When new members ask about diagnosis

Post Reply New Topic

Another aspect of this is the reality that in evaluating people for autism spectrum disorders, a balance has to be found between overdiagnosis and under diagnosis and that trying to avoid mistakenly diagnosing people results in more people with autism being missed. There are reasonable arguments as to which side it's better to err on, but errors, both false positives and false negatives, are inevitable.

In terms of allocating resources, I think that high-functioning verbal children who communicate and may even socialize should have fundamentally different kind of accommodations than low-functioning non-verbal children who can't communicate.

What I mean is that the most $$$$ one-on-one human resources should be for LFA and/or non-verbal/pre-verbal.
HFA children with severe impairment in a specific area should also get one-on-one for that specific area.
HFA children who have milder impairments and no severe impairment in a specific area should be helped in a way that uses less one-on-one and more like teaching certain skills that are harder for them to pick up naturally with the goal of timely independence from any aide being with them as an aide might be with an LFA child all day.

As an eggsample from my own childhood, I got help in terms of EF in junior high, but not with an aide, but with a clear simple system that I had to manage myself of doing and turning in homework. I had really bad EF (maybe caused by sensory overload and junior high complexities) in 7th grade, but as a result of this help in 8th grade, I developed good EF skills, so I was able to be independent and responsible in high school, which set the foundation for me going to college, etc. I don't know if I would have done as well with one-on-one aide, as that would have dropped my need to develop EF skills that make a big difference in terms of adulthood functioning/outcome.

I think there should not be an always when it comes to what kids need.

We all have our childhood stories of what worked and what didn't work.

As a little girl I was very easily frightened, mystified by games, and though I could talk I did not do conversation. It was terrifying when I was placed in a group of highly verbal Aspie boys for support and that simply could not ever have worked.

I really do feel it's important to match the services to the child's overall needs and it may be better to provide individual support when there isn't an easy peer group. And when there are comorbid problems like anxiety or with reading skills which might independently require one to one if they were a little more severe. Independence can still be what is being supported and still be what is achieved.

There's no making up for what you don't get as a child, it's always finding ways to compensate and I think it's a terrible mistake to put all our resources only into those designated as the lowest functioning. Maybe as much as I hate the response to intervention model, there is something to be said for finding the minimum service level needed and providing what's needed, rather than creating hard and fast rules. Every child deserves a chance to grow even if needing more resources than she or he should.

I think part of the issue is dedicating resources like personnel/time and money to actually serving individual children's needs. Doing testing/assessments is great, but it doesn't matter much if they are going to plug and play your kid into what already exists and fight anything that they do not usually do, just because they have never done it before. Unless your kid happens to match up relatively well into a school's menu of options, your kid is not truly getting an IEP. It is off the rack, with minor alterations available, but not custom made, if that analogy makes sense to anyone.

One word in caps is the equivalent of bolding or using italics. It is for emphasis.
It is not shouting.

If you're fine with your child being denied resources, that's your business. I'm not fine with it for my child.