Future Horizons Incorporated Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew

..... living with someone on the autistic spectrum. I have read a number of books that purport to help understand the breadth of challenges facing the families of those living with an autistic child. All were helpful, some more than others, with the only deficiencies being perhaps a too narrow focus on the authors personal experience. An understandable approach, given that the majority of those challenged by Autism present different behaviour and symptoms reflecting their position on the spectrum. There does seem to be however a number of consistent core truths and behaviours that are vitally important to understand and come to grips with. Ellen Notbohm manages to capture most of these and presents in a clear and concise manner a road map, if you will, explaining these key elements and offering a well thought out response that I hope you will find, as I did, enormously helpful. You cannot take the square peg representing an autistic child's needs and fit it into the round hole that is our expectations of how to parent a child. The parenting skills we learned from our families, our teachers, our therapists, may be roughly useful to help you cope with the majority of children but there are those who are tuned to a different frequency. They need extra love, extra understanding and a standard Dr. Spock approach may not fit. We need to learn to tune in to the right channel. Ten Things can help you. I highly recommend it.

I'm new to the Autism world. My nephew is almost 2 years old, has PDD and SPD. He went from being a kid that tantrummed every 2 minutes, non verbal, to a kid who has ABA 3 times a day, and a sensory gym 3 times a week for OT, PT and ST. He's starting to say a couple of words. His tantrums have gone down considerably. We can almost make it 45 minutes through Mass without him screaming bloody murder. What does this have to do with the book??? From my experience, this book as brought me so much understanding OF WHAT MY NEPHEW IS GOING THROUGH ON A DAILY BASIS. I've read so much about why he might or might not have autism, I've read that he has a sensory disorder and we have all the sensory toys to help him...but it was not until this book, which I finished in one evening, that I ever FELT how he must feel on a daily basis. I see a lot a of reviews for people who think this book can't help if your child is non verbal. I can't comment on something I don't know. But from where I'm coming from, this book has opened my eyes to the ways I should and shouldn't speak, act and shouldn't act, around a litle boy that is seeing the world in an entirely different way frome me. No, I don't have to do those things, but I'm his aunt, and I want to bond with him however I can. And that's the main point of the book. We can change. We are adults. We think neurotypically. Someone with a different perception cannot just conform to the way I think. Even if he tries hard, or wants to...he can't. So it's up to ME to change. I can't wait to share this with the rest of the family. My heartbroken mother who thinks his dreams are shattered, my stressed out sister trying to hold together her last slice of sanity, my aunt who is not sure autism is not just an excuse for bad behavior. I think this book speaks in a very plain, understanding way from a woman who worked VERY HARD not to FIX her son to be what she wanted him to be, but to enter his world and engage him, so that he could then seek her world out as well. And she's sharing how she did that. This book is not a how to book with the secret ingredient to make a child verbal or filled with emotion. Her point is that even if your child never speaks, or never hugs you back, he or she deserves your unconditional love, and she gives you the support and pep talk you need to be that person your child needs.

As a parent of two autistic boys life can be a challenge, every day will show you a side of your child that is as hard to accept as it is to understand. It is sometimes impossible to know what has caused a 'meltdown' and even more difficult to know what to do to calm the situation and return to as near a normality as you can. It seems, sometimes that an autistic child perceives a world that we can only visit on their terms. This book helps you to understand what those terms are and in doing so allows us in, and enables us to make informed and subtle changes that accomodate rather than agitate a complex mind. Ellen Notbohm is a mother of autistic children and deals with the issues of autism in a sensitive and somtimes humourous way and since she is first and foremost a parent, she manages to convert some of the language of the phsycologists into practical, understandable and usable information.

I borrowed a copy of this when ASD was mentioned in connection with my son - oh my goodness, it taught me so much in a very short amount of time. Everything about my son, and I mean EVERYTHING, started to make sense. One of the things I really loved was the fact that the author is a parent of an AS kid, and had such wisdom to share. I have now bought a copy for 6 members of my family, and 3 friends. I think anyone connected to AS should read this book.

Thanks amazon for having such books, hellped me a lot