home, my neighbourhood and from my mother when I was a child. Home was a place where my special things were kept and where I could spend as long on my many hobbies as I wanted to. It was a peaceful, plain, unchanging place that was a haven from a world beyond that could be chaotic, unkind and uncaring. It is such a pity that these idiot Australian parents have cashed all of this in to pay for ABA. Obviously if these parents are both working their butts off to pay for this unproven treatment they are unable to provide the kind of stable and secluded and quiet home base that aspie kids need even more than ordinary kids do.
Some people believe that autism and ADHD are being diangosed at invreasing rates simply because of child-care becoming more popular over the years. This makes sense to me; kids who are different or are a "handfull" are going to be the ones who can't fit into the world of childcare centres and impersonal mass-parenting. Therefore these kids who are misfits in these environments are going to be identified as "the problem" in increasing numbers, while if the kids were being raised by parents who understood the individual quirks of their kids, and were not comparing these kids with other kids in group settings, these kids might not be identified as "freaks". Isn't it ironic that these autistic kids could be more likely to be placed into just the type of settings in which the kids look the most like freaks and where their needs are less likely to be accomodated, just because their parents have to both work long hours to pay for ABA?
Isn't it ironic that these autistic kids could be more likely to be placed into just the type of settings in which the kids look the most like freaks and where their needs are less likely to be accomodated, just because their parents have to both work long hours to pay for ABA?
It is so sad, and surely the long working hours will contribute to the high divorce rate that we have heard about for parents with autistic kids. The children are missing out on the real basics of regular life - spending time at home with both parents.
Some people believe that autism and ADHD are being diangosed at invreasing rates simply because of child-care becoming more popular over the years.
I agree. Not only are the kids more stressed from being taken to child care every day (and thus more likely to act hyper or to develop typically autistic nervous behaviors), they're also being seen every day by preschool teachers who have taken child-development courses and are familiar with the diagnostic categories.
When we were kids playing in the back yard, our mothers didn't see anything abnormal about collecting shiny pebbles or lining up toys. They were happy that it kept us busy enough so that we weren't jumping on the furniture.
But I do think that a few hours a week at a good preschool (and the key words here are "a few") can help a child get used to a classroom setting and make a better adjustment when the time comes to start school. When my son was three and four years old, I took him to preschool three times a week, for sessions that were 2 1/2 hours long. I wanted to give him an idea of what it would be like when he started school, so that he wouldn't be overwhelmed by the transition.
My mother stayed home. I did not attend daycare or nursery school. Every weekend and summer vacation, our family went away to a lakeside cottage.
They did not pay for us to participate in team sport or other group activities. For years, I blamed my lack of friends on my lack of early "group" activities. I know many people who have friends that they have kept through all their school years. Now I realize that I just enjoyed being on my own as a child and I did not really get along with other children. I used to blame my parents for not having friends. Now I am happy knowing that there are other people like me and I should not be unhappy because I do not have lots of friends.
It might be a good idea if parents could get a job that they could still be there for their kids before or after school instead of just picking them up after 6 pm. If they are dropping off their kids at 7 am and picking them up after 6 pm and the kids go to bed at 8 pm or so, how much time are they really spending with their kids? Well in the morning, the household is just too busy making lunches, getting breakfast and getting washed, dressed etc to really have any good one-on-one time. After pick up, its rush around to cook and clean. So at the most 1 hour. If someone is working two or three jobs then they do not really have any time to spend with their children.
We could talk about ideal situations but I find that many people have a reality that is far far from the ideal.
I am not sure what your son could be doing in play therapy. Since he is 13 there might be some activities that he might love to participate in that he might need some help with. Otherwise, in a clinical setting, what is the end result and what does he feel he is getting out of the therapy?
I will give some examples. I would want to play baseball when I was a kid. I was not good at throwing or catching, if I did catch the ball I never knew where to throw it. I could really hit the ball but I never knew when and where to run to. Some of the kinder kids on my team would try to help me, either by standing beside me and telling me what to do: when and where to run, so that I could play. The result, I could play with the other kids. I really hated sports but at school we had to play. When the other kids stopped helping me, I would just sit in the outfield and pick grass instead of trying.
So maybe you could ask your son what he would really like to do and help him do it.
So his therapy is for anger management, not for autism.
Some stay-at-home parents make use of "play groups", informal play with other children in the park or neighbourhood, and church sunday nurseries for socializing their children. Full-time daycare and nurseries are not necessary unless the parents need them.
I've got nothing against playgroup or pre-school (we call it kindergarten in Australia, or "kindy" for short). All of our kids were taken to playgroup and kindy, but I must say, I always supervised our kids super-closely at playgroup, closer than the other mums, and when I send our kids to kindy I took great care in picking the right kindy with the right teacher, just as my own mother did for me. There was one bad experience. One of our kids got KICKED OUT OF KINDY. Such infamy at such a young age! :twisted: I can laugh about it now...
All of this stuff is entirely different to a child being left in the care of people who aren't family before school, during school and maybe even after school too, all the time amongst a seething, noisy, smelly, annoying, hyperactive, chaotic crowd of kids. Just the thought of it makes me want to pull some hairs out! :shock:
"The NT kiddies I work with every day are busy learning what social interaction is all about at the age of around 3-5 (preschoolers) and the only kids who really can't seem to get it so early are the AS kids (I have one in my class of eleven children, and there are two others in the other preschool rooms)."
I have to agree that some social interaction skills have to be TAUGHT to children of a certain age, even NT children.
For a child to be kicked out of play groups, it had to be a very violent and prolonged incident. Noone running a children's program wants a child who will injury other children. It might be too over whelming for some autistic children to be put into a noisy busy environment will tons of other children. They would have to try just a short time with a few children first and a little bit of play with the parent there. Then move up to longer times with more children.
All children have to be shown how to ask for a toy, share, what to do if a smaller child takes a toy from them. If they do injure another child purposely, they have to know that it is wrong and be punished for it. Getting a time out, a slap or spanking will work. This should be happening at home with their siblings and relatives as well. I find great fault with parents who do not punish their children when they hit their parents.
Maybe you should take this thread over to the parent's section.
you need a licence to drive a car
Our child got kicked out of kindy (for "normal" kids) for not following the directives of the teacher, but I was considering pulling our child out of the kindy anyway. The teacher was doing a number of things wrong. Some activities that she planned were not age-appropriate, the books she read were not what I'd consider worthwhile reading, and she wasn't any good at leading the programme. When I helped out I saw about half of the kids there acting up or looking bored or crying because they wanted their mummy. This teacher was one of the ones that spends a lot of time talking with the mothers or aides, but seems to have little rapport with the kids.
I found another kindy, and we haven't looked back since. At that kindy the kids were allowed some time to choose their own activity, but at other times the teacher led the whole group in a group activity. It was always clear to the kids whether they were meant to be in the group or whether it was the time for free choice. With the other teacher it was never clear what the kids were meant to be doing, so some of them just did their own thing anyway.
"With the other teacher it was never clear what the kids were meant to be doing, so some of them just did their own thing anyway."
I find with children, the best thing is to tell them what you expect them to do and then praise them for doing it, rather than always telling them what they should not be doing. Some children are just overwhelmed with choices. I prefer to give them just a few choices to choose from and sometimes there are activities that everyone has to participate in and there is no choice. Following a routine: first story time, then game, then crafts, helps most kids adapt.