Weighing the Options

The Asperger's Express receives many letters from parents who have just been informed (usually by their school districts) that their child needs "a program" and are having trouble weighing their options and deciding what to do next. We can empathize with these parents because, a few years ago, we were in the very same situation. In almost every case, when we ask them "do you feel that you have a good understanding of your child's specific needs?" their answer is no. They have a stack of reports in front of them, written by speech pathologists, school psychologists and social workers, yet they are confused and do not feel capable of making informed decisions. Why?

What is an "Intervention Program?"

A common misperception on the part of many special education professionals, therapists and parents is that the term "program" refers to a place. (We sign up for the "program," then, every day, we take the child to a building, where the "program" lives, and all the "intervention" happens.) It is easy to see how parents of newly diagnosed children can make this mistake. Without a clear picture of their child's needs, they certainly cannot imagine themselves having the necessary skills to design an intervention program, much less assume the leading role in it.

Ideally, an intervention program begins with a comprehensive assessment of the child and the creation of developmental profile upon which intervention decisions can be based. Intervention programs should not be built around a diagnostic label, meaning there is really no such thing as a program "for autism." An intervention program is simply a strategy for addressing the needs of a child based on his or her individual profile. Using our definition, you might say that every child, autistic or otherwise, has an "intervention program."

Without a comprehensive approach to intervention and a defined purpose, your program can quickly degenerate into a list of various skill-building therapies which, no matter how effective they may be, remain unconnected and do not contribute to the achievement of your main goal.

The primary goal of intervention is to enable children to form a sense of their own personhood.

Stanley I. Greenspan

Assessment

In order to design a comprehensive intervention program, it is essential that you begin with a comprehensive assessment. A school district's evaluation, in our opinion, is insufficient. It provides you with a description of your child's performance of a particular set of tasks presented over a relatively short period of time by a group of strangers, meaning that it measures a product. It gives you very little insight into biologically-based processing deficits that may have influenced your child's performance of those tasks, such as sensory processing and motor planning.

Standardized testing should not serve as a cornerstone of the assessment. Rather, it should be used, if needed, after the child is observed interacting and playing with his caregivers...Tests tend to emphasize how the child relates to the person administering the test and to highly structured tasks that may require motor-planning (attentional) skills the child does not have...As a result, the assessment often supports a more global picture of the child, rather than a picture that builds on how the child relates to, and uses his unique abilities with, his most treasured caregivers.

Stanley I. Greenspan
The Child With Special Needs
pages 12-13

Our school district's assessment was disturbing to us, not because we were unaware that our child had special needs, but because it did not begin to answer the two questions that needed answered most - Why did Katie perform as she did on this assessment? and What do we do now?

The Asperger's Express suggests that parents, who are just now asking themselves these same questions, consider assessing their children in a different way - by looking at processing capacities, rather than the products they generate. In Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of The Child With Special Needs, Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder provide a set of tools that parents can use as a framework for observing children and understanding them in terms of their sensory processing profiles, motor-planning and sequencing abilities, and functional developmental capacities.

Next, Defining Goals