Group News

This daycare in Georgia sounds just wonderful: http://autism.healingthresholds.com/news/reach-for-the-stars-center-teach

It reminds me a bit of what we did with our family when our son was born with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS). We decided that we did not want to create two set of family experiences - one for my little guy with PWS and one for my healthy girls. Instead we wanted to create a rich family life that would be fun and educational and satisfying for all of us. There are several things that we did in order to accomplish that. One of those things was to learn sigh language (ASL) as a family. We decided to take it on as a second language. The whole family studied it an used it. We bought the Signing Time videos and part of our family time was watching the videos together and practicing the signs and signing to the songs. When we finally learned everything in all of the videos, we hired an ASL intructor to tutor our family.

There were several wonderful things about this. The first is that the whoele family had an activity that we shared. The second was that my girls learned a second language - not only a second language, but a very cool secret second language. They loved teaching their friends signs and even perfomed in the winter pageant at school by signing to "It's a Wonderful World." I might add that their young and flexible brains made them much quicker at picking up ASL than their parents. They, of course, loved this.

And, finally, my little guy was immersed in ASL from infancy and became a proficient signer. He was able to meet his language milestones and communicate his needs in an age-appropriate manner even though his speech was delayed. I believe that the ASL really did help his language and cognitive development.

At some point, his speech started to come in and our family life got more complicated. (My mother was diangosed with cancer.) At that point we stopped the ASL. We still remember some of our signs, though, and I know that we all have fond memories of our study of ASL.

I am lucky to live in Illinois, which is a state with a decent early intervention program. The state now also has an early intervention hotline: http://autism.healingthresholds.com/news/parents-of-illinois-children-can

I think that this is such a fabulous idea. When my son was born with Prader-Willi Syndrome it was wonderful that I was immediately assigned a case manager who arranged for screening and set my son up with the therapy that he needed. Lots of research shows that one of the best predictors of out come is that the parents feel included, supported, and competent in the care of their child. I wish more states would understand how some simple systematic changes can make a world of difference to depressed mothers of newly diagnosed children and the families that depend upon them.

I actually take my son to a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctor. I think that she is fabulous and he has benefitted a great deal from the experience.

This article describes the use of Chinese massage therapy to help kids with autism: http://autism.healingthresholds.com/research/outcomes-of-a-pilot-training-pro.

We do a type of massage called tuina on our little boy. Our TCM taught us how to do it and we do it most nights. It involves massaging certain acupressure sites to change the energy in his body. It takes about 15 minutes each evening. I normally read to my son while my husband does the massage. It is a nice, peaceful way to end the day and focus our love and intention on our child.