secretly i think my kids are much better off than "normal" kids

[riverview9]

my son is 3 and the school system did their evaluations and say he is autistic. we plan to homeschool but the only help around here is the public school system...so i'm on my own. the doctors only help was to "check out books about autism at the library".

i first realized signs of autism in him a year ago. i didn't know what to call it then. after the diagnosis i started seeing everythign he did as a trait of autism instead of just part of his personality. i missed my little boy and dumped the autism label and just loved him for him. now i feel like i'm in denial and what if that is harming him? i want to help him but i'm not sure anything is "wrong" with him. our life may not be normal but we make it work. my kids are incredibly happy, have a very loving family and are as smart as other kids but in different ways (which strangers don't seem to see).

also, i read about sonlight and it sounds a lot like attached parenting which is what we're already doing. which of their books do i read to learn more? i know of at least two

[PikkuMyy]

Hi! You are thinking of SonRise. Sonlight is a Christian homeschooling curriculum.

I'm not familiar with any more than two books by the founders of SonRise but I will say that it is a therapy that has had no studies performed on it, and you have to pay a lot of money to learn how to do it.

For a child-centered program that has tons of empirical data showing how well it works, and doesn't cost anything to learn how to do, I and many other professionals (and parents) highly recommend FloorTime by Dr. Stanley Greenspan.

http://www.icdl.com/dirFloortime/overview/index.shtml

[savannah smiles]

I was trained to do Sonrise at the Option Institute (which is the headquarters for the program) when I was a nanny for an autistic child. It's quite similar to Floortime but focuses a lot on your attitude when you're in the playroom with the child. Sonrise only costs a lot if you go to the Institute to be trained or have a trainer come to your home to help you set up your program. You can try to just set up the program using only the book so the main costs would be getting a playroom set up accordingly (w/ high shelves). I got very burnt out doing Sonrise but some people really like it.

[Lisa1970]

Was his diagnosis PDD-NOS?

I think you are doing the right thing to forget the label and move on raising your son the way you would have otherwise. I have 2 sons with that label. I am ready to lose the label. They are still the same people they were before. The public school help was not much help. I am homeschooling my younger children now.

I would make sure you try to keep his schedule predictable, with clear expectations and enforcements of that. I would also reduce computer time. That is good for any child, but for a child with this DX, computer gets very very addicting. If he does not already use the computer much, don't even start letting him. That is the biggest area of concern for most parents of children like ours has. In fact, it is a huge concern of parents of many children. But my child would melt down and have a hard day once he was on the computer. It was as if he could not function until we set down a strict 6-8 computer time, and put passwords on the computer to keep it that way. Then he only got it if he followed a set of rules that day (chores and homework and not picking on his brother). It generally works. Things are going much better for us now than they ever did when he was off at school.

You are not short changing him at all, you are doing the completely right thing!!

[riverview9]

thank you all so so much, all the responses are very helpful. i'll look more into floortime. is there a message board or somewhere that parents homeschooling autistic kids hang out online?