Living with Autism: A Parent's Perspective

To start the history a bit our son was diagnosed as non-verbal autistic meaning on top of the general autism traits our son also could not talk and so had no method of expressing himself

Three years later he still is unable to talk much, generally a word here or there with some minor exceptions and definitely not sufficient to make any communication by this form possible.

He has over time learned the pecs method of communicating and has also developped other physical methods of getting his point across (ie getting juice from the fridge to tell us he wants a drink)

With the increase in communication and our increase in understanding him he has become far less frustrated and therefore much more open to additional options and lessons

It should be pointed out to parents who have just recently had a child diagnosed with autism that this is not the end of the world by any means. Yes you are going to have to deal with behaviours etc that you would not expect or tolerate out of other children and you have to find constructive ways to try to work around these behaviours however you will find that most autistic children once some form of communication has been established can be extremely happy children.

It also should be noted that with approximately 1 in 100 children are being diagnosed with varying forms of autism so again to those who have children recently diagnosed with autism, you are not alone.

encourage and allow your children to play with various electronic toys (vtech toys worked best for us) as you might be surprised at how well they adapt and this does include various complicated type toys like vsmile and leapster. If your child is hard on toys (rough, possibly throwing and dropping) then you will find the leapster is rugged enough while the vsmile is a bit more fragile.