RE: Kids w/ Classic Autism, PDD-NOS & Speech Delays

Post Reply New Topic

Usually I wind up cleaning it up myself because I don't have the energy to make him clean it up ... but when I do have the energy, if he's being too ornery and trashing everything I make him clean it up using hand over hand until he starts doing it himself. If it's a little mess I make a game of it, I have baskets full of toys all over the place so if he dumps one it can be lots of fun tossing the toys back in one at a time ... he says "in!" every time he puts one away, sometimes he wants to dump the basket again once everything has been put away though .... and other times he'll get a time out in his room. (So we can pick up whatever mess he made without him one step behind us pulling back out everything we put away.) Folding the laundry and making the bed can be quite a challenge too. He loves to pull all the sheets and pillows off my bed after it's been made.

Mine won't let me wash his hair either. I usually just use a little bit of glycerin soap and a bowl of water or a wet rag. He won't lean back in the water or tilt his head down, turning on the shower head is out of the question and now that he's getting bigger it's getting more difficult.

About to start trying toilet training. Its timely as my son will be turning 5 at the end of the year and school will be starting for him. He has never really shown acknowledgement of his toiletting, he just goes in his pants and that seems to be fine with him. (I say acknowledgement rather than awareness because lack of awareness is debatable to me as we can't know he is not aware it he doesn't show it).
However he has recently developed the charming habit of sticking his hand in his pants, pulling out to investigate and wiping the poo off his fingers on his top, and making the same disgusted noises he uses for things like Broccolli
So thats progress.

Any advise on approaches that have worked?

Actually, the ABA therapist basically just performed additional occupational therapy. Physically, it was very difficult for my son to hold a pencil correctly and write clearly, and that was the main thing that she worked with him on. An occupational therapist had shown her how to make a home-made grip device, and he used that with her until he learned how to hold the pencil without the grip device. Grip devices are also for sale over the net (see sites that sell occupational therapy, physical therapy, autism, and teacher supplies) and at teacher supply stores.

When we started the occupational therapy, we had a cap on the insurance plan of $ 2000/year combined for speech and occupational therapy--which would only cover about one session per week. Now, it is $ 5000/year, which is not nearly enough if you do both speech and occupational therapy. (My son is on the State High Risk Pool--those who cannot buy private insurance--rejected due to health issues and who don't get insurance through a job can buy into the High Risk Pool).

This insurance coverage was not enough to meet my son's needs. I tried to help him myself with it, but he would scream and cry, and I was not disciplined enough with it. So I had the ABA therapist do additional home-based sessions. He would work with her without getting upset. (Her rate for private sessions is about 1/4 of the rate for private sessions with an occupational therapist.)

We really started noticing the fine motor issues when he was 5 and had issues at school. He might have had fine motor issues earlier, but I think that it is hard to tell with a really young child.

This is what we did. Sit him in the chair in front of the food. Give him a spoon. Put a wet towel on the table. Say "spoon." Do hand-over-hand and make him pick up the food with the spoon. Do this for a while. Stop the hand-over-hand. See what he does. Here's where the wet towel comes in. If he grabs at the food, wipe his hand with the towel. Don't let him eat what he picked up, put it back on the dish. Don't say "No" or anything like that. Only say "spoon."

Yes, it's a lot of work but keep doing this till he is using the spoon consistently. It only took a couple of days for him to stop using his hand. He will still try using his hand once in a while and when he does we just say "spoon" to remind him, only do the hand over hand if absolutely necessary. Yesterday he started using his hand and giggling, I think he was just doing it for attention...

I wonder if there's any way to tell with a three year old? My son does letters & numbers in ASL, some of those are pretty complicated. He can even do the ASL alphabet while singing the ABC song.

Around here, most of the kids with classic autism seem to end up doing occupational therapy. I don't know how to test a very young child (there is probably something on-line that I don't know about). However, there are lots of fun toys out there and fun activities which encourage fine motor skills in children. An occupational therapist will often use such toys with a very young child. I have some information about dysgraphia [poor handwriting caused by fine motor issues] and some fine motor exercises on my Autistic Kids website on youtube. Looking at the fine motor exercises will probably give you a good idea of what types of toys to buy at the store to enhance fine motor skills.

If the child actually has a physical fine motor skill issue (versus just not wanting to use a spoon or not knowing how), correcting the issue often takes over a year of regular occupational therapy, and some parents are unable to fully correct the issue. I was told by the occupational therapist almost a year ago that my son's dysgraphia might be permanent and that he would have to be taught to use a keyboard for all writing--that is when I decided to pay for additional private help at home.

I used potty training videos to teach my children where poop and pee belong. You can check out the playlists on my Autistic Kids YouTube channel to see some potty training videos made by various people.

Unfortunately, the videos won't make a child poop in the potty if he/she doesn't want to. After I change my three-year-old, for instance, I ask him where he was supposed to poop. He says, "In the potty!" every time.

