Interview with Dr. Temple Grandin on How to Turn Autism Around

in november of 2020 i sat down with dr temple grandin who wrote the foreword for my new book turn autism around an action guide for parents of young children with early signs of autism temple gives her input on the importance of treating autism speech delays sensory processing issues or anything else as intensively as possible by the parents empowering parents to take action and not to wait so i hope you love this interview with dr temple grandin okay thank you so much for joining us today temple i am just honored to interview you and get to speak with you today um so as you know you know we talked about three times this spring um about my new book that's coming out for parents of one to five-year-olds with autism or science autism and um when we first talked when i started saying that my book was for the really little kids it got you excited about possibly doing the forward for it and you you told me at that time that you were really passionate about helping little kids you've got to get on these little kids and i'm seeing all the time i'm talking to people and um i just talked to a mom she's getting a you know half an hour of therapy a week or something like that right now and i explained that you've got to um they got to get a lot more hours into them and and uh get someone to volunteer and help you ask for help because we work on these little ones and get that speech going i went into therapy at age two and a half i was very very lucky two teachers that worked in the basement of their house older teachers and one of the things they had did a lot of emphasis along with all the speech they worked on was turn taking games and i think this helps a lot on impulsive behavior so we're doing a board game or just some little activity where you take turns doing something you have to learn to wait and i think that's an important skill to learn and this reynolds my speech teacher she she did that all the time and then the other big thing is when the grown-ups talked fast it went into gibberish i actually thought the grown-ups had their own special language and so my speech teacher would slow down and she'd hold up a cup she'd hold her cup up and she'd say um cup and then she'd say cup pop she'd alternate back and forth and saying it regular and saying really super slow starting with one syllable words and i'm at uh i became fully verbal at four my words came in very slowly but i can't emphasize the importance of early intervention and i got it and it was really good early invention what kind of signs did your mother see that concerned her well i wasn't speaking and there was another little girl next door that was the same age and i didn't behave the same way as she did and i had all these tantrums and i didn't want to be held and and i i you know rocking and spinning and stuff and and no speech right and this was a long time ago this was in the late 1940s when you were very young right i i went i went to the doctor in 1949 okay two and a half and actually mother was really lucky she took me to a neurologist not a psychologist a neurologist and uh named bronson cruthers who was really ahead of the head of the time and he had me checked for epilepsy and for deafness now even though i wasn't deaf you see that doesn't tell you about auditory detail that just tells you you can hear these little tones and i was able to do that i'm so this even thinking about petite mall epilepsy was really ahead of the time and he referred my mother to this little speech therapy school that the two teachers had had a couple of down syndrome kids in it and i you know they were all kids that were non-verbal it was about six kids in the class and when miss reynolds was working individually one of the students then the other teacher did the turn taking games okay and i think that's really important to teach the turn taking because there's always problem with impulsive behavior and i can remember very young um you know maybe when i was about six we were playing part cheesy and i i grabbed the cup to shake the dice and mother said you gotta wait for your sister to take her turn she would just give the instruction you've got to wait and take your turn yeah when you were talking about slowing your words down and that's a it's a huge technique that we use in our in my book in my online courses is that we take a shoe box for instance cut a slit into it and then we have pictures of people the child knows or reinforcer so we might say juice juice juice with one picture of juice and the child say they can't speak at all all they have to do is take the picture of the juice and put it in the shoe box and that pairs the word with the item and then um many kids with using those approaches of slowing things down like you said focusing on one syllable words first and reinforcer um things that the child might like um i always think of it like if i were learning a foreign language and somebody said oh do you want to drink in some foreign language i would have no idea what the gibberish was they said water water water i'd be like i have to remember that that's important so it sounds like they were really um these teachers in their little school were really ahead of their times and they were they were older people i'm going to guess probably early they'd be late 40s early 50s they were both gray hair and it was just in a little house in a housing development but they were those older experienced teachers they knew how to work with kids she knew just how much to push because i've talked to people on the spectrum where you had a therapist that were pushing too hard and just driving them into sensory overload and how horrible that was miss reynolds kind of knew just how hard to push yeah you got to push a little bit to get advancement but not you know go into sensory overload right it's just i call it the knack some teachers have it and some don't on working with these kids do you have a memory of going to that school yes i do yes i do so many years ago i remember just a few things i remember holding up the cup