Talk to me about the 'Early Bird' program

[hotmamalovespavlova]

Hello all,

Would love to hear your thoughts and personal experiences of this program as it has been mentioned and hopefully we will be attending in January.

Many thanks as always.

I've done this course before, and also the EB + one.

I found the EB course very informative, especially as I had no idea about autism. Also, it was very calming speaking to other parents who were going through the same as us, it helped knowing we weren't the only ones.

You have to be videoed with your child 2/3 times which I didn't enjoy, but the rest was fine.

We went on the course a couple of months after ds was diagnosed so found it very helpful as we did not know much about autism. It touchedon a lot of different interventions eg. TEACCH, Hanen, PECS but does not really go into detail on anything. However,it means you can then explore what you think might work.

I found it very helpful to have other local parents to discuss things with - the 5 couples had children who were recently diagnosed so were in roughly the same situation.

I also found having the opportunity to discuss my concerns with the people running the course very useful.

I think it depends how early you get to go on the course. I did it quite some time after the diagnosis and actually the best bit was meeting the other parents. the actual course was not very useful for me as I had already found out everything they had told me. I think it also depends on the professionals leading the course - ours were rather patronising and a bit useless tbh, but I am aware that this is probably not everyone's experience. Looking back now I think it should have been obvious that my ds1 was very severely affected and that they weren't really equipped to advise on him. They also kind of offered the early bird course when they should have been offering us intervention to deal with his communication etc.