How do you & your spouse work together with your ASD chi

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I thought it would be interesting to learn how you and your spouse (or child's other parent) work with your special needs child. Do you both work on the SAME skills at the same time or do you take on different areas of needs to address ? For instance, Dad is primarily responsible for working on gross motor skills, while Mom works on communication skills, with the roles reversed during the weekends or so, to promote generalization ?

How do you all do it and what has worked the best for your family ? I have heard arguments both for and against both models. Some families claim that both parents focussing on the same area of need leads to momentum and a faster mastery of the skills in question. Others have advised us to "specialize", as this helps us to focus exclusively on one area of need & promotes global, even if slower, development across domains at the same time. To promote generalization, the parents switch "areas" over the weekends, or for about 1 to 2 days every 15 to 20 days,

To be honest, I can see both sides of the coin, here. What do you all think, and how do you & your spouses work with your children ?

With us, some things are jointly reinforced others are specialized, or maybe more accurately our efforts are weighted differently as a total percent of the work.

In terms of the specific categories you mentioned, I do the most communication work while I am home, and it is probably split pretty evenly when we are both home. As your child gets better at communication it will be also be effected by who your child chooses to initiate communication with,

My husband does most of the gross motor stuff, but sometimes I do some too, because I am with him at certain times when I am able to integrate it into his schedule.

I end up doing most of the fine motor stuff because I am home during HW time, but my husband does a better job of it when he is home and able to help him.

I found that time availability tends to be our main determinant of who does what.

It's interesting. Before my dd really started experiencing problems and then was dx at age 12, my dh could relate to her much more easily than I could. I was so used to my older kids picking up on cues and responding to positive, gentle discipline that I found it frustrating when she did not react the same way. I also had stricter rules and didn't want to give in as easily as my dh did. He places a strong value on peace and harmony and does lots to keep her happy, including rewarding negative behaviour, and can be moody and inconsistent. Throughout the year leading up to her formal dx, I did a lot of reading and talking to my older daughter, who is an autism intervention worker, about my dd's behaviour and responses. I ended up putting a few strategies into action, changed my way of talking to her, and somehow became her "go-to" person. She became very talkative with me, and now almost always initiates communication with me. I have taken over almost all the homework and communication support. Now I am the one who has to remind my dh to give her some time, be patient with her when she is trying to explain something, or not engage in a lengthy argument when I feel she is managing to work towards a difficult goal (we only have a small handful of challenges now). She does get frustrated with me when I push her, but I am usually able to stay calm and she is becoming much more motivated and positive about tasks and about expressing herself. We have lots and lots of relaxed conversations now, and I work in some of our communication goals. So some of the changes in family dynamics evolved naturally but most of them came from me offering to take charge of specific things, and reminding him that we needed to be consistent on such-and-such, needed to be patient with her, and so on. If I ask him to work on a specific task or learning activity or challenge with her, he does his best, but he generally doesn't initiate.