and saying cup and and i remember i she i was brought up you know a little safety you know you don't point sharp object as people and for the turn taking she'd point the blackboard pointer at different kids and i was afraid of that and then i remember really fun activity where all the children got american flags and we marched around with the music with them and i remember marching out the back door of the house and he went outside with the flags and that was really fun i do find music is really motivating my son who's 24 i found a music therapist really early on and um he he takes to music he loves music he actually can play the auto harp now he got lessons and um i find that some of the some of the kids like the really the way into language is songs and song fill-ins and making activities like head shoulders knees and toes and marching with flags like that's that's incredible that you have memories way back i remember the the saying cup and she'd uh you know cue me she'd say it both ways i remember being at the table the point in the blackboard pointer i was afraid of that and marching around with flags and and then i remember the car accident that i wrote up in in emergence where i didn't want to wear this stupid hat i remember this really really well so i chucked it out and i couldn't talk at this point i couldn't get my words out okay and i chucked it out onto the driveway at home mother says get out and get it then i thought oh check it out the window during the high on the highway now the cars in those days had cranked windows oh my goodness and i wasn't strong enough to work the cranks so i was in the back seat i leaned over mother she had the front window open and chucked the hat out and she swerved and a red tractor trailer swerved and we hit each other and i remember saying ice ice ice it's broken glass so i went in all around us we were not hurt we were very oh my goodness i learned a new word that day wow that was not a good thing but the reason why i you see this is an example where i did not have a word to communicate i was probably about three and a half when this happened okay i did not have a way to communicate that i'd not want to wear the hat and i can remember something that's just thinking want to scream right now because i don't know how else to say i don't want to wear the hat yeah that's why it's giving a kid way to communication so important right and if they don't have a way they will tantrum or have well that's exactly what i did and and when the drops talked fast i went to gibberish but i also have had some brain scans that showed that my circuit for speak what you see i was short on fibers not enough fiber optic lines in it and and i then what research now is showing is that you work therapy you can increase the bandwidth on the fibers that are left because i had a i wrote in my very early stuff it was like a big stutter i was not nakalele kid i was just yeah i was not one of those i was not one of these ones that acts out a whole movie script or something like that no no no no that was not me um those kids don't know what the language means right tell people there's three ways speech can be messed up don't hear it clearly even though you're not deaf can't get it out that's expressive or echolalic yak it out they don't know what it means yeah that's not the echolalic type so you were you you had a hard time processing auditory input and i had a hard time getting it out and i described it now stutter and she had to push me a bit to get it out and i would say things like bro for broken dare but that for the dare and and i actually thought the grown-ups had a foreign language special grown-up language yeah i remember one time i was very young we lived in where's a lot of snow and we'd make snowmen that was another turn-taking game i'd roll the bottom ball for the snowman izzy would do the middle ball i'd do the head then we had a whole box full of old junk we decorated with scarves and um things for eyes and i remember one time we built snow chairs and my sister and i wanted to play grown up i sat in the snow chairs and i was like oh this is how girl i was talking about you're going to grow up talk you have so many memories from when you couldn't talk and you became verbal at four by four but i was still slow to get it out okay mainstreamed into a normal kindergarten at age five for half a day and i'm little tiny classes you know 12 kids in a class old-fashioned classroom and so i was able to handle it without nade if it had been a bigger class i would have had to have had an aide okay were you hyperlexic in the beginning no haven't actually nope not me i got the third grade and i could not read okay so you were more on the dyslexic side a lot of kids with autism like they they either are really hyperlexic or they have trouble reading well i had trouble reading and i did not have the visual problem with the print jiggles on the page that was not my problem but uh the books we used with the dick and jane books i thought i hated them and just picking up those whole world words did not work so mother taught me with phonics okay and because mrs dietz my teacher was very concerned that i was eight years old and still couldn't read that's a problem and so mother took and pinned the alphabet up on the wall and had me learn the sounds he said a is a and ah b is ba and memorize the sounds and then we got a book worth reading like the wizard of oz something you know you'd actually be interested in probably about a you know higher level than third grade and mother would read it and then get right to the best part and then get me to sound out maybe two or three words then gradually she read less and less and i read more and more and then she'd cue me on the rules like an e is when you got the two e's together the long vowel with the e on the end sometimes the rule works sometimes it doesn't and she just had me read out loud we did this for maybe you know 45 minutes a day during the week and in one semester i went from first grade reading to sixth grade levy level reading like very very fast my reading