Junior Grendel Number One has a rather limited diet of food that he will eat. His daily meals consist of Nutella Sandwiches, Cheese Snakatas and Jarlsburg slices. This complicates dining out as we have to pack a lunch for him whenever we go somewhere – although if we go to T5 in Joondalup he will always order and eat a ham and cheese croissant.Occasionally he will express a desire to try a new food – often prompted by a brightly coloured package or even an ad on TV – and we usually jump at the chance to (perhaps) add something to the very short list of foods he will eat. Yesterday he asked for some cocktail frankfurts – barely meat, but a lot more than he has had this year.
As of this afternoon he has had a couple at each meal and finished a pack – now what parent in their right mind would be ecstatic about that?
Me
:)
Grendel
ReplyDeleteI understand very well your enthusiasm for your son's tolerance of new foods. On these small foundations, progress is made.
Whilst I'm no expert on Autism, I was the Principal of various special schools in different parts of Queensland for twenty-two years. In my last school (the one I "retired" from), one third of the kids enrolled had a diagnosis of Autism. In Queensland, students with Autism are enrolled at Special School if they have another disability (usually intellectual impairment) on top of ASD. On a few occasions I was approached by parents of kids who were on the spectrum, but had no other problems, because they were unable to find a school which would take their child. This, of course was in conservative (and inflexible) Toowoomba, which is not necessarily typical of the rest of the state. On these occasions, the authorities allowed me to enrol them at my school on the basis that whilst the placement wasn't ideal, it was better than no school at all. They also provided no additional resources.
We would then try to build a partnership with sympathetic primary school communities, intensively teach social skills to these kids, and send them out for ever-lengthening periods of time with a trained teacher aide into the other school. They then had the opportunity to practice the skills they'd learnt with support at hand.
This worked more often than not, and it's been gratifying to hear from the parents of these children over the years how much this process helped. The majority finished up staying in the mainstream.
Unfortunately, this kind of flexibility, even now, is the exception rather than the rule in Queensland.
This practice may assist with kids with extreme ASD, but for the majority, an inclusive setting with support for both teacher and child, and lots of social skilling, both for the child in question and his/her age peers has to be the way to go. Parents also need strong support.