Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… The years of 2020 and 2021 has been quite an eventual time. There have been so many global and cultural issues that will for sure be written in our history books in the years to come. As I was thinking about the next topic of discussion for our podcast, I wanted to talk about an area that many of our families may not realize is a large factor in our children’s lives. The topic of cultural differences. I don’t want to talk about the politics of all these different issues, but I do want to bring to light that your cultural identity as parents does greatly impact the way your child’s ASD diagnosis and treatment services come into play. It’s a no-brainer that there has been a vast amount of research conducted on ASD, covering the realm of biomedicine, treatment, healthcare policies; however, an area that needs more research coverage is studying ASD from the perspective of minorities, especially for the AAPI community. There’s been quite a bit of research observing and analyzing the Black and Hispanic community, but I believe that the AAPI community has received very minimal amount of investigation and analysis when it comes to autism. While working with quite a bit of Asian families, and coming from an Asian heritage myself, I’ve come to see that there are some cultural differences in perspectives that can affect the diagnosing and treating of ASD within our children. Coming from an Asian heritage I think there are still this level of stigma that comes with children being diagnosed with learning disorders, such as Autism. There is definitely a feeling of failure and shame on the mothers’ end. Fortunately, many Asian countries are starting to realize the growing prevalence of Autism and related disorders; however, I think there’s still quite a bit of shame and embarrassment that comes with this diagnosis for many Asian families today. I think a lot of these mixed emotions along with denial is often times what results in some children being diagnosed at a much later age, but for our Asian American listeners out there, if you suspect that your child may be showing any signs of delayed learning, please make sure you have your child evaluated by a psychologist. With now 1 in 54 children being diagnosed with Autism, this is not a individual issue that needs to be faced with shame and guilt, this is a global issue that needs to be continuously addressed through research and health care interventions. The sooner you can get your child diagnosed, the quicker your son/daughter can get the support they need! Another area that I want to talk about is what services may look like for your family and your child. When you place your child through various therapy services whether it’s for speech, behaviors, or gross motor concerns, please don’t think this is a “the therapist knows best and will ‘fix’ my child.” GET INVOLVED! Ask questions! Get the training you need to better understand the treatment that’s being provided. Regardless of what treatment your child receives, the purpose of this treatment is for it to be ongoing 24/7 whether the therapist is present or not. This means that you need to be fully informed and trained on what you can do to best support your child when they’re not in therapy sessions. If your child is enrolled in school, your treatment providers NEED to be in collaboration with your child’s school teacher. We need to have an ongoing healthy collaboration of modified work and modified exams. Growing

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… I want to use today’s episode as an opportunity for us to have an open dialogue with our listeners who have been impacted by the autism diagnosis. Today I’ll be sharing with you a short snippet of my experience working with children and adults diagnosed with autism and provide you with an opportunity to share yours! Let me tell you, since 2013 when I first started working as a behavior therapist, it’s been a long journey of learning for me and the learning never ends. When you think you know everything there is to possibly learn, a new learning opportunity arises. And I think that is what’s most important in this whole conversation about autism awareness. No one expects you to know everything there is to this diagnosis. What would encourage and support this community of individuals is for the us, the community, to remain open-minded and curious to learn more about the diagnosis, so that we can help dissipate some of the discrimination towards individuals with learning disabilities. During the last 8 years of working with children and adults with autism, the biggest feedback I’ve received from friends, relatives, random strangers is “wow! You must be really patient.” And they couldn’t be any further from the truth. I’m definitely not as patient as I would like to be. I don’t like to wait in any sort of line for more than 5 minutes. I don’t like drivers who take their time making a wide right turn instead of using their blinkers to cut closer to the curb. A new year’s resolution that I miserably fail at since birth is “being more patient.” So why and exactly how did I continue working with the autistic community? You see, working with individuals with a learning disability isn’t necessarily about patience...I’ve learned that it’s about urgency and envisioning a bigger future. Patience can only get you to a certain point before you race past your threshold and you completely burn out, and that was one of the first things I learned when I started off as a behavior therapist. Whenever I had a new bruise or a bite mark, or whenever I lost another t-shirt to an aggressive episode, patience without vision only made me exhausted and fearful heading into another day of work. So what do I mean by “urgency” and “vision?” As a BCBA, I learned that a treatment program needs to be approached with urgency. Opportunities to maximize learning are limited. When I see a 2-year old, I get a sense of urgency...urgency to teach this child everything I possibly can to get them at their developmental milestone. The window of learning opportunities only grow narrower every year, and without a sense of urgency, there is no progress. This leads me to the topic of vision. As someone who works closely with families and individuals greatly affected by the autism diagnosis, it’s extremely important that we stay focused on the goals and the bigger picture. I ask parents at the beginning of their child’s treatment to start thinking about what they would like to see their child accomplish. I’ve had parents cautiously tell me that they want to see their child go to college, but to them it feels like wishful thinking. I’ve had a dad come to me and tell me that he just want his son to be able to play a game of catch with him. There are some 16-year-old clients that have told me that they want to own their cafe or their own nail shop. I’ve also had a 17-year-old client tell me that he wanted to become a character designer at Disney. These...