level went from none to above grade level that's amazing and you were a little bit older then um did you have older or younger siblings yeah i had a younger sister a year and a half younger and then another two siblings of with a great big gap in between okay so you were the oldest child yes i was the oldest that's right yeah and i find that like my son lucas is our oldest too and um you know it's not always oldest but it seems like it sounds like your mother was just completely on it and driven from the very minute and you know she saw delays like that you know give her a lot of credit i met your mother and she wrote up she wrote an endorsement for my first book and i really enjoyed meeting your mother um and uh it sounds like she was really ahead of her time too in terms of well yes uh getting a diagnosis of some sort getting treatment the original diagnosis was brain damage because it the neurologist this was 1949 that would have been in there didn't even know what autism was right but i had all of the classic symptoms right that was coined in what 1943 yes but you see that wouldn't have gotten over to the neurology department because you have silos in medicine and and bronson brothers was a neurologist not a psychologist or psychiatrist but you did eventually get a diagnosis of autism yes i did but that came later it came a few years later so you know my book and my toddler course and my my focus on the little kids my thought is it really doesn't matter if it's just a speech delay or sensory processing or eight early signs of adhd or learning disability or autism any kind of this intervention of slowing words down getting kids to talk getting them to turn take is ideal and well you got to get these kids talking and i you know i'm seeing i go on places i just talked to somebody just the other day you know where they're waiting two years for diagnosis and the kids getting no therapy to help them with talking yeah it's really really bad right and i say look i don't care what the diagnosis says the therapy is pretty much the same once you rule out something physically wrong with their mouth or their throat once you roll that out right you got to start working on these little kids you can't just let them vegetate in front of screens you just cannot i tell people doing nothing is the worst thing you can do with little kids two-year-olds three-year-olds and four-year-olds that are not talking right the worst thing you can do is to do nothing and it's often the mother of the child who is has to be the leader you know because if you if you're just making calls and well there's a two-year wait here there's a nine-month wait here stand in line you know and that's why i am so excited about my book and so thrilled that you agreed to write the forward because this is really a step-by-step manual well that's right and then of course my favorite book too the way i see it okay talk about that book what tel tell okay the way i see it when this is the fifth edition updated it's a whole lot of little chapters and it covers um to my early intervention but it also covers a whole bunch of other things a lot of little chapters very practical would be a great uh companion for your book yeah way i see it and it's the fifth edition now we just updated it last year and i you don't have to read it cover to cover you can just go into the index pick out the subjects that interest you and read little short chapters really practical for parents and and teachers excellent i've read a number of your books but i haven't read that one so i'm gonna definitely get get a hold of that now um but so we have chapters in my book on talking yeah how to increase talking with things like shoebox mr potato head instead puzzle you know those kind of toys that we slow everything down we focus on one two syllable words we make it super positive um you know as a behavior analyst my procedures are based on the science of aba but they're child friendly the child's crying they're not learning and we are crying they're not learning and then you may have driven them into sensory overlay yeah unfortunately some of this old-fashioned bad rigid aba yes it's done on some people on the spectrum years ago drovement sensory overload so they hate aba yeah and i make it very clear there's some good aba that's really flexible and good there's some old-fashioned bad rigid stuff where they didn't understand sensory overload and that was bad yeah and i wholeheartedly agree and you know i think that's another concern for parents is you know they start hearing all this well aba is bad well you shouldn't do this or try this and it's like um we need to use the science of what works pairing words making it fun making it reinforcing preventing problem behaviors not making a child go into sensory overload to make it um appealing and fun and we need to show progress like in in my book you know we start out with a one-page assessment and a one-page plan that i walk parents through how to do it you know you don't have to just leave it to the professionals can you imagine if your mother would have just been like well wait till she gets to school and and leave it to the professionals to to help you absolutely cannot wait you just cannot wait yeah and the other thing your mother did was she hired a nanny yes and that and the nanny did a lot of turn-taking games because we would like i would go out with the nanny my sister and i to build the snowman and then the nanny would have us take turns like i roll the bottom ball is he do the middle ball i'd do the head and then we had a box full of decorations with hats and scarves in it and then izzy'd get to put the hat on and i put a scarf on it and then there was old pill bottles and stuff that we could use for eyes then uh that was the snowman box yeah and that was stuff that nanny did uh take one sled out and we take turns using a sled you see just really simple things the other thing i always tell parents oh you know the kid knows the word for juice now if he actually wants the juice then you want to say now use your words and the other thing i