AT THE MAUI AUTISM CENTER, WE MAKE LEARNING FUN
Early Intervention is Key
The best part of working with children with core deficits is seeing the gains they can make. If given the tools to succeed, a child can make noticeable gains in a relatively short amount of time. “We have a long way to go, but at least now we have the building blocks put into place to forge a good working relationship,” a therapist said of her latest client, now attending Maui Autism Center.
For children with speech and language delays, waiting for your child to talk can be the most terrifying thing you can do. There is no need to wait as early intervention is the most important thing a parent can do to mitigate any potential life long defects in your child’s ability to access and understand language. 
The number of children suffering with language delays, awkward social inadequacies, and behavioral issues has skyrocketed in the last decade. The CDC now estimates that approximately 1 in 80 boys now suffer from autism spectrum disorder. If one were to categorize attention defects in learning, ADD would be most prevalent, followed by ADHD, but Autism Spectrum Disorder sometimes called Global Development Delay, PDD or PDD-NOS, is far worse as it affects the language centers of a child’s developing brain. Although some cases are not as severe as others, autism is a condition that a parent will sooner or later need address. As with anything, it is better to address the issue at its earliest appearance.
“I could no longer handle that my son was just staring off into space and not attending to anything” said a parent. “I kept asking people and no one could give me an answer. When will he say yes or no?” I asked. “The experts at the public school could not tell me. They would all just shrug their shoulders. I felt like it was just left up to me as a parent to either resolve it on my own or to just accept it. I looked in the mirror and asked myself, how could I accept that my child could not say ‘YES’ or ‘NO’?“ To me this was unacceptable. So we searched, and we searched. We flew out experts by the plane-load. We read books. We prayed endlessly. We tried everything biomedical. We tried intensive ABA therapy. And what we found is that there are no short cuts to recovery, but that recovery is a long hard accent up the side of a steep mountain top. Each day, we make a gain, and each day we are grateful for it. The thought comes to me that perhaps we were put here on earth to strive. And perhaps in doing so, we are creating “Tikun Olam”, (A Yiddish expression for making the world a better place), or in Hawaiian, “PONO” (Doing what is right).
In our search, here is what we have learned. Autistic children can learn! Autistic children learn differently. Children need to be motivated to attend. Autistic children need to be just as motivated to attend, if not more so. The knowledge that learning must be made fun and interesting is not a new one. The task at hand of finding reinforcers that are compelling to your autistic child becomes key!
We need to make learning fun! We do this at the Maui Autism Center by creating a situation of errorless learning. No one wants to get a question incorrect. Sometimes, just getting a question incorrect, may be enough to jumpstart a trantrum or meltdown. A regular neurotypical child does not want to get an answer wrong. An autistic child especially may not like being asked a question that he or she does not know or yet even understand. So, we contrive situations to create errorless learning, exposing the children to language demands continually, and following up with reinforcements for motivation as needed. Prompting the child to the correct answer, alleviating a potential breakdown before the breakdown has even had time to fester. By doing so, we create a safe nurturing environment where children can work on their core deficits and build confidence in their social behaviors before returning to the greater community at large.
We enjoy the children here!
For a free consultation on the services we offer, please call the Maui Autism Center @ 879-4111.
