How do you do 'early intervention' work for ASD as a working parent?

[dietstartstmoz]

Have been posting about DS2, aged 3.6.
Since age 3 he has not made appropriate development and we are expecting a dx of ASD. We are already getting some help, we are getting some support from early years pre-school service, are having SALT, hearing test due, already seen paed once and go back in 3 weeks. I have applied to main stream school and will find out in April, but he will get in as he has an older sibling.

But, we are very keen to do whatever we can to help DS. I have been reading a lot on here about ABA, TEACHH, etc but I work 3 full days a week and DS goes to a private nursery, where he has an IEP, the early years service are supporting the nursery. The 2 days I am not at work, I have DS at home with me and have some strategies from early years service and SALT and try and incorporate these into normal daily activities.

What else could we do? I have looked at ABA and it talks about 40 hrs a week, but we couldn't do that. I'm not sure ABA would work for DS anyway, but how do you fit extra stuff in when you work and have no family support to help you?

Hi

My job has always been 3-4 days/week, and (without really realising cos I was in full denial mode) somehow managed to spot many of the impairments and do a fairly comprehensive early intervention programme with ds1. I have a relevant work background, so was lucky in that the common interventions were familiar enough for me to use them without fully realising.

With plenty of reading, some high-quality professional advice, and lots of help from here, you can definitely learn enough to make a massive difference for your ds. Your skills will also rub off on the rest of the family. Some early years staff are already unknowingly giving high-quality, consistent input that teaches social and communication skills... find the one in his nursery who is best at this, ask for them as keyworker and teach them what you do at home.

Even with work, you have him 4 days a week. And all mornings, evenings and any night wakings. The trick is to approach almost all your daily interactions with him from a therapeutic viewpoint. So you don't do much 'extra' but you do a lot 'differently'. It's not easy at first, but you get in the habit of it. With this model, ABA / SLT / TEACCH and all the rest are just skills you draw on when appropriate. And lots of toddler taming tactics are actually informal versions of ABA so you may find your skills are greater than you think.

Each interaction has 2 aims: the immediate aim, plus teaching him something. So if you replaced, 'Time to put on your shoes now' with 'Shoes please' [plus sign or PEC or object of reference as visual support], you would be doing that with an eye to finding something to teach that will have a long term impact. You obviously can't simultaneously reinforce everything you want to teach, so you select as appropriate, break it down into chunks, and you keep reviewing your personal targets for him.

The one thing I didn't do, but would advise, was to document the help I'd provided. Keeping a daily diary, however brief, will help you to spot patterns, monitor progress, and may help if you get into a dispute with the LEA later on over how much input your ds2 needs.

Oh, and apply for a statement of SEN straight away as they take at least 6 months to prepare (lots of threads about why the vast majority of asd kids need them, so I won't repeat that all here)

You don't have to do 40 hours we did 15-20.
We did cut our work hours to do that. But we could not easily do weekends or evenings as we have 2 other children.
Try and get maximum DLA, direct payments etc
The best way would be to get the nursery staff trained up which would mean you paying an ABA supervisor / consultant to go in the same way as the early years service do as well as teaching you at home. Does he have 1:1 at nursery? If so you want to maximise that resource.
But the nursery would need to be happy to learn new things / use ABA or other methods and you will probably find the early years team not keen on ABA (as the LA who employs them will probably see it as a way of you asking them to fund ABA). Indeed ours threatened to pull out all support when we said we intended to do ABA ourselves at home.
You could try and ask for volunteers we have a local Mum (ex teacher) who comes and plays with DS one afternoon a week.
ABA can be done by anyone eg family or friends.
Also if you live near a university can advertise for volunteers from psychology dept who may be looking for career in ABA. You would still have to pay for the supervision / training element.
Some people are able to do ABA from books or there are now online resources but my DS was too severe we needed the hands on training / supervision.
Some people on here have done much less eg 6-10 hours. It all depends on the child.

Thanks I will look into ABA books, and see what points I can get from that. He doesn't get 1-2-1 in private nursery, but has an IEP and it's a small nursery and staff good. The manager is working with DS and he has 3 targets on his IEP which staff do with him each day (but each one is only 5 mins). We are trying to gather evidence at the moment to request Statement, but haven't done this yet as we have no paper evidence. have seen paed, but have nothing written from that assessment, have anohter appt in 3 weeks and will ask for something then. have had SALT assessment and 2 sessions of obs, but again, no paperwork which outlines how DS presents. We go back this week for our strategies, and I will ask for a written report. Nursery are keeping a daily log of how DS is and when he needs extra help, but we think we will be requesting statement during March, when we have something on paper. I worry, if we don't have any evidence when we request stat assess it will be refused.

Who would decide how many hrs support DS needs? The support worker from early years service feels DS isn't 'too bad' (her words), but she does not have a full picture of him, and she told me he may not get any hrs funded support. Will she write a report that goes towards statementing process? If so, I don't think she will support his having 1-2-1 hrs in school in sept, so we need to prove to her also how much support he needs in nursery.

The council should have an inclusion fund or similar for 1:1 which you can access without a statement. We were able get 75% of nursery time without statement but had to get statement to make it up to 100%. should be info on council website or nursery should ring the area senco. We did not need evidence the nursery had to fill out a form and say how delayed he was in different areas on EYFS criteria. They then got any professionals who were involved to fill in a short paragraph supporting need for 1:1 and put in iep etc. At least this way you get some 1:1 while sorting out the rest etc.