tell them is wait for the kid to respond they're slow i tell them some of these kids like a phone on a really bad a cell phone connection so you're trying to download a web page and wait and you wait and you wait some of these kids are like a phone on one bar give them time to respond it might be 15 or 20 seconds that's a long time give them time to respond and always encourage them the use of words yeah yeah definitely that's what i wrote so in addition to um signs of autism and talking and reducing tantrums i also um my work and my new book has a chapter on eating sleeping potty training um going to the doctor and dentists and haircuts which can oh yeah we have like a tree overload yeah um so so let's go over those kind of um issues did you have um eating problems picky eating or eating i could have easily gotten into a grilled cheese sandwich habit but i was allowed to have that on the weekends and it just wasn't loud i think some of us i you allow too much of it i was allowed to have i hated raw egg white they let you can let them have a few things to just hate raw egg white is like an environment compartment for me and they did not make me eat that um you know where an egg's not cooked all the way like yeah yeah yeah and and and i but so the picky eating wasn't a problem but i hated having my hair washed i hated getting water in my eyes and even now like when i take a shower i hang a towel over the shallow rod so as soon as i get water in my eyes i can dry my face while i'm in the shower and and i've talked to other people have passed that hint on and that's really helpful um uh the other thing is no surprises let me tell you this is how not to do a vaccination the doctor said to me oh let's look at the pretty bird feeder and then they stuff the shot in me and i had to see but then what they did that was good after that is we'd go to the doctors and we'd go in the doctor's office office part not the medical part and we'd look at my records and we'd find out whether or not i had to have a shot then we'd get it over with okay and then the rest of the exam i was fine okay because i wasn't having the suspense of whether or not i had to have a shot yeah but a principle no surprises i let the kid watch what goes on at the dentist's office uh make things interesting rather than scary you can look at x-rays of your teeth that's kind of fun we're gonna see what your teeth in your jaw look like yeah and turn that into something that's fun but no surprises i've had parents say what about when the kid goes back to school and all the desks are separated well don't have that as a surprise all right that's no surprise go in and take a picture [Music] you know lucas gets allergy shots for instance and and i know a technique for him for shots for um anything haircuts in the past when we've had issues is he really likes blood draws he really um what calms him is counting so okay we're going to count to three and then we're going to do the shot one two three and then as they're doing the shot and injecting the allergy serum then it's he's counting again so then when we go to blood draws which isn't so frequent okay we're gonna count we're gonna sing songs we're gonna and the other thing um is what we use a promise reinforcer so when we're all done we're going to get we're going to go somewhere or we're going to have something fun that's wrong and that that that would work with me too and after we do this shot then you know we're going to get an ice cream or something right and if you throw a fit in there then you don't get the ice cream right that would be be when you know it's older yeah boy back in the 50s they had those horrible reusable glass syringes with needles that were never sharp old-fashioned stuff yeah but i remember when i got my tonsils out the nurse did a really good thing i was six years old they still use the dish strainer thing with the ether okay enough for that put a dish brainer over your face ether on it oh the nurse son took the thing and just put it up to her up to her her face and what it doesn't hurt me it's not going to hurt you and she just put it on me no struggle i remember that really super well i was six yeah yeah model that was the way to do it she says it's not going to hurt me i'll just put it on you yeah yeah i know um my son lucas had to have a covet test done and so i was like i don't know how that's gonna go and you know we modeled it with another person getting the test first we use we use the counting strategy we offered the promise reinforcer at the end and so he was able to do it um but i know you know especially with very young children who not only don't talk or don't don't talk much or don't talk at all they might have like big comprehension issues too so well that's right you see you don't um i'm i now i knew age six why the tonsils came out because they were kind of choking and they were swollen in the back of my throat and i said oh they you know get that out it will help me right so i didn't resist going to the hospital i knew why doing it right was six it was fully verbal right right now your your the book that i know you from most famously is thinking in pictures that book also was kind of the basis for the movie about your life was the basis for the movie that's right which is called temple grandin and it was out what year to 2010 2010 it won 11 emmy awards then i got seven emmy awards seven okay um i thought it would say 11 somewhere where i was looking that up and i mean i thought it got one emmy award and then once you that was the golden globe they got one golden globe i got claire danes got a screen actors guild award okay i had a peabody award there were a bunch of awards ago okay so maybe all together it was eleven and maybe all together yeah yeah yeah so how involved were you with um that movie about you and your well i was very involved with the producer and the writer and uh emily gerson sainz the producer was a mother of a severely autistic child he was almost an adult then and she wanted this movie to be right and it took her 10 years to put the right team together wow