Special needs of children increasingly must be met at home
The Autism News | English
By William Goldie, M.D. | Ventura County Star
Home-schooling is making a comeback. Even if your child is attending regular school, much of his education and services will have to be provided at home. This will be especially true if the child has special needs.
It is becoming apparent that up to 10 percent of school-age children are given the label of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and up to 1 percent are given the label of autism. This is creating an enormous stress on the special programs that the schools and the regional center are being asked to offer.
For those parents who have learned to complain the most effectively, their children often get more than adequate services. However, for those parents who have not learned the effective methods for complaining, their children are getting left out. There are serious shortages of special-education teachers, speech therapists and other trained pediatric therapists. They have always been in short supply and are always overworked and underpaid. This will be getting much worse in the months ahead.
The special-needs children with very serious learning and behavioral problems are losing their valuable services. This is very regrettable.
There has been a huge effort to try to identify children with special needs early on and to develop a momentum of services that allows them to become more normal. Pediatricians are being pressured by the American Academy of Pediatrics to screen children as young as 18 months to identify developmental and learning and behavioral problems and to refer them for special services. This will be futile if no services are available.
The home is where special services need to be provided. This is where children must learn proper speech, proper behavior and the desire to want to learn.
Teaching is a process that is futile if there is not the desire to learn that is instilled within the child. Communication skills and interactive skills are learned from daily living, not learned in some classroom or therapy session.
The really good pediatric specialists in special education, speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy are burning out. Their special skills are being thinned out and diluted and used for children who are in less real need.
Their special skills need to be preserved for those children who would benefit the most and who will then develop the momentum toward normal.
Other children who could benefit from help with speech, behavior and attention problems will need to have home-schooling. This is going to become much more of an issue in the months ahead as we see the effects of severe budget cuts and burnout.
— William Goldie, M.D., of Camarillo is a pediatric neurologist.
Source: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/jan/16/special-needs-of-children-increasingly-must-be/
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Rose Player
A gr8 post, i wish more Consultants were like Dr Goldie ,
Dom Townshend
and home schooling is easy? my son was off school for nearly six months awaiting a new school. we were given no support no resorces not even told where we could find help. my wife got him some prep books and we got tutor eventaully just before he started school!!
its great if your in a position and want to home school but we were not!
Heather Campsmith
I agree insurance needs to cover more for people,
like aba ect
RoseAnn Umberger Mercante
My dameian is 10 and just now Im trying to show him what autism. He has asperger’s and I tell you he is totally not interested… so I talk about it and if we see something on tv about it I say oh Dame that’s what u have.. It’s no big deal really to him or us.. but it does help his brothers to learn about him
Nancy Levy Marin
I agree that as budget cuts are happening and more and more of the burden of care for these children rests on us, we need to think of home as the central place that they receive his care, not at school. Therefore, home training needs to be increased. We need to have BCBA level therapists assist us in creating the best possible environment for these kids to thrive in.
Carole Reynolds
Go figure! The school can’t teach him, the mental hospitals don’t care to teach him, and the judge won’t LET ME teach him homeschool.
Julie Vincent
With the schools having to cut down, our children are hurting even more. Our school turned in a report for this school year, and apparently didn’t include our child needing special assistant in the class, who was mainstreamed. There is an assistant, but assigned to another child, who off and on assists ours (most likely no experience with autistic children). Now he’s falling behind and now they want to transfer into another school for mild-moderate. One step forward, two steps back. Just because they didn’t add the assistant to the budget.