How to Be the Best Parent You Can Be to a Child with Autism
Dr. Mary Barbera
Are you worried you can’t be the best parent you can be to your child with autism? Today I’m giving some advice on parenting kids with and without special needs that I learned from being in the autism world for two decades.
Each week I provide my insights, usually about autism, right here on my YouTube Channel. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that now.
My two sons are young adults now and they’re only 18 months apart in age, so I had my hands full when they were young, especially when Lucas was diagnosed with autism. I studied nursing in college and took a fair amount of psychology courses as an undergrad. I also had a lot of management courses when I pursued my Masters Degree in Nursing Administration from Penn.
I didn’t realize, even after all that education, how ill prepared I was to be a parent, especially to be a parent of a child with autism. It wasn’t until 2002 when I started to study applied behavior analysis, or ABA for short, and became a behavior analyst that I learned better ways to parent both of my kids.
Want to Learn how to Increase Talking & Decrease Tantrums in Children with Autism or Toddlers Showing Signs?
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The number one way to be the best parent you can be to children with and without special needs, in my opinion, is to learn how to teach them. I didn’t realize how much teaching was involved with parenting until I became a behavior analyst in 2003 and worked directly with hundreds of children with autism, their siblings and their families.
When children start to show signs of autism or have a lot of tantrums, parents often don’t know what to do. Especially, since parenting strategies they may have used for their older children or strategies that their friends are suggesting don’t seem to work with children who have limited ability to speak and may be uncooperative, to say the least.
Parents are also getting a lot of different opinions from professionals. Some professionals saying to take away a pacifier so their children speak more, and then other professionals say for sensory reasons, children need the pacifier. Parents really struggle with what to do for a lot of things.
While it shouldn’t be work to teach typical children to talk, for instance, it usually is a lot of work to teach a child with autism to talk or talk more, and it’s a lot of work to teach them how to do almost everything. I definitely recommend using the science of applied behavioral analysis to teach your child to increase communication and decrease problem behavior, but many parents are not going to pursue formal education in applied behavioral analysis.
To help you get started, or to revamp what you’re doing at home to become a better parent, I created this brand new three step guide so you can begin to turn autism around for your child, learning how to be his best teacher.
Since each child is different, my guide will help you do a quick and easy assessment, make a plan, and learn how to keep records so you can get started and make sure your child is making progress.
If you like this video blog, please give me a thumbs up, leave a comment, and subscribe to my channel. I’m on a mission to turn autism around for 2,000,000 kids by 2020.
I hope you’ll join me by taking the first step and downloading this free guide to get started today. I’ll see you next week.
Want to Learn how to Increase Talking & Decrease Tantrums in Children with Autism or Toddlers Showing Signs?
Want to start making a difference for your child or clients?