Living with Autism: A Parent's Perspective

To start i would like to give you a history to our story.

Our son was born on Valentine's Day 2004 (it was going to be either valentines day or friday the 13th and he chose valentines day)

We first noticed his behaviour start to change around his eighteenth month and after watching him for a few days chose to speak to our pediatrician.

Now your choice of pediatrician is vital when it comes to situations like this as you need a pediatrician who will not instantly think you are being hysterical worrywarts.

In our case our pediatrician chose to immediately start setting up tests to see if we were right, no questions, no fuss, right down to lets get to it.

Now the tests did not happen overnight and i believe it took about 6 months for all the results to come back confirming our suspicions.

There is now a number of things that happened. Not all quickly but over time we were set up with three therapists at the hospital.

speech therapist, occupational therapist, and physio therapist were set up over a period of time and we were also introduced to the concept of ABA therapy.

It did take a period of initial hesitation but we eventually chose to enroll our son in the ABA program and between the therapists and ABA we started to see some improvements.

Now as of fall 2009 our son has entered the school system, at the kindergarten level and has lost his access to not only all the therapists but also to the ABA program.

Our luck here is that due to the fact our son is labeled a high flight risk he was assigned full time TA coverage (at no time during the day is he unaccompanied) and now we reach our present point in time

Now while i will attempt to expand on some of the details of this introduction over time, i will also attempt to show his general growth as time goes on