I have a son who is ten years old and who was diagnosed with autism when he was three. At the time he had no functional language, threw tantrums frequently, had obsessions, and his IQ was tested at 70. I live in the Salt Lake City School District. I have sent my son to both public and private schools in this area.
When my son was nine months old, we noticed that he was doing a lot of strange eye movements that looked like seizures. When he was one year old he started to avoid eye contact, and didn't want to be held. We started early intervention services with DDI Vantage (a public early intervention organization for 0-3 year old children) when my son was 18 months old. We also put our son in speech therapy at Primary Children's Hospital. Neither of these interventions made any significant changes. When our son was diagnosed with autism at the Autism Research Clinic, we were put in touch with a speech therapist, Lori Krasny, who helped my son learn the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS). It helped him to learn the function and purpose of language. For several months, we also tried a program called TEACCH out of North Carolina. We also hired employees of the Children's Behavioral Therapy Unit to work with our child (now called the Carmen Pingree School). We started to recognize that our son could learn new things, but he needed to be taught differently than other children and that certain techniques seemed to work better than others.
When my son was 3.5 years old, we came into contact with a person who had tried Lovaas Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and were very impressed with the progress of her child as well as the research we were able to find on the intervention. We stopped all other interventions and hired a consultant and tutors. We did ABA with Redwood Learning Center for 5 years. Our son made dramatic progress and learned how to talk, school skills, self-care skills, play skills, peer skills, etc. At the end of the five years, he was able to go to school with the help of an aide. After Redwood Learning Center, we hired the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) out of California to help with Executive Functioning and Social Skills. They were able to help us for approximately 18 months. Our son made some significant gains with his peers and was able to attend school without the help of an aide. He currently is mainstreamed with other children his age and performs well in school. He has friends and I can say I truly admire the work he has done to get where he is today. Although he is doing well, we continue to search for things that will make his social life less difficult.
He currently is involved in Relationship Development intervention (RDI) and we are hoping that this program will help him to maintain better eye contact and have a more complex understanding of difficult social situations.
We have considered biomedical interventions, but have not pursued them because our son has responded so well to behavioral interventions. Quite frankly, we could not afford to do both. We are very grateful for the progress we have made and realize how fortunate we are that our son responded to some of the interventions we provided. We would like to encourage others who are able to do what they can for their children, because we can definitely say it was worth it!