a lot of names on the credits and those were the team there were there's a lot of people there that the teams that couldn't figure out how to do it and the right team was eventually mick jackson the director christopher munger the writer emily gerson sainz and then mick hired claire and and they stuffed her hair up under a wig and she became me yeah she did a really uh super good job at it and when i saw the first screening of the movie it was like going in some strange time machine the 60s and 70s and the other thing i loved is they put all my engineering and design stuff in there all the projects were accurate that's what i really liked now the one scene in that my mother doesn't like is the one where the doctor says we usually recommend an institution well that is what was normally done in the 50s kids would that had my kind of problems usually we're just putting an institution and fortunately when the doctor recommended speech therapy now that seems historically accurate because what mother went to was way ahead of its time yeah but that was typically what would have happened right right so um thinking in pictures really details like that you have just a really incredible visual perception of the world visual that's right oh and um so did you have that all along well i guess since now the thing is when i was in my 20s and started out in the cattle industry i thought everybody was a visual thinker yeah it's been a you know interesting journey for me learning that other people aren't visual thinkers and i talk about the science behind some of the different thinkers in my book the autistic brain okay um but in my 20s i thought everybody was a visual thinker and i couldn't figure out why people are so strange for me to be looking at what cattle are seeing well if you're a verbal thinker it's not gonna be obvious to look at what cattle are seeing yeah see that's some of the first work that i did yeah but it sounds like since you have such a strong memory of of early childhood which is incredible like three years old you can visualize it still and it's sort of like little tiny video clips yeah yeah you know like at the speech clinic is like the three video clips there's i worked the work saying cop yeah or board pointer and marching around with flags and then of course the car accident that number right and we were on the way to speech therapy one had that accident and i remember that very clearly and my new word that i learned um and it's like four little video clips and then i remember a lot of things from elementary school and fun things we did um things that weren't fun and yeah so so let's little tiny video clips that start out as still pictures and then i can run just a little tiny video clip for just a few seconds for each one of those things yeah so what are your thoughts on you know i've done podcasts and video blogs on like high functioning low functioning and i know um i don't like to use those terms because you can you know within each person or child there's their unique strengths and their their weaknesses and you know somebody that looks really high functioning could be really impaired and many i just tend to use the terms well one little because i was non-verbal as a young child so let's say once they get past the age six or so i'm gonna call them fully verbal partially verbal non-verbal okay all of that because that just describes them okay and you know what they actually are um the thought we got with autism is the continuous trait i've looked into a lot of the genetics on it and you know you go out to silicon valley and you've got computer scientists out there who are definitely got autistic traits and um someone like bill gates has some autistic traits i mean watch the antitrust depositions i also found out that when he first started his company he'd look out in the parking lot and he memorized everybody's license plate and he'd know who was at work well most people don't memorize everybody's license plate you see so it's a continuous trait we're a little bit geeky gives us the tech that we're using right now right and you get more of that trait then you've got um uh real severe and there's a paper i really like this called genomic tradeoffs or autism and schizophrenia the steep price for a human brain see the same genetics that makes all these stem cells grow to make us have a huge brain are also involved with autism and schizophrenia making a huge brain is kind of a messy proposition and and you get a little bit of a certain trait it's helpful you get too much of that trait so it's real severe disability you see the problem is you got the same name going from somebody that ought to be uh working in a skilled trade or someone like me somebody in computer science to somebody who can't dress themselves yeah you see now i'm thinking about it visually and and you see i'm not a verbal thinker right and i think it's kind of ridiculous to have the same name for that wider range i mean now you've got the fighting going on between the neurodiversity people and the parents with the very severe kids because so what do you think about that well they they um little bit of autism i don't think is a disability make you an engineer there'd be no computers without a little bit of autism because a brain can be more social or a brain can be more cognitive here's another paper i really like to show it's a continuous trait solitary mammals as a model for autism and let's take the big cat fam all the cats the big ones and the small ones the lions are more social than the tiger or the leopard or the panther there's genetic crossover here less oxytocin is a panther defective no now if a panther couldn't learn to hunt or something that would be definitely a severe disability you see how i'm talking about a true continuous trait when you think about it visually i can see it as a true continuous trait it's just like when you breathe different dogs together two different mom and dad are totally different distinct dog breeds the offspring look like half and half and then when it gets down to a quarter lab it's hard to tell you