When it comes to our children and our clients, it’s our job to be advocating for them and ensuring that they’re able to lead their happiest, safest lives.
When I began advocating for my own son, I learned that, although I wanted what was best for him, that wasn’t what he was automatically entitled to. So I had to constantly strive to be able to give my son the future he deserved. I learned many valuable lessons along the way and my hope is that I can save you some time and effort with my five steps for advocating for children with autism.
One of the most important things I want to remind my listeners of is that “advocate” does not mean “fight”. It is not our job to be “us” against “them”; we all need to work together to ensure that our children are granted the chance to lead their best lives.
It isn’t always easy when you’re advocating for something you feel so passionately about, but the end results are well worth it. I am confident that my five steps will prove useful to you, as well as the sources I provide you. Remember, it’s up to us to advocate for the changes that we want to see, for both our children and our clients.
Advocating is tough, and I’ve had both parents and professionals really go and advocate very hard for insurance reform. I had Dr. Amanda Kelly, known as Behavior Babe, on podcast episode eight talking about her advocacy efforts. On podcast episode number 3, I’ve talked to Kelsey, who’s a single mom of 2 who’s taken all my courses and she’s our online community manager. She’s had to advocate for her kids very hard. I’ve had to advocate very hard for Lucas over the years too, and I’ve learned a lot from those advocacy efforts. I think within my course and community, especially the community that includes about half professionals and half parents, we do talk a lot about how to advocate and when to push harder and when to push less to get each child to reach their fullest potential. So, I want to give you five basic steps today to help you become a better advocate.
The first step is to not to get into fight mode and to really try to stay positive and supportive and calm and be assertive but not aggressive. So number one in advocacy is not fighting.
The second step is you always want to start with an assessment. I have a free one-page assessment that’s part of a guide that I wrote a year or so ago. And that one-page assessment can help you whether you have a 2 year old or a 20 year old, to really get the basics down. So always start with an assessment. That one-page quick assessment is not going to be enough. You’re going to need more assessments, but that might help you get started with just taking a look at the whole picture quickly.
The third step after not fighting and starting with assessment, is we want to make sure the plan, the goals and the placement are based on the child’s assessment, not based on what’s available, financial implications, and all that stuff. I just looked at a VB-MAPP recently, and the VB-MAPP was done and it seemed okay, but the goals were not really intertwined with the assessment. The goals looked like more of a traditional ABA approach versus following the VB-MAPP assessment. So make sure that the assessment you’re using is tied in with the goals and also tied in with the family values and make sure it’s appropriate for the child’s age too.
The fourth step is to pair yourself with each other. If you’re a parent, pair yourself with the professionals. If you’re a professional, pair yourself with the parents. We all need 8 positives to every negative and we don’t want to just keep hammering more and more demands. If I am trying to advocate for Lucas and all they hear is, “well this isn’t going well and that’s not right and he needs more” and lots of negatives without any positives, the professionals in his life are going to start to resent me for putting so many demands on then. They’re trying their best, so try to step back and take a look at the other person’s perspective and all the variables at play and really try to give as many positives as you can.
And the fifth step is if there is disagreement, which there probably will be, instead of just fighting, go back to the assessment and look at the forest, not the trees. In some cases you might even need an independent evaluation or someone outside that can come in and kind of mediate the situation and see, where the disagreement lies and how you might be able to help get back on track.
So those are 5 steps you can take to become a better advocate for children with autism. You can sign up or learn more about my course and community by going to a free workshop at marybarbera.com/workshop. I hope that these 5 steps have helped you see how you might be able to better advocate for your clients and children with autism, and I hope to see you right here next week.
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