Hi all,

Last week I attended the Asia Pacific Autism Conference and one of the big take-home messages (which I am always going on about) was “how important it is to fit the therapy to the child rather than the child to the therapy”. This is incredibly important and also a great way of distinguishing good quality therapy from more generic approaches that may not be effective, or sustainable.

As you may know, I strongly believe that every child’s intervention plan needs to take into consideration the unique and individual differences of the child with autism. But what is equally important and often overlooked, is that the intervention must also take into consideration the values, circumstances, and lifestyle of the FAMILY for it to be most effective and sustainable. » Continue reading “Therapy needs to fit in with your family life”

One of the main autism symptoms or characteristics of children with autism is their language delays and slower speech development.

The ability of a child with autism to talk well is not just dependent upon having the motor skills to be able to shape sounds into words and words into sentences. But more importantly the child needs to have thoughts, ideas and feelings that they want to ‘share’ and communicate with others.

The reason that I want to talk to you about this today is because I had a session with a little girl named Sasha on the weekend. She is a delightful little girl who has many of the pre-verbal skills necessary to be able to talk and in fact she has already started to appropriately use some important words in her life e.g. more, go, biscuit… which is a wonderful start.

However it is very obvious that the area of development that is going to get in the way of Sasha’s language and speech development is going to be her ‘limited interests’ in her life. » Continue reading “If you want more language you need to expand your child’s world”

Often organisations and professionals that work with your child with autism may pride themselves on the fact that they work collaboratively and holistically with the other service providers in your child’s team.

Though I must admit that this statement confuses me a little and I will tell you why…

I think that when most professionals say this they mean that they ‘discuss’ their therapy goals with the other professionals or therapists who are working with your child.

This might sound ideal but unless all the team members are actually implementing the treatment goals in the SAME way, the child’s program will not be consistent and can often be very confusing for the child.

What you need to keep consistent in your child’s program is the ‘therapy style’ or the way that you and your therapists interact with your child when you are working on these goals. » Continue reading “Is Your Child’s Therapy Team Really Working Together?”

Howdy all,

This week’s tip as the subject says is a quickie, but a goodie

Have you ever noticed that after your child has been jumping on the trampoline, swimming, swinging, playing chasings or basically just moving around that they are a lot more talkative and chatty, or if your child is not talking yet that they are playing around with their vocalisations more?

Well there is a reason for this…

Movement stimulates the language areas of the brain. » Continue reading “A Quickie but a Goodie!”

Often when I chat to families about using visuals with their child they think about photos and visual scheduling to explain what is happening in their child’s day. Also families tend to think that visuals are a tool to help ‘low functioning’ children with autism.

However this is not true…

Let me explain why.

There are three primary learning styles;
Auditory, Visual and Kinesthetic (learning through ‘doing’).
Most people have one learning style that is more dominant than the others and prefer to use this when learning new things.

To illustrate this, the following image shows a very simple version of the differences between Auditory and Visual learning. » Continue reading “Maximise Your Child’s Learning With Visuals”

Hey all,

Welcome again to our new readers out there!

Apologies that I wasn’t able to send out my regular weekly tip last week. I was fortunate to have a few days off with my family which was a very nice break.

This week I thought I would share with you a new and slightly ‘nutty’ therapy idea that I only trialed for the very first time this week. Because each of the children I treat are so unique, I’m constantly testing and trialing new therapy strategies to find out what works and what doesn’t in order to get the breakthroughs and results that families are desperate to see.

So I really wanted to share this one with you because it worked wonders for this client of mine, Sam.

It still blows me away how incredible it is that such a small change in therapy can make such a huge difference.

» Continue reading “Nutty therapy idea that worked!
Help improve the attention span of your child with autism”

Since you are reading this I’m guessing that the subject line may have grabbed your attention which is great because….

What I have to tell you today is very important. In fact it may change the way you think about just about every aspect of your child’s treatment.

———————————–

I often get asked to give families strategies to help deal with specific behaviours such as ‘toilet training’ or ‘picky eating’ or ‘poor sleeping patterns’.

It would certainly make my job MUCH easier if I could tell each one of you that ONE particular strategy would be the ‘Magic Formula‘ for solving each of these issues.

But the truth is…

because every child with autism (like any child) is so incredibly different and so unique, there simply isn’t a ‘magic formula’ or one strategy in particular to remedy these individual behaviours.

But there is a solution… so please read on. » Continue reading “Is there a ‘Magic Formula’ for Autism?”

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”

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”

In my last post I spoke about improving your child’s social skills, and how preparing your child with autism for successful play interactions with other kids is a step by step process.

As mentioned, your child will need to become competent at playing and interacting with YOU (their primary caregiver) before they have the necessary skills to be able to do this successfully with their peers. This is mainly because ‘typically’ developing children are not very patient and will not wait around if your child does not have the skills to participate in the game or activity that they want to play.

Step 1

Therefore, step one is to make sure that you equip your child with these necessary skills by teaching them how to interact well with YOU first. You can get more help learning these skills with the ‘7 steps to Unlocking Your Child’s Social Skills‘ audio which I use regularly with all of my clients.

Step 2

Once your child has mastered the skills from step one you can move onto step two, and begin increasing the amount that you expose them to peer interactions.

Please remember that to begin with your child’s abilities with their peers will not be as advanced as they are with you. It is important that you learn how to support your child through their play with peers so that you give them every chance of success by ensuring that they have a positive experience.

Here are 5 key strategies I use with my clients on a daily basis to help them build successful interactions with peers… » Continue reading “The Key to Socialising with Peers – the next step”