see those are continuous traits yeah i'm not sure if you're familiar with the newer work of ami clinton okay he worked on now so he is an at emory and he's a researcher and i can say i can send you his um 2020 paper with him and colleagues but they're really showing that the little kids based on their eye tracking study and based on their twin research that the that the the autism is genetic but even with identical twins it's not guaranteed where you're going to be on the spectrum and their studies have shown that the rate of autism plus intellectual disabilities almost double in african american children as opposed to white children and so it it like basically his work is saying what my new book is saying it doesn't matter if you think it's a speech delay or touch doesn't matter it does severe autism you got to get on it and like you said after six then we can categorize them well that's what i got so good i'm glad his paper supports if you send cheryl that paper send it to cheryl says you printed out a nice printer i'd really appreciate that but you see that's exactly the same thing i've been saying just what what i've observed and you know looking at literature it's a true continuous trait and there's a zillion genes that make the brain big the other thing is why the identical twins don't both have the same level is because there's a lot of what's called random variation where the nervous system so complicated this growing in the uterus they're not going to grow exactly the same way very similar but not exactly the same way you just got too much stuff going on there it's sort of like my condo complex and they uh there's slight variations in the buildings that don't really have any rhyme or reason right somebody just did it right now it's just uh random variation different people building things clint and his colleagues also are identifying sub threshold autism where it's not going to it it can actually be just a serious speech delay if you can be treated well yeah it's very special but then you take your people out there in silicon valley the other thing i'm seeing is that i've talked to many parents well i got my kid out i got to get a job and all this stuff and they'll say blossomed you see you get somebody who's just sort of mild you really work him and he learns how to work and stuff like that he ends up in silicon valley if you don't do that he ends up in the basement playing video games and the thing is i'm a bottom-up thinker so the more stuff i get out and do then the less autistic i'm going to act because i got more knowledge and i think a lot of it's increased detection i work 25 years in heavy construction and i'm going to tell you right now that 20 percent the people i worked on worked with they could weld anything build anything draw and design complicated equipment with autistic dyslexic or adhd how about a family of dyslexics this is in the 80s building huge gigantic complex feed mills and they had the visual processing problem where the print jiggles on the paper and they all wore tinted glasses and very successful company building feed mills you see this is where i want to you know want to bring some of my world because uh there were all kinds of kids that um they were just a different kind of kid but they got out in the world and they learned enough you see this is where they can kind of go one way or the other and i'm seeing a lot of parents way too overprotective and this kid's not learning any skills you know how about a 16 year old kid that's building beautiful lego things and nobody thought to introduce tools that's ridiculous a a teenager good grades mom's so overprotective he's not learned shopping this is some of the stuff i'm seeing now that's ridiculous yeah your book um developing talents was really good i read that you know a decade ago when my son was a teenager and in that book you talk about especially for kids that are more severe like my son is you know look at things he likes like if he likes to paint okay maybe he could paint a room with you you know with a lot of supervision you know and you you in that book talk about looking for work that can't be shipped overseas because everybody's going to need painting painters exactly landscaping how about diesel mechanic not even a self-driving truck you're not fixing it from overseas uh people to fix things i just had to have my shower repaired i can't i could believe what they charged for that ridiculous yeah you lit you live for yourself it's not going to go away yeah yeah so you're going to go away it's it's a true continuous trait you see so in the mild forms autism you know to give you it is just personality variation but then there's a point where it gets more serious yeah and you've got somebody where they're an adult and you can't do any normal activities go to restaurant go to a game go to a movie i'm and it seems like the people that have followed my work because of the verbal behavior approach and now my new work well especially people that have followed me over the years they tend to have more kids with moderate severe autism who are you know 15 but talking less than a three-year-old so um my audience is is a lot usually more severe but now that i'm going into the early intervention you know so you know really trying to turn up the burners on that because that's really where we can make whole life changes no we can make totally but you know what else i'm seeing now i'm seeing certain parts of the country when i'm back when i travel i haven't traveled since march everything's been shut down but i had very sad therapists come up to me i think it was in massachusetts and they were doing a great job on the early intervention the kid's a teenager and i wasn't addicted to video games in the basement because he never had a job and so there's some place they're doing a really good job on early intervention but we're not done working skills you know things like a volunteer job at a church we need something to replace the paper routes because those taught such important skills um but i'm a total believer in early early intervention