by Virginia Boudreau

Created on: February 04, 2011

As a first time mother, things can get very overwhelming real quick. Then when you find out that not only are you a first time parent but you're also the parent of an autistic child, it can be pretty scary. Autism was never really heard of before the last decade or so, therefor, many parents either don't know anything about it or even how to deal with it. A lot of resources are not readily available to parents and you have to rely on yourself to do the research and find what you need. The therapy the government provides is very helpful to not only the child but to the parents. It's pretty much a step-by-step training program for the parents to learn how to better deal with their child and if you reinforce the same rules and treatment at home you will notice huge differences in your child.

With our little girl, therapy first started at 2 years of age in a hospital environment and things went from bad to worse not long after that. These therapists were not specifically trained to deal with autism or any behavior therapy so the bad behavior got worse not better. After a year of hearing my daughter scream and cry and hurt herself from the stress we stepped up and took over. I had to sit and watch my baby scream and kick and smash her head off the floor for over an hour before they let me talk to her (part of the therapy focuses on ignoring bad behavior) and that day I walked out and never came back.

Six months later, she was enrolled into the government's autism behavior therapy program and though it was a bumpy start and exhausting on everyone involved we finally made a breakthrough. We figured out that she memorizes patterns, full movies and depends very much on a strict routine with few derailments. We then decided to try introducing a visual schedule, a Velcro band with cutouts of every day regular activities from eating to sleeping and everything in between. She responded very well to this because finally, because of the language barrier, she could be shown a picture of what was coming next in her day instead of trying to understand your words and it cut out a lot of frustrations and confusions.

Another big part of the therapy is usually toilet training and it can be very hard, VERY hard. Our daughter at 5 was just beginning toilet training because school was starting in just a few months and it seemed impossible the task at hand. So we tried something new, all her therapy for weeks was all done in the bathroom. They set up a table in there and did everything

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