I was reading back over the questions that you posted me and there was a common theme emerging…

“What is the best way to deal with  my child when they are feeling upset, frustrated, annoyed, disappointed?”

I am pleased that this topic was raised because it is an area of treatment that I get quite passionate about and I would like to share my thoughts with you…

So often we are happy to engage with children (not just special needs kids!) when they are happy and joyous, but we tend to disconnect with them when they are experiencing more challenging emotions.

But why do we do this?

Feelings of frustration, sadness annoyance etc are all basic (and completely normal) human emotions that we all encounter on a regular basis. But when this happens to our own child we are naturally driven to find a way of making them feel ‘happy’ again by saying things like “Stop crying”, “You’re okay”, “Where’s your happy face?”, “It’s ok, how about we have something to eat”.

But all this actually does is disconnects us from what they are really experiencing and feeling, and we miss an important opportunity to ‘connect’ with our child and to help them learn and grow from the experience. » Continue reading “Dealing with your child’s challenging emotions”

GREAT NEWS!

My company, Connect Therapy, has just been approved by the Australian Government as an official autism service provider under the “Helping Children With Autism” package.

I realise that most of our non-Australian readers will have no idea what this means.

So what does it mean?

The Australian Government has committed $190 Million to help support families with children aged 0-6 who have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Essentially, families will be able to access up to $12,000 of funding to pay for approved early intervention services for their child.

So this is wonderful news for families, and the Australian autism community is very thankful for the government’s action.

It’s also very nice for Connect Therapy to be recognised in this way after years of service and dedication to helping families with autism… we can’t ask for a better endorsement than from the government » Continue reading “Great News! We’re Government Approved”

Welcome again to our new subscribers out there.

I’m slowly but surely answering the emails that many of you have requested some help with…

Today’s topic…

How Avoiding this one little habit will help improve your child’s social and communication skills

Often children with autism can be very passive communicators and may only talk when they are spoken to or when they are very motivated to communicate something.

Sometimes when I’m carrying out assessments, parents tell me that their child is capable of stringing a few words together into a sentence, yet often the child will not utter a single word for the entire session which is very sad! This is because the child does not know how to share their wonderful thoughts with others yet.

One way that you can dramatically improve your child’s ability to actively share their thoughts and ideas with you is by reducing the amount of questions that you ask them. Sounds simple I know. But sometimes we have such a natural desire to constantly ask our child questions because we know that they understand many things and we want to try and ‘squeeze’ as much information out of them as possible!

Here are 3 reasons why you should avoid doing this… » Continue reading “One Habit to Avoid for Better Communication”