Creatively Ironic

My son has to be reminded from time-to-time not to get up and pace the room during school. He maybe does this once every other day or so at home and is often deep in thought about his favorite subjects.

Yesterday, from the back seat of the car he said, "Mom, I've figured out how to pace without leaving my seat".

"How do you do that?" my wife inquired.

"I just move my brain from side-to-side" he explained.

OK - let's see how many "causes" of autism I can think of off the top of my head:

• Autism is linked to couples who have a difficulty conceiving
  
• Autism is linked to children who watch too much TV before the age of 3
  
• Autism is caused by mercury poisoning as a result of vaccines
  
• Autism is linked to "older dads"
  
• Autism is caused by having an "extreme male brain"
  
• Autism is caused by measles virus in the stomach brought on by vaccines
  
• Historical: autism is caused by fairies or gremlins who substitute the normal child with a changeling.
  
• And of course, the grandfather of them all: Autism is caused by "refrigerator mothers".

Wikipedia has a good list of these and a lot more (minus the recent ones)

I like the wikipedia entry for autism. This is from the first paragraph:

Autism is classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests itself in markedly abnormal social interaction, communication ability, patterns of interests, and patterns of behavior.

This entry also makes a claim about prevalence that I didn't know. Namely, that although autism is four or five more times likely to effect boys than girls, if the autism is severe, then the ratio is more like 1 to 1.

Speaking of prevalence, UPI writer Lidia Wasowicz does a good job talking about the fabled "1-in-166 children with autism" myth:

The ubiquitous one in 166 figure popping up on and off the Internet is the simplified form of six in 1,000, the highest rate studies suggest for the most liberally inclusive category of autism, which encompasses the mildest forms of the condition, scientists say.

I linked to another article on autism by her in an earlier post. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) estimates more conservatively that the incidence is 1 in 1,000 children.

One would have hoped that new age therapies for autism were fading out in favor of proven ABA methods. Not so for 16 children in Harbin, China according to this article: Beluga whales helping children with autism in China.

Experts said that the sounds by beluga whales can help to treat infantile autism by stimulating thee [sic] children's nerve cells, which will be more effective when the children make direct contacts [sic] with the animals.

Less bad is that the kids are only exposed to these shenanigans for 30 minutes 3 times per week. Still, one could imagine the transportation to the site, washing, waiting, and post therapy routine to consume at least another 1 hour, 3 times per week. That's 4.5 hours of time lost per week. Over the 20 day therapy routine, the child would lose 30 hours of therapy. That's a lost opportunity for more effective intervention.

It's interesting that the article also states that the kids are "given medicine and get other treatment" after the 20 day course. Here's hoping that the "other treatment" is ABA based.

Nothing has been more frightening to us than discovering our daughter missing from our house. This has happened three times in the last 2 years - and no times in the last six months (knock on wood).

The first time happened at a relative's birthday party. It was an evening party and we were sitting by the front door watching her ascend and decend the stairs right in front of our eyes. Other parents started arriving to pick up their children. There were lots of waves and goodbyes. About 5 minutes after we last noticed her, she was gone. A search of the house and under everything yielded no trace. We frantically started searching the neighborhood. After about 10 minutes (seems like an hour) we called 911 and reported her missing. We described her to the police as a 6 year old girl, barefoot, wearing a purple sparkle dress, and carrying a magic wand. At the same time we were leaving the description, a family in a house about 100 yards from the party called 911 and reported her found. The details matched except they reported her as being "about 10". They had heard her come up on to their porch and sit down on the swing outside their door. They opened the door, were a little surprised, and asked if she'd like to come inside and have some cookies and milk. She did. They asked for her phone number and she recited it perfectly - the years of ABA and generalization training really paid off. Unfortunately, we were not at home, so they left a message on our machine.

After the police figured out that they had the right kid, they put us together. She got lots of hugs from a relieved family. We vowed never to let it happen again, but our daughter, though autistic, is a clever little girl and she had been given cookies, milk, and hugs the last time she escaped, so why not try again after the fuss was over ...

Teaching a new skill to an individual with autism requires special attention to how skills are actually learned. This usually starts with a clear functional analysis that breaks the skill into its component parts, and then trains each skill separately- combining them piece-by-piece. Each piece requires a certain fluency (rate per minute and response time per task). Finally skills need to be generalized so that they can be performed across a wide variety of circumstances. This process focuses on the outcomes of the instruction, rather than the so-called "structure of instruction" that is targeted by most classroom instruction.

Even if one follows this process, it is still hard to know if the teaching of the skill is complete. That is, does the learner really have mastery of the new skill. This excellent paper by Michael Fabrizio and Alison Moors explores a concept first proposed by E.C. Haugthon (1980) and later refined by K.R. Johnson and T.V.J. Layng (1992). This breaks up the skills mastery into four parts:

Retention: Learners can remember how to do a skill after a period of time when it was not practiced.
Endurance: Learners can engage in the skill for a long period of time without getting tired.
Stability: Learner can engage in performing the skill even if there is a significant distraction in the enviornment.
Application: Ability to generalize the skill to different environments - even environments that have not been previously taught.

This criteria for skill mastery is summarized by the acronym, RESA.

I thought that the (original) title of the article was pretty funny: "Autistic Council meets in Salt Lake". The readers picked up on it and had a short dialogue as to whether it was funny or not. Since then, the article's title has been changed to: "Autism Council meets in Salt Lake".