because just during covet i'm talking to parents where um even before kovid started they weren't getting enough therapy i'm hearing many many times oh he gets a hour of speech a week well that's not sufficient right and and i said you've got to do something and you're going to have to ask volunteers to help you right you've got to work on the early intervention it's super super super i don't know what important have happened to me if i hadn't got an early invention right and you know if you have the resources hire a nanny get extra therapy because people are like well you know does he need 20 yeah 20 hours a week does he need 40 hours a week yeah i'm telling people if they can get 15 or 20 but i i've talked to a lot of super low income people mm-hmm you've got to get some grandmother from your church yeah yes church volunteers college students experience boy scouts girl scouts that need service volunteer hours um mommy's helpers yeah you need to be resourceful and it's not the amount of hours that you pay people you also really ideally need to keep a child engaged for all of their waking hours or as many of them as possible so that's a hundred hours a week i was kept engaged uh because meals were formal and i'm gonna have to go in five minutes so um meals were were formal yeah and i made a mistake like i put my finger in the mashed potatoes they didn't scream no they said i use the fork so meals were structured and i was allowed to have an hour off after lunch where i could go stem and another hour in the evening where i could do it and the rest of the time i was kept the meals were engaging you know then we did all the all the outdoor games and stuff that were really engaging yeah and taking that to the grocery store or having a closet store mother called it marketing first nationals the name of the grocery store and i would go and they had a wood floor and and i would go and get stuff off the shelf and we had a list i thought marketing was a lot of fun yeah she'd take me there when i was a small i don't know six or seven i would go marketing and then by that time i had a little allowance yeah and by the time seven or eight years old i could buy ten candy bars with that or five comics and then i learned if i wanted the 69 cent airplane which now cost five dollars today i won the 69 cent airplane had saved for two weeks i was learning that at a very young age yeah yeah and that's what when you think about 100 hours to keep your kid engaged you know this is bath time this is groceries you know this is and if you learn the tools like breaking things down saying water water water when the child wants water it can become a part of what you do and the child can make progress okay i know you have to go so my last question part of my goal for everything i do my podcast my book everything i do is for parents professionals and people with autism to be less stressed and lead happier lives so do you have any stress management techniques or self-care things that you would recommend for people in general well i liked um you know i would have loved the weighted blanket i i used to make my bed really tight and i used to call it putting a letter in the envelope okay so weighted blanket would be something that would be helpful for you know kid i would have loved that as a kid um i would have liked those bicycle outfits that people wear that are tight i want a light fat to sleep and you know i mean there's on um that when i was older i made my squeezing machine lots of exercise is good and then another thing i did is i had my my special tv show i watched howdy duty and i was allowed to watch that you know every night unless i was bad like pitching a tantrum and then i got taken away for one night um but they um even now just sometimes have a chance to just chill the sit and read science in nature that's my idea for you know recreational reading now yeah and then i like to do that even now you know just have a time to show and do that yeah well it sounds great lots of exercise yeah i i can see how that is a stress reduction to us as adults and as well as the other thing is the sensory thing now there's some you know the thing with the deep pressure some kids respond to that some don't see one of the problems with doing evidence-based research and some of that stuff is it only works on the pressure responders and not all autistic kids are pressure responders yeah that's the problem it's very very variable on the sensory i do not have the visual processing problems that some kids have i don't have right right we all have our unique strengths and our our weaknesses and so we've got to get on the early intervention and i tell parents you got two-year-olds that are not talking and screaming and and a lot of repetitive kind of behavior the worst thing you can do is nothing you got to start working with that kid and um you know here's some books you can get recommend my books and i recommend your books you got to get on it now and if you can't get services you got to create your own services because you cannot let this kid vegetate in front of the screens you just cannot yeah well i think that's a great way to end um i really appreciate your time today i appreciate you writing the forward being a huge advocate for families i know you've impacted my life and my son's life and i i know you've impacted so many around the world so thank you so much for being so generous well it was really great to be here and thank you so much and i'm going to sign off right now okay all right bye if you're a parent or early intervention professional working with young children with signs of autism or if you're a parent or professional helping older children with moderate severe autism you'll definitely want to order my new turn autism around book today you'll get access to all the book resources that will help you right away for all the details go to turnautismaround.com

Channel: Dr. Mary Barbera

Views: 26,403

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Id: MvYkVlCu6Sk

Length: 46min 59sec (2819 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021