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… Throughout the last 16 episodes, I’ve covered quite a large range of topics and areas of concerns that many families typically have when their child is first diagnosed with autism. All this information can often times be a bit overwhelming, so in today’s episode, I wanted to quickly review through some recommendations for any parents and/or caretakers that are new to this topic of autism. As a clinician, there are a couple BIG recommendations that I can’t help but emphasize. First, if you’re suspecting that your child may be autistic, have a psychologist see your child IMMEDIATELY. Delaying your child’s evaluation is only delaying the options you may have for your child in the future. Every month is a huge growth spurt opportunity for your infant, and as they grow older that window of opportunity grows narrower. So it’s extremely important that we don’t waste time. Getting an appointment in with a psychologist can be a very long wait, so make sure you do whatever you can to get an appointment in sooner than later. Just like with any medical doctors, there are private clinics and there are also county and/or state-funded clinics (in the state of CA, they’re referred to as regional centers). There is a wide range, and of course with each type there are pros and cons. For private psychologist clinics, you might have to pay out of pocket, dependent on your insurance benefits, but your child’s evaluation should be expected to be clinically very specific and customized to what your child may need. Dependent on their client-base, you may also be able to get an appointment in sooner than a county-funded clinic. The county-funded clinics should provide an evaluation free of charge; however, due to the higher level of need, the wait time might be longer and their evaluation will typically be a template assessment that’s completed. Every state has different resources available, so make sure to do your research on what resources are available for your state. I know we also have quite a bit of international listeners, as well. I’ve only worked with clients within the state of California, so I can’t provide specifics to any out-of-state nor international folks; however, I did leave a link to the ASHA website that provides state insurance mandates for the autism spectrum disorder. This is extremely helpful to review and understand before trying to set up any logistics with your insurance provider and your treatment providers (https://www.asha.org/advocacy/state/states-specific-autism-mandates/). Second, do your research. There are so many voices screaming at you in so many directions. What’s most important is that you make the best decision for your child. But ensure that before you make any key important decisions, you do your research to understand what the scientific research has shown. I’ve worked with quite a handful of parents that have paid out of pocket for various treatments that claimed could “cure” autism. I’ve also witnessed families bend over backwards to get their child into a program that claims to be ABA treatment, but after much time, we found out that their methodologies aren’t based on ABA principles. So I just want to reiterate the importance of doing your research and asking various questions and addressing your concerns before signing up for any type of service. Third, know that every decision you make is extremely important for your child. I’m not going to add the fluff and tell you that...

