“Massachusetts may have the best health care in the country, but it doesn’t cover the treatment for the fastest-growing health threat to children – autism,” writes ex-NFL quarterback Doug Flutie, in the Boston Globe. “More than 500 babies born this year in Massachusetts will soon be diagnosed with autism. What their parents will learn first – what my wife, Laurie, and I have learned from our son Dougie – is that while the hopes and dreams for their child may change, they will also intensify.”
A touchdown statement if I ever heard one. And here’s the extra point from the head the …read more

The Net has certainly let loose the dogs of both support and criticism for some parents of children with ASD. In El Paso, Texas, parents and teachers around the world have chimed in regarding a 10-year-old with boy with Asperger’s who got a ticket for $260 for disrupting class. Students can be ticketed and their parents fined in the state for such actions, and the mom says her son kept falling asleep in class, made noise in the hall, and got down on the floor and refused to get up. She agrees the behavior is not okay and that he should be …read more

This is kind of eye-catching (especially if you have Jill’s eye), from a review in today’s New York Times TV section of “The Middle,” which premiers tonight: ”The youngest child, Brick (Atticus Shaffer), is peculiar, and not in a cute way, which makes him all the more appealing. His teacher describes him as ‘clinically quirky’ and wants him tested. ‘I just hope that he’s weird enough that our insurance covers it,’” says one character. Tested for? How weird would that have to be, exactly? Could the money-counters who govern prime time entertainment finally be realizing that one of every 150 kids …read more

UCLA has a class that offers an instruction to ASD teens that’s often lacking from a menu of therapies: How to make friends. The teen years are tough enough, but for those with ASD this time could only be a nightmare in terms of interacting with peers. The UCLA program teaches its 33 students (28 of them male) to watch for all the social clues they might commonly miss — body language, hand gestures, facial expressions, speech inflections — and try to turn those improved interpretations into connections.

The class, called PEERS (Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational …read more

The Fraser Child & Family Center in Minneapolis found a new way to reach ASD students: through headphones and iPods. The devices play music and videos to teach these students how to fit in. Fraser staff came up with the idea of programming iPods to act as an electronic substitute for “that missing [inner) voice for those with Asperger’s, the voice that governs appropriate behavior. Staff have helped students create short videos and slide shows on how to behave in different social settings: How to carry on a conversation; how to respect other people’s boundaries and think before they speak; …read more

We continue our week of spectrum artwork today!
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A Book for Our Times: Understanding Jason (AuthorHouse) is a new book written by Marsha Rae Osborn and illustrated by DeOnna Mills, and it tells the story of a group of typical students who learn from their teacher how to accept and help an autistic student, Jason, fit in with their class. (Osborn is an RN and the mother of twin boys, one
of whom has autism.) Told in rhymes, Jason seems typical of the kinds of titles we need to see more of. (”We don’t understand,” kids say, “Why does Jason act …read more

Yesterday we faced the familiar problem of getting the kids to clean up the living room. Ned, typically developing, was the usual sour-faced/hopeless case in this regard, but Alex has shown a willingness to scurry about and put things away if properly motivated. For a long time, I used a pointer (a “stick”), feeling like Patton as I slapped the pointer on toy after toy to be removed from the floor.
Yesterday, however, I hit upon a new idea. I sat Alex down by his pile of strewn plastic animals, grabbed an index card and a pen, and wrote, “Pick up …read more

The online version of The Jerusalem Post has run a great essay on autism and special needs in the Jewish community. Essentially positive, the piece doesn’t gloss over the friction religious institutions seem to occasionally spark with special needs families (”One family told us about being asked by their rabbi not to return to the synagogue anymore … Their child liked to be too close to the Torah!”).
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“I wonder if our pediatrician would give us  a prescription for a mild sedative for Alex to go to the dentist?” Jill wonders. Good idea. Now we just need to find …read more

Owner and operator Lisa Witte, 29 and diagnosed at age 2 with autism, has cut a place for herself in the world at Lisa’s Quality Rags, based in Wyoming, Mich. Witte can’t read, write or talk beyond saying, “Hi, I’m Lisa,” and sometimes parroting what others say (sounds like Alex), but she’s turned a decade and a half of training by Goodwill Industries into a profitable business. She began by taking clothes out of boxes and putting them on hangers, but her aide soon saw she could do a lot more, becoming by last summer a veteran rag cutter, producing half …read more

I know other families whose kids have autism. Yes, sometimes more than one child in the family with autism, and I really don’t know how they keep it together. I have to admit I think we’re doing a fairly terrible job a lot of the time with just one.
We haven’t done ABA with Alex (long story and not interesting, so I’m not going to go into it). I used to feel bad; then I recalled children I know who have had years of ABA and whose behavior is not so very different from Alex’s. And if you look online there …read more