2 Biggest Pet Peeves About The Way Therapists Interact with Children with Autism...

Ok, this post might not make sense to everyone (who am I kidding, I mean my 3 readers), but I had to rant.

1. Telling an autistic child to, "Say 'bye.'" I understand why parents fall into this -- you don't want your child to seem rude, so you just prompt (still not effective, but understandable). But when I hear a speech pathologist do this, it drives me crazy. "Can you say 'bye'?" Well, yes, he can, but if it's only when you ask him then it's not really functional, is it? The behavioral approach to solving this problem is to start with a full prompt, then fade to successively lesser (ok, I just said that part cuz it sounds smart) prompts.

2. Asking an autistic child a question you don't know the answer to. If you ask, "What did you do at school today?" and they don't answer, you are reinforcing silence! I admit I've done this before, but I'm really trying not to ask anything I can't prompt. If a child already has trouble answering questions he does know the answer to, please don't give him more opportunities to practice not answering! The behavioral approach to this is much more complicated than #1, but more rewarding than looking stupid when you repeatedly ask a child questions he can't answer yet.

I have many pet peeves on this subject, but they're probably only interesting to me (and maybe Marria, who I better not ever hear is guilty of #1). :)

Death and Tornadoes

A good friend died Wednesday night. I hadn't talked to him in a few years, but we were best friends for a while when we were little. We were planning to get married when we were five, but he said that he was going to be a fireman, and he knew I wouldn't want a fire truck parked in the driveway all the time. So he broke it off. :) It's hit all of us really hard, but I have many fond, funny memories to hold onto.

After finding out about that Thursday morning, we came home Thursday night and had our subdivision surrounded by tornadoes. It was strange the way the death made me view the tornadoes. There was a total lack of fear, because it seemed impossible for two really bad things to happen in one day. Luckily, we didn't have any damage, other than being without power for the night, but we drove around this afternoon and looked at the destruction. The little airport about a mile from our house had hangars flattened and planes destroyed. We saw huge trees uprooted and thrown around. It was a strange kind of metaphor for what the day had already brought.