I had a negative experience with our OT. She charged us $800 and provided us flashcards to hang on our wall to help our daughter with structured daily routine. She told us if our daughter follows a structured routine it will resolve her behavioral issues?

She never directly addressed any of the issues we asked her about including noise sensitivity, tantrums etc.

The OT for our NT (Dyspraxia) daughter was really good. My daughter would do stuff like swing in a hammock and have to throw balls at targets. Well certainly looked like fun anyway She certainly made a lot of progress. Also worked on fine motor skills, one of her faults was using both hands to do the same task, apparently that does not as you would think lead to Ambidexterity, rather a deficiency in the skill which really needs to be developed in one hand.
Treatment seemed to align heavily with one of the treatments used by some for Dyslexia, i.e. work around the concept of 'crossing the midline'. I notice my Autie has various strange physical behaviour, balance can be a problem for him. We take him to a gym for ASD kids weekly which is helping.

Where we live we can only dream of these things. Even social skills classes are so hard to organise because there aren't enough parent's interested.

My kid does not appear to be developing a dominant hand and I realize this can be a problem.

The flaschcards thing is wierd. You were overcharged.

Occupational therapists are way too expensive if not covered by insurance or government program. Also, a lot of the exercises performed by an occupational therapist can be performed by a non-professional, particularly if a child is cooperative. You can look at the exercises on my Autistic Kids Channel and elsewhere on the net for stuff to do at home.

Some people choose to get testing by an OT (hopefully a good one) and to do most of the actual exercises themselves with the child.

An occupational therapist is sort of like a physical therapist for kids, so here, they don't try to address social skills or behavioral issues.

Neurological impairments can result in autism and in fine motor skills (using the hands) and gross motor skills (such as gait issues).

Incidentally, I had a grandmother who had a stroke which affected her ability to use her hands correctly, so, to the extent that my older child has a neurological impairment, fine motor skills issues make sense to me.

Also, some kids with AS even have fine motor issues and gait issues, but many learn to work around them. (I have a wierd gait myself [which I can control], and my brother, a suspected aspie, has such bad handwriting that he uses a keyboard to write everything--it looks like the writing of a very small child or someone who is mentally deficient).

I think the OT is a good therapist to have in theory. In practice the one we had simply did not address the issues we asked her to help address. Instead she provided a generic template she uses for probably all her ASD clients.

I thought people with hyperlexia were more "word" thinkers than visual. This is why they are able to read....its a bit like visual thinking but they visualize words instead of pictures. In visual thinking you view everything as a picture which is why math is difficult. I taught myself math by visualizing dice as it is a "picture" and not a number, if that makes sense?....if you read Temple Grandin she explains the different types of thinking better than I can.

For potty training....I potty trained my daughter out of neccessity as she would get constant MRSA infections. She was still mainly non verbal a bit after 3 years old and we used to say "WE" were potty trained and Maddy was just along for the M&M's. We and her teachers just took her every half hour then we got to every hour....every time she went we gave her an M&M. If she went in her pants we just cleaned her up and gave her clean clothes but didnt make any fuss about it. She is 6 now and will sometimes go by herself, every once in awhile she actually ASKS to go, but does not wipe so we have to catch her before she pulls up her pants and takes off. Sometimes she has accidents still but mainly only when I or my husband are not around because we read her body language when she needs to go. Her teacher also got good at watching her body language this year because she got tired of having to change her and also she gets upset now if she has accidents, we dont know why, it may be sensory now as she is accustomed to being dry. Also we were lucky that she was just naturally dry at night....the only one of my five kids that was dry at night by age 3. She only wet the bed a couple of times when she was sick.

<iframe width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GXkAIUuAYrw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The above 3 minute YouTube video features a reading expert defining hyperlexia. (I hope I embedded it right. It is in my "favorites" on my reading channel on YouTube (user vids4autistickids) if you cannot get it to play.

People define hyperlexia different ways, but this is what happened with my son with classic autism: He has wonderful visual abilities and could memorize words by sight from a very young age, regardless of whether he knew what they meant or how to use them correctly.

He has the same ability to memorize pictures.

The words were memorized as pictures, as visual patterns.

A lot of moms in the local Autism Society here in Austin, Texas, have kids with the same problem. A child with a great visual ability may have an easy time learning a large number of words by sight or learn letters and how to sound out words without comprehending what he or she is reading.

I had a whole lot of success with my son by pairing every word he learned by sight with a picture, using pictures whenever I taught him phrases, using close-captioning for the hearing impaired whenever he watched educational videos, etc. I had to go to a lot of effort to make sure that he was never just sounding out or memorizing words without understanding them.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/GXkAIUuAYrw

Just paste the above into your browser if you want to hear the reading expert discussing hyperlexia.