Claire Golomb is a Professor Emerita of the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. For over 40 years she taught courses on child…
“I always knew that my father seemed different from other fathers, but back then I didn’t know there was a name that described this difference or that there might be other people who had similar issues in their families. Once I realized that my father had an ASD, it helped me better understand and get along with him. I have found that over the past ten years there has been an exponential increase in the amount of information available to parents to help them understand their ASD children, but almost no information for children or teens to help them understand their ASD parents. I wrote this book to begin to fill that gap.”
“Therapists are increasingly required to learn and work using an approach which is unfamiliar to them; this is the case for many therapists seeking employment within the NHS, where CBT is often the treatment of choice. The FIT approach meets the current need to incorporate additional or new approaches within their work, and to utilise an integrative approach which is flexible yet clear and consistent, rather than confusing to the client.”
All relationships require constant care and attention, but the love between an “Aspie” and a “Neuro-typical” comes with its own set of challenges. Celebrate Valentine’s…
“Some things that our children say or do can be especially poignant in certain situations and, quite often, they can say things that are so truthful, we just wouldn’t dare say them ourselves! There shouldn’t be anything sad or embarrassing about situations like these. We should see the humour in it and not feel guilty to laugh out loud. I think it is important to embrace moments like these as we have enough of a hard time and laughing can help redress the balance. Laughter is very good for stress too, so there’s no excuse!”
” I find that older people are often patronised, and their ability to recover and make changes in their lives is often not acknowledged. Dr Martin Blanchard speaks in the Foreword of a ‘therapeutic nihilism’ that exists in attitudes towards the client group described in the book. One effect of this is that older people are often expected to fit into generic treatment systems, when they clearly have needs that will not be met by those systems. Thus the need for a specialist approach such as the book describes.”
“My goal in counselling young people around issues of ordinariness, I suppose, is to help them begin to feel that the way they are is fine. They’re not going to be as good as they always longed to be, but nor are they going to be as dreadful as they always feared they might be… That’s not to say that they won’t achieve massively, but that they don’t have to be striving for it to such an extent that they then start behaving strangely or self-destructively or being destructive at other people’s expense in order to get recognised, and in order to be different.”
“Children with ASD are not good at generalising. They cannot transfer knowledge from one situation to another. Something as simple as having a different symbol to show ‘choosing’ for example, may result in the child being unable to understand what is expected. Not all schools have access to symbol writing programmes or they may be different from those used by early years practitioners. Parents usually have no access at all and are not even aware of the visual symbols they could be using to aid their child’s understanding at home…The aim of the book is to promote and foster collaboration between the home and the school. This will result in improved generalisation of skills and opportunities to exchange ideas and to decide what methodology works best for the child.”
Carol L. Spears and Dr. Vicki L. Turner are Speech Language Pathologists, Assistive Technologists, and Alternative/ Augmentative Communication Specialists. Here, Carol and Vicki answer some…
In December, JKP author John Merges shared some thoughts about his passion: helping young people on the autism spectrum enjoy social interactions – an important skill…