Jamie

Even before diagnosis, Jamie was referred to a speech therapist. She examined his behaviour and quickly noticed just how little eye-contact he was making. At that point getting his attention was extrememly hard work. I knew this, but the speech therapist made me realise just how much hard work it was to talk to him or hold his attention. At 3 he was still only using one word at a time, mostly nouns. He had perhaps 200 words.

Speech Therapy

Surprisingly, Jamie's speech therapy did not begin with language exercises, but ones to encourage him to take part in games. We focused on trying to get him to respond to another person, such as pushing a toy car back and forth. Later we took home various worksheets, and introduced more verbs. The speech therapist was also very good at suggesting schemes to persuade him to talk, such as keeping toys out of reach so that Jamie had to ask for them.

Jamie recieved speech therapy approximately once a month. The main drawback is that much of what we needed to achieve is outside its scope. It helped, but it doesn't offer a whole language course that will teach a non-verbal child to speak, and it doesn't address the heap of other problems that come with autism.

Portage

Portage is a service geared towards behaviour, play skills, self-help and more general development. It is provided for preschool children with disabilities. Sessions involve observing and developing a child's attention span, motor skills, number and colour matching, and playing. The therapist suggests things for the parents to work on over the week. It is more a matter of meeting and planning the next week's activities than a learning period.

Portage services are heavily over-subscribed in my county, and probably across the whole of the UK. Jamie recieved just under a term of portage, for an hour once a week.

Jamie generally enjoyed portage sessions, which meant the opportunity to play with new toys. He would sometimes get excited and show off by jumping on the furniture, but generally he would settle down for several minutes of work at a time. At this time he was learning to do simple jigsaws, to thread beads and match colours.

Whether portage would have had a great effect in the long run is hard to say, but it came to a halt in December. Jamie's major problems have always been with speech, and to a lesser extent behaviour. His motor skills and intellectual development are side issues to the main problem. So it may have helped a little, but didn't have a profound effect.

By the time Jamie was 4, his situation had barely improved. He was still using only one word at a time, although his vocabulary had expanded to include a few verbs. He was frequently wet. There were tantrums caused by his problems with making himself understood. At playgroup I would often hear that he had hit the other children, and he was nowhere near being able to join in with their games. It seemed as though we would never be able to have a conversation with him.

At this time I came across an article in the national press about a new treatment for autism, known as Applied Behavioural Analysis.