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re:We hope that some of...
We hope that some of your feelings of fear and frustration will be replaced with a sense of hope, determination, and confidence in yourself as a parent, in your family, and in your child.
This book is based on our extensive and ongoing work with families like yours, using the Early Start Denver Model to help children become active, curious, and engaged learners in the world. The strategies you’ll learn come from formal scientific studies that show children’s accelerated development when the Early Start Denver Model is delivered combined with parents’ use of these skills. Although children with ASD benefit from and need intensive early intervention services from trained professionals, we believe that parents and other family caregivers can make an enormous difference in their child’s learning.
We three authors of this book have all worked for many years directly as clinicians teaching families how to promote engagement, learning, and communication during the daily routines that naturally occur with children. We have found that parents are as effective as therapists in teaching core skills affected by autism. They can use these strategies to make every interaction with their child count toward learning. Parents also have the opportunity to teach skills or behaviors at home that children may not learn elsewhere or may not have much opportunity to practice in other settings.
The Early Start Denver Model supports parents’ relationships with their children. It helps parents develop learning opportunities via simple games, communicative interactions during caregiving, and fun exchanges during other daily routines. No special background or prior knowledge is required. The strategies described here are designed to help parent–child interactions become more fun, more emotionally rich, and more meaningful, while at the same time providing children with more learning opportunities. We hope that parents from many different walks of life and many different backgrounds will find the strategies helpful for developing richer learning experiences for their children from the everyday activities involving playing with toys, bathing, eating meals, grocery shopping, or other activities in their daily lives.
We also understand that each child with ASD is unique, with a personal set of special gifts and challenges. As someone once said, “If you have met one child with autism, you have met one child with autism.” Like each typically developing child, each child with ASD has a unique personality, set of likes and dislikes, talents, and challenges. But all young children with ASD, by definition, have trouble relating and communicating with others and playing with toys in a typical way.
Areas in Which Most Children
with ASD Have Difficulties
• Paying attention to other people
• Using social smiles
• Taking turns and engaging in social play
• Using gestures and language
• Imitating others
• Coordinating attention (eye gaze) with others
• Playing in typical ways with toys
From decades of research on early development and intervention in children with ASD, we have learned a great deal about the kinds of difficulties that young children with ASD have. It can be hard for them to pay attention to the people around them—including others’ language and activities. It is often hard for them to share their feelings—happiness, anger, sadness, frustration—with other people by sending emotional messages to others through their facial expressions, gestures, and sounds or words. They experience a full range of emotions but may not share them in a way that is easy to understand. They may not be very interested in playing with other children and may not respond very well to other children’s efforts to play with them. They often do not use many gestures to communicate and don’t seem to understand the gestures of others. They are less likely to imitate others readily, so it can be hard to teach them by showing them how to do something and expecting them to copy it. Many children with ASD enjoy toys, but they often play with them in unusual ways, and their play can be very repetitive. Developing speech, and responding to others’ speech, can be very difficult for many children with ASD, even for those who learn how to repeat other people’s words. It is also not unusual for children with ASD to have some “challenging behaviors.” These challenging behaviors are often seen in other young children as well, but young children with ASD do not respond to the typical ways parents try to teach children how to behave. They may throw tantrums, hit or bite others, destroy objects, and sometimes hurt themselves (this is called self-injurious behavior).
This book will teach you strategies for helping your child in each of these areas. Many studies, including studies we authors have conducted ourselves, have shown that early intervention can be tremendously helpful for children with ASD, resulting in significant gains in learning, communicating, and social skills. Some children even lose their diagnosis of ASD as a result of early intervention; others may still have challenges but are able to participate well in regular classrooms, develop friendships, and communicate well with others. Still others may continue to have significant challenges requiring ongoing special services, but early intervention will help them progress.
Most of the research on early intervention has focused on studies in which the treatment is delivered by trained therapists. The research on parent-delivered early intervention is still at an early stage. However, studies show that parents and other caregivers can learn to use many treatment strategies as well as trained therapists, and that when parents use these strategies, the quality of their interactions with their children improves and the children become more socially engaged and learn to communicate better with others. We have helped many parents learn to use these strategies at home with their young children, and they have told us again and again how helpful these approaches are for teaching their children to learn, interact with others, communicate, and play in more typical ways. In our work with many children over the years, we have discovered that every single child with ASD can learn to communicate, improve social interactions with others, and increase play skills. We are confident that these techniques will help you feel more effective as a parent, a playmate, and a first teacher for your child. And as you use the techniques and see your child learn from them, you will experience a sense of parental pride and pleasure that comes from seeing your child achieve and knowing that you are part of your child’s successes.
This book is designed for parents of young children with symptoms of ASD who are in the infant through preschool years/kindergarten. You can use it whether you only suspect your child has ASD or your child has already been diagnosed. It will provide you with step-by-step instructions and examples through which you can use your typical everyday activities to help your child become more engaged, communicative, and interactive with you and with your family.
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发表于 2013-2-18 16:22:27
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发表于 2013-2-22 08:05:43