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Posts Tagged ‘Connect Therapy’

Please help me improve my child’s attention span!

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By Monique Simpson – Founder and Speech Pathologist

A child with autism may have an unflinching ability to be able to maintain attention on a task that is motivating to them, like chatting about fire engines, repetitively turning taps on or off or perhaps lining up their favourite Thomas the Tank engines. However when asked to attend to an activity that doesn’t ‘tickle their fancy’, like labelling or matching some picture cards or building something with blocks, their attention may be very fleeting.

A study carried out by Garretson, Fein and Waterhouse in 1990 suggested that;

autistic children’s difficulties in sustaining attention on imposed tasks may be attributable partly to a developmental delay and partly to the motivational contingencies of a task rather than to a primary impairment in the ability to sustain attention.

I couldn’t agree more! Working with a child’s motivations and respecting and building upon their ideas are valuable tips to remember when improving attention span.

From my clinical experience here are three other critical points you should consider when working on increasing attention span: Read more …

Therapy needs to fit in with your family life

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Hi all,

Last week I attended the Asia Pacific Autism Conference and one of the big take-home messages (which I am always going on about) was “how important it is to fit the therapy to the child rather than the child to the therapy”. This is incredibly important and also a great way of distinguishing good quality therapy from more generic approaches that may not be effective, or sustainable.

As you may know, I strongly believe that every child’s intervention plan needs to take into consideration the unique and individual differences of the child with autism. But what is equally important and often overlooked, is that the intervention must also take into consideration the values, circumstances, and lifestyle of the FAMILY for it to be most effective and sustainable. Read more …

Is there a ‘Magic Formula’ for Autism?

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Since you are reading this I’m guessing that the subject line may have grabbed your attention ;)

which is great because….

What I have to tell you today is very important. In fact it may change the way you think about just about every aspect of your child’s treatment.

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I often get asked to give families strategies to help deal with specific behaviours such as ‘toilet training’ or ‘picky eating’ or ‘poor sleeping patterns’.

It would certainly make my job MUCH easier if I could tell each one of you that ONE particular strategy would be the ‘Magic Formula‘ for solving each of these issues.

But the truth is…

because every child with autism (like any child) is so incredibly different and so unique, there simply isn’t a ‘magic formula’ or one strategy in particular to remedy these individual behaviours.

But there is a solution… so please read on. Read more …

Great News! We’re Government Approved

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Great News.

Connect Therapy, has now been approved by the Australian Government as an official autism service provider under the “Helping Children With Autism” package.

Most of our non-Australian readers will have no idea what this means… 

So what does this mean?

The Australian Government has committed $190 Million to help support families with children aged 0-6 who have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Essentially, families will be able to access up to $12,000 of funding to pay for approved early intervention services for their child.

This is great news for families and although $12,000 doesn’t go along way when it comes to specialist intervention services for autism, every bit helps!

It has felt very good coming on board with the program as a recognised autism provider after many years helping families and professionals working with children with autism… we can’t ask for a better endorsement than from the government 🙂 Read more …

Back on Deck for 2009

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Hello everyone.

I hope things are going well for you and your family.

For those of you who have recently joined our ‘Autism Essentials‘ newsletter, welcome and I hope that you are finding it helpful!

For others, who may not have heard from me in a while, apologies that I have been out of touch. I have been off on maternity leave for the last little while since being blessed with my beautiful daughter Siena, who is already one… doesn’t time fly!

Siena and me

The rest of the team here at Connect Therapy have been doing a great job managing the clinic and website in my absence.

But I just wanted to let all our subscribers know Read more …