Early Intervention
Early intervention is so important because if you don't intervene early enough, you're going to lower the success of the child. The faster you start services, the younger the child is, the better the outcome. So all of the research and just my experience in general has shown that the earlier you start with an intensive high quality therapy program, the better the outcome. The child will make much more progress if you start when they're two years old than if you start when they're five years old.
If you have a child who's two years old, and he's not talking, there's a good chance if you intervene, you can eventually get that child talking. If you have a child who is five or six years old and they're not talking and they just start receiving services when they're five or six years old, there's a possibility they might never talk.
Well, early intervention in the United States, the services that are given depend on the state. When I was in New York, it was a very generous program. They covered evaluations, so the child would have been evaluated by a special education teacher, a speech therapist and occupational therapist, if necessary, a physical therapist and if necessary, a psychologist. If a child had a diagnosis of autism, the New York City early intervention program would pay for 20 hours a week of ABA therapy, they would pay for speech therapy, occupational therapy, and if the child needed physical therapy or feeding therapy, they would pay for that as well. The therapies can be done either in the child's home or in a center based program, which is basically a school for kids under the age of three, or it could be a combination of the two. Some families didn't want ABA therapy. So for those families, they would get something called special instruction, which is basically play therapy. If you live in a state that doesn't have a very generous early intervention program, you can always go through your medical insurance because most states have laws saying that if a child has a diagnosis of Autism, the insurance company has to pay for the services.
In order to qualify for early intervention, the child first needs to be evaluated. So early intervention will pay for the evaluations and if the child is found to have enough of a delay in certain areas or if they have a formal diagnosis such as Autism, then early intervention will pay for services. The evaluations through early intervention can be done either in the child's home, or they can be done at a center based program.
Parents often ask how they can further support their child's therapy. Something that's very important is for the therapists to have the parents sit in on the therapy sessions. Many therapists will ask the parents to leave the room. They don't want the parents in the room while they're working with the child because they feel it's a distraction that the child's behavior is worse in front of the parent than it is with the parent in another room. Although that may be true, the parents are a very important part of the team, they've got to be in the therapy room watching what the therapist does. So that way when the therapist leaves or when the child leaves the center based program, the parent then has the tools with which to work with their child. Follow through is very, very important. The parents have got to work with the child in the same way that the therapists do. They have to work on speech goals, they have to manage their behavior in the same way that the therapists do because if they're doing things differently than the therapist, there's a lack of consistency and it's going to slow down the child's progress.