Maureen Bennie’s blog on a wide variety of subjects pertaining to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Maureen is a mother of a son and a daughter ages 24 and 22 with autism. She has managed an at-home Intensive Behavioral Intervention Program for eight years for her children. She has written hundreds of articles and book reviews that have appeared in publications and on websites throughout North America and the UK. Maureen also gives presentations both live and online across Canada on various topics about autism, available books and resources and how to use them.
Ido Kedar is a young man on the spectrum who has an excellent blog called Ido in Autismland. In his own words, he says: “I am an autistic guy with a message. I spent the first half of my life completely trapped in silence. The second – on becoming a free soul. I had to fight to get an education.…
I’ve written about the difficulties I have had getting my own children to recognize and use washrooms that are not the ones from our home. It can be a real challenge for a child with autism because there is a tendency to represent, understand, and remember things in an extremely specific way. This tendency towards specific or inflexible learning is…
Answer: A few years ago, I attended an excellent seminar with Penny Gill, President of the Autism/PDD Family Alliance in Southern Ontario. Her presentation, Overcoming the Challenges: Teaching Someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Cook Really Well, showed us that you can teach someone with an ASD the important life skill of cooking provided the challenges are understood and the…
Historically children with developmental disabilities were excluded from pain research, but this past month a new (as yet unpublished) study showed conclusively that people with autism exhibit abnormal brain responses when a painfully hot object is placed against their skin. The brain’s response to pain has three phases – early, intermediate and late. In an experiment with 17 people with autism and 16 people without, a small piece of metal was taped to the skin and heated to the point of causing discomfort/pain but not injury. The people without autism were still responding to the pain ten seconds after it stopped, but the people with autism had no brain response after the ten seconds.
Feeding a child on the autism spectrum can be a great challenge for parents. Creating healthy meals, eating a variety of foods, eating too little or too much food, focusing on only one texture or food presentation, and gut/digestive issues are just some of the worries parents have when feeding their children. Here are a few helpful hints that I have learned as a mother of two children with autism who are both on specialized diets and struggle with eating.
I am an avid reader of Judy Endow’s blog because she highlights issues that many of us are not even aware of. Her recent post about the differences in self-advocacy if you are poor or middle income was eye-opening.
Judy has been both poor and middle income as an autistic adult and has observed that “self-advocacy is typically geared toward middle-income status. This could be problematic since many autistic adults live in poverty.”
If you have a child in school with autism or other special needs, chances are you are already navigating either an IEP, an IPP, or a 504 plan. These plans can seem overwhelming to parents, so I have prepared an explanation of what to expect during the meetings and how to get the most out of these plans for your children with ASD in school.
Until recently, boys and girls on the spectrum have been painted with the same brush both in terms of diagnosis, and more importantly in terms of treatment. But as a mother of both a boy and a girl with autism, I can tell you that they have always been very different.
Many of us have had uncomfortable moments when a person with autism “acts out” or does something inappropriate. Sometimes these behaviours can be aggressive and downright scary for a parent or caregiver. While it might be easier to imagine that prescribing a drug could minimize these events or make them stop altogether, new research out of the UK suggests that many people with intellectual disabilities are overprescribed medications in an effort to treat problem behaviours such as aggression and self-injury, despite there being little evidence of any benefit from these medications.
When at a restaurant this week, I went to use the bathroom. Luckily, I speak French and knew the difference between femmes and garçons so could navigate which bathroom to use. Had my two children with autism been confronted with that on the doors, they wouldn’t have known which door to choose. It got me thinking…how to do we teach the symbols for toilet, which one to use if you’re male or female, and general washroom etiquette?
After doing some searching, I did find a good page filled with different symbols for the washrooms. While this doesn’t cover all of it because there is a vast, creative, array of toilet symbols, it’s at least a starting point to let a person with ASD know there is a variety of toilet signs and they can change from place to place. Restaurants tend to be the most creative with their bathroom signs, so when at a new restaurant, it would be a good idea to accompany the person with ASD even if they are independent with toileting. There will also be symbol differences between countries and languages. If planning a trip to another country, you may want to review the toilet symbols before you go to create some predictablility and lessen anxiety.
I am frequently asked the question about how to introduce the topic of menstruation to girls on the autism spectrum. Mothers worry about how their daughters will react to the event. Will there be sensory issues around blood flow and the use of sanitary pads? How will they feel about this change in their body? Will it be painful? How do you teach hygiene around menstruation? Will menstruation be understood and accepted?
Assistant Professor Paul Shattuck who lead the study, says that as children with ASD age, and as their cognitive skills improve, they spend more time using social media, which helps them to further develop social skills. So how can we get our kids technology time more social so they can build these skills?
Because of sensory processing issues, individuals with autism may exhibit hyper or hypo sensitivities to heat and cold. A child may not feel how cold it is in the winter and take off his coat. Another person may start to shiver as soon as they come out of the sun and enter an air-conditioned room.
September means back to school, transitions, and changes in routines. Judy Endow, an adult with autism, wrote a blog post about changing classroom strategies, asking us to alter the way we do things based on past knowledge in light of new information. This is good advice for all of us as autism is a relatively new field where knowledge is rapidly changing, challenging our long-held views which may no longer be applicable.
A good night’s sleep is important. Without it, children can be irritable, struggle with academics, engage in more repetitive behaviours, become easily fatigued, and are more likely to suffer from unintentional injury. Over the long term, poor sleep can lead to adult obesity, anxiety in adulthood, and sleep problems throughout adulthood.