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… In today’s episode, I wanted to talk about mental health conditions in children that have been diagnosed with autism. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210119114358.htm) A new U.S. study published in January earlier this year by the University of British Columbia and AJ Drexel Autism Institute found that nearly 78% of children with autism have at least one mental health condition in comparison to 14.1% of children without autism. Dr. Connor Kerns is an assistant professor and the lead author of this study, and he stated that “for a long time, mental health in kids with autism was neglected because the focus was on autism. There’s much greater awareness now, but we don’t have enough people trained to provide mental health treatments to kids on the autism spectrum. We need to bridge these two systems and the different sets of providers that tend to treat these children.” Children with autism are at higher risk of other mental health conditions such as anxiety disorder, depression, behavior conduct problems, ADHD, and more. This study additionally compared the prevalence of mental health conditions in children with ASD to children with intellectual disabilities and children with other on-going chronic conditions that require healthcare attention. They found that mental health conditions were significantly more prevalent in children with autism than in any other groups. Dr. Kerns suggests that “the longer mental health conditions are allowed to exist and worse, the harder they are going to be to treat. It’s much better to catch them early. Right now, we don’t have a great system for doing that.” This research study revealed some pretty interesting data and factual information about our population of children with autism. Even during my experience as a clinical manager, over half of my clients came in with other mental health conditions, such as anxiety disorders, ADHD, and severe behavior conduct problems. This comes to provide us with another reason as to why our children with autism needs treatment as soon as possible. I’ve encountered quite a large population of parents and advocates that push for neuro-diversity and not treating the autism diagnosis stating that we should seek to “change” our children. Neuro-diversity is definitely something that I strongly believe we need to continue advocating for within our healthcare policies and education systems to provide more learning opportunities for our children; however, leaving the autism diagnosis untreated leaves our children at risk for other mental health conditions that could result in dangerous health risks and safety concerns. The important thing to know is that effective research proven treatments such as ABA does not base their principles upon changing a child. The goal is for us to teach the child life skills that will help promote the children to become more independent in life rather than remaining dependent on their caretakers to provide their daily needs. When we’re looking at shaping the behaviors of our children, we’re not looking to “change their personality.” Rather, we are aiming to provide them functional communication and replacement behaviors for them to continue living life as independent and safely as possible. If you’re interested more about my opinions on ABA and what it can offer for children diagnosed with autism, I highly recommend you check out episodes 6-9, where I break down the basics of ABA to help you determine

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… In today’s episode, I want to talk about the research behind physical activity with autistic children. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210202113843.htm)Now, it may seem like a no-brainer that all children should be engaging in some type of daily physical activity, but surprisingly, the Oregon State University helped find some really interesting data when it comes to our children with autism. This research study was published earlier this year in February 2021 and found that between the ages of 9 to 13 years of age, children showed the biggest drop in active time. In order to help children with autism maintain healthy rates of physical activity, the study suggested that interventions should be targeted especially between the age of 9 to 13 years. This study was one of the first to evaluate this issue on a longitudinal scale. The study relied on data collected from families in Ireland between 2007-2016. The children who participated in this study had their evaluations/interviews at the age of 9, 13, and then lastly between the age of 17-18. The study compared 88 children with autism to 88 children without autism over the course of these 9 years to determine how physical activity changed over time, along with patterns on screen time usage. The study found no significant difference in screen time between children with autism and children without a diagnosis, but there was a significant difference in the amount of physical activity reported. As someone who has worked with many different families leading various lifestyles, I can see how some of our autistic children drastically decrease in physical activities in their adolescent years. As academics become more demanding and services such as ABA, speech, and/or OT continues to take up all afternoon, there is very limited amount of time to intentionally designate to physical activity. There’s not enough time in a day to go around. Some autistic children even despise being outside. Being out in the sun during the summer is one of their worst nightmares, but with positive association to the outdoors and building a higher tolerance to physical exertion can help a child better tolerate the outdoors. There is always a way to make it work. But during free time, I recommend not just handing off the phone or tablet to your child to buy yourself some time. Yes, when times get tough you need to do what you need to do to make things work. But what I want to focus on is not allowing that to become a daily routine. Our children need to be constantly moving and coming into more frequent contact with their environment outside of the electronics. Be intentional about taking your child outside for a walk around the neighborhood. You prefer to keep things indoors during this pandemic? Totally okay...have them move throughout the house. Incorporate a mini workout routine before dinner. Anything to get your children moving. The physical health created for our children now will determine their health patterns for their future. Let’s not let a child’s autism diagnosis affect their physical health as well. The CDC recommends that between the ages 3-5 years, children should be constantly moving and engaging in physical activity all day. Children between the ages of 5-17 should engage in nothing less than an hour of moderate-vigorous physical activity. As a BCBA and clinical programmer, I enjoy making some of my programs/lessons more physically active than trying to...

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… During the last couple of episodes, I’ve been pushing hard on early intervention and getting your child assessed as soon as you notice any possible signs of an autism diagnosis. But today, I wanted to talk about the flip side and society’s role in all of this. What is our responsibility as fellow community members? In what ways can we fight for more autism awareness and promote inclusivity within our education system and within our community places? There was a research study (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210208085441.htm) published in January 2021 that investigates whether reducing biases about the autism diagnosis would help facilitate and promote social inclusion. Individuals with autism experience different struggles. Movies/tv shows have boxed individuals with autism as one specific stereotype...typically they were white males that are socially awkward but intellectually gifted and brilliant. While this may be true for some, this is DEFINITELY not true across all. The autism diagnosis affects every individual in a different way. The variance across skill sets, communication styles, behaviors are all quite broad. There is a common quote that gets tossed around within this field and that is “if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person.” In the research study we’ll be reviewing today, Dr. Desiree Jones led a study where 238 non-autistic adults were split into 3 groups: the first group completed an autism acceptance training that focused on factual information and engaging first-person narratives, the second group completed a general mental health training not mentioning autism, and the last group had no-training which served as the control group. The participants then responded to various surveys that assessed their knowledge on autism, the stigma, and their impressions of autistic adults, and completed a novel implicit association task about autism. The study found that the participants in the autism acceptance training condition reported more positive impressions of autistic adults, demonstrated fewer misconceptions and lower stigma about autism, endorsed higher expectations of autistic abilities, and expressed greater social interest. These findings suggest that the autism acceptance training program increased autism knowledge and familiarity among non-autistic people, which resulted in reduced explicit biases towards the autism diagnosis. One of the co-authors of this research study, stated that "it's not easy to be autistic in a predominantly non-autistic world, and making the social world a bit more accommodating and welcoming to autistic differences could go a long way toward improving personal and professional outcomes for autistic people.” So this comes to the question of what are YOU doing to better understand the autism community and to stay informed. As the prevalence rate of autism continues to spike, more and more children in our education system are needing special education services. As a professional that’s worked with a wide spectrum of this autism diagnosis, the hardest part of my job is working through a treatment plan out in the community or in school settings and having strangers and other children stare at and judge the child and parent like spectators on reality tv. Even with the kindest of intentions, this type of behavior can often times make families feel like they’re being pushed into a corner that society has labeled with negative...

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “What the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… Today, I wanted to talk about developmental milestones and screenings. I’ve received quite a bit of questions about the process of getting their child screened and monitored for developmental delays and the developmental milestones that is expected for their child. For many of our parents, coming home with a newborn child can be extremely overwhelming. The list of things that need to be taken care of is quite extensive and I hope that today’s episode can help breakdown all the information out there into simple steps in the area of developmental milestones. As always, all resources, articles, research studies will be posted on our facebook page @whattheautism, but if you’d like access to any of these resources via email, feel free to email us at whattheautismpodcast@gmail.com. But let’s talk about developmental milestones. How your child plays, learns, speaks, acts, and moves provides us with important information about your child’s development. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by a certain age, and often times these milestones can direct us to the appropriate support your child might be needing. I’ll be including on our Facebook page the link to the CDC’s list of milestones that are expected as early as 2 months and as late as 5 years. For each age, the CDC posted a simple and easy checklist of skills that should be exhibited by your child. It covers social/emotional skills, language/communication skills, physical development and motor skills, and cognitive skills. If you prefer a much easier way to track your child’s skillset through a checklist, the CDC released an app for all smartphones. The app is called CDC’s Milestone Tracker and is available on your app store for any iOS and Android systems. But like I mentioned I will be posting the link to the CDC website for more information on these developmental milestones, if you have limited access to downloading this app to your smartphone. Link for list of basic developmental milestones: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/index.html Screening versus monitoring checklist/chart (in English and Spanish) https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/pdf/Dev-Mon-and-Screen-English-and-Spanish-P.pdf CDC Child Milestone’s App: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones-app.html The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends developmental and behavioral screening for all children during their visit with their pediatrician or physician at these ages: 9 months 18 months 30 months In addition, AAP recommends that all children be screened specifically for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during their visits at: 18 months 24 months If your child is at higher risk for developmental problems due to preterm birth, low birthweight, environmental risks like lead exposure, or other factors, your healthcare provider may also discuss additional screening. If a child has an existing long-lasting health problem or a diagnosed condition, the child should have developmental monitoring and screening in all areas of development. If your child’s healthcare provider does not periodically check your child with a developmental screening test, I recommend that you ask that it be done so that you have a clear idea of how your child is developing. These regular screenings and assessments with your child’s physician