Mir Kamin Woulda Coulda Shoulda (wouldashoulda.com) For the first time in a very long time, it felt like things were okay. Good, even. Things were going to be great, in fact, and once I got the kids settled in to our new town, new house, new life … things would only get better. So there I was in the office of the one and only psychiatrist in town our new health insurance would pay for, who would also see children younger than twelve. My son was only seven, but for the past year he’d done well on an anti-depressant to help control his anxiety. I’d had reservations about medicating him — of course I did — but it helped. It helped a lot, actually. All I needed from this doctor was a new prescription for the medication that we already knew was working fine. I’d brought his medical records and…
Tag: MS
Jordan Sadler, MS, CCC-SLP www.communicationtherapy.net When your child is diagnosed with autism, one of the first professionals you will need on your child’s team is a high quality speech-language pathologist (SLP). This is because challenges in communicating and relating are core features of the diagnosis, and improvement in this area will make a tremendous difference in a child’s — and family’s — life. For many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), the speech-language pathologist is the cornerstone of the therapeutic team. A speech-language pathologist may also be referred to as a “speech therapist” or the more descriptive “communication therapist.” Whatever the title, parents will want to be sure their child’s therapist is licensed by the state and certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Furthermore, be sure to work with a practitioner who has extensive training and experience in the field of autism, and don’t be afraid to ask the therapist…
JoyMama elvis-sightings.blogspot.com My six-year old daughter Joy loves Baby Einstein videos, and has found them mesmerizing since infancy. I’ve heard them so often that I practically know them by heart, including the promotional material at the end of the VHS tapes. In one of the self-advertising sequences, Julie Aigner-Clark, creator of Baby Einstein, is heard to exclaim, “As moms, we’re all looking for help … and if a mom tells you, ‘Try this, it works,’ you automatically try it if you’re a mom!” She wasn’t talking about alternative therapies for autism. But as the mother of a child on the autism spectrum, I hear the echoes. One place I heard such reverberations was in a Time magazine article on Jenny McCarthy and autism1, in the March 8, 2010 issue. Actress and former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy, whose son was diagnosed with autism in 2005, has become the celebrity-mom face of…
Daniel Dage http://specialed.wordpress.com Note from the author: This article is part of a larger series about Individual Education Plans (IEPs) and the IEP process in which I go over each part of the IEP in-depth and describe the process from both a teacher perspective and a parent perspective. By far, this article seems to be the most read and searched for of the entire series. However, in actual practice I have not attended many IEPs where the goals and objectives were actually the subject of enough scrutiny by the attendees. Most of the time, the biggest issue of contention is during the discussion of placement. What most parents (and an embarrassing number of teachers) don’t realize is that goals and objectives are what are going to drive the students’ placement and services during the coming school year. While a Behavioral Intervention Plan (BIP) is the most abused part of the…
Emily Willingham http://daisymayfattypants.blogspot.com Pardon me for a moment while I get a bit sciency on you. In a former life, I was a scientist who conducted research in the field of endocrine-disrupting compounds. We focused on compounds that accumulate in body fat. The list of these compounds is long … almost endless … and many of these chemicals occur in what we consume, wear, sit on, wash with, and eat from. The term “endocrine disruptor” doesn’t even encompass the physiological systems that some of these compounds affect, and one system that interacts and overlaps with the endocrine system — the two cannot be separated, frankly, and I dare anyone teaching physiology to try — is the neurological system. Our neurology and our endocrinology are integrated, and compounds that influence or disrupt one often will do the same to the other. It all started with what we used to call environmental…
Corina Lynn Becker nostereotypeshere.blogspot.com In my time browsing the online community, I often get asked about my story, what it’s like to be a late-diagnosed autistic and what I want people to know. This is rather odd, because I’m not in the habit of showing off my scars, but there are some things that I think that I can talk about. I want to be very honest with you. I am an adult living on social assistance, in a shared accommodation run by a non-profit housing organization. Despite being highly educated, I find it difficult to find and maintain a job on my own, and I’m not even sure that I ever will. I struggle to survive with few to no supports, mostly my family and the little that some organizations have been able to provide. It is, at times, very and extremely hard. There is a lot to remember,…
Jennifer Byde Myers www.jennyalice.com Can you remember developing photos, when you had no idea what you were going to get? We would turn in those little canisters and hope for something wonderful to come back in the envelope. We used to spend a lot of money trying to get a good picture of our son. Capturing Jack on film required expert photography skills combined with the fastest shutter speed and endless rolls of film. It took money and patience and perseverance, and faith, and will, and cooperation and an ability to be spry that most people lose about the age of nine — and we failed, continuously. We don’t really have those “Kodak moments” in our family, and it’s not for lack of trying. We have been prolific in our clicking so as to produce at least some decent shots over the years, if only by the grace of statistics…
Michael V. Drejer twitter.com/maialideth When I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in 2003 at the age of 25, I had already pretty much given up hope of ever finding and getting a job that was right for me. All I had to show for my job skills was a high school diploma with a lousy grade average, and a few exams which I barely passed when I tried studying to become a school teacher and when I tried getting a bachelor degree in English at the university, neither of which I finished. Apparently it is difficult for people with Asperger’s syndrome to get a job or keeping a job, which was exactly what I had experienced as well. Fortunately, it does not have to be like that. In fact, hiring “aspies” for certain niche jobs can be of a great mutual advantage both for the aspie and for the company…
Christa Dahlstrom hyperlexicon.blogspot.com If you spotted my six-year-old son on the playground or at recess, he wouldn’t stand out from the other kids. Like most boys this age, he loves playing any made-up game that involves running, shouting, fighting bad guys, fighting robots, or fighting bad guy-robots. If you were to watch him, you might even be impressed at the way he’s able to invent elaborate imaginative play scenarios and enlist other kids — kids he’s never even met — to join in the story. “A born leader,” you might think. “What an imagination.” You might also be impressed by his sophisticated vocabulary, peppered with “suddenly” and “meanwhile” and “actually” and maybe an occasional “shall” substituted for “will” for extra flair. “Smart kid. Polite, too,” you think, as you watch him introduce himself to kids and adults and request their names with an Emily Post-ian correctness. But if you hung…
Diane Levinthal http://www.socialstrides.com Sensitivity and compassion can result from having kids with autism and social challenges included in regular education classrooms. It is also likely that there will be no choice other than inclusion, financially, in the future. Classrooms will have to accept differences (and I write this knowing that every child is “different”). How do we make inclusion positive for everyone involved? I taught in a district autism spectrum inclusion project, have worked in speech for 25 yrs, and have a middle school child with PDD/ADHD. In my experience, what is important and overlooked is that regular education peers are not given good information. The teachers are trained (supposedly) as are the other staff, but the kids themselves are told little besides “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It has been my observation that in kindergarten and early elementary school, most kids are either…