randomly chaotic and frequently mundane

april is autism awareness month… and ironically, i’ve learned a few things in the past week or so.

echolalia - which is basically the repetition things that one hears. in gage’s case it’s delayed echolalia, “echoing of a phrase after some delay or lapse of time.” most of what he repeats is from movies, tv shows, commercials, etc.

he also repeats things that i’ve said. recently he’s started repeating comforting words that i’ve said back to me at fairly appropriate times. if i have a coughing fit, he looks at me and says “you ok?” i threw up recently and he came into the bathroom and rubbed my back saying “it’s ok. you done?” very cute.

applied behavior analysis - a method that’s basically “rote learning” that has apparently helped to “cure” a number of autistic children. nice, and i’m looking into it. but i don’t know that it would be helpful for gage since everything i’ve read says it should be started around or before the age of 3 and gage is almost 5.

there’s a number of other “treatments” i’ve been looking into. different methods to help develop communication, interaction, etc. this site has a lot of good information… it’s a lot of reading but it’s worth it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under gage, autism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.