Children with Autism: Help Us Help Them

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex condition that impacts normal brain development and affects a person’s social relationships, communication, interests and behaviour.

Because ASD is a spectrum disorder, there is wide variation in how it affects each person. Individuals with ASD vary widely in their needs, skills and abilities but most have common types of characteristics including:

• difficulties with communication and social interactions
• repetitive interests and activities
• unusual attachments to objects or routines

The effects of ASD may not be visible to most people. Many parents feel a sense of guilt because they have a child that does not learn at the rate that the others do, or exhibits troubling behaviour both inside and outside the home. For these parents their sense of shame is so great that they do not want their children interacting with the others in their community. As a result, their children get even less time to learn how to behave socially than others and fall further behind in their social skills development. The real tragedy here is that children with special needs often need more time than other children to learn these skills. When I work with these people, my job is often made harder by the fact that, for example, a 12-year-old who has been kept away from other children on the playground will not have the verbal skills to tell the others that he would like to play with them because he or she hasn’t been put in that position by the parents, who might be right beside the child everywhere they go and making decisions for them about who they should play with. In situations like this, an opportunity for personal growth is taken away from the child.

Over the last 20 years of working with children with special needs, I’ve seen these issues on a regular basis. A child won’t always embrace the idea of independence at first. If they have, up until now, lived a life where they don’t have to take on any of life’s responsibilities, it may be hard to get them to change and to move out of their well-developed comfort zone. But change needs to happen, and you can start this in a variety of ways. One of the easiest ways is to talk to a counsellor at your child’s school. Counsellors are aware of what is available for children both in the school and in the community. Remember, the sooner you make the decision to help your child, the more that can be done by others to help where it is needed. You can be assured that even though your son or daughter won’t tell you that they want to be more independent, they’ll be much happier when they can make more of their own decisions. But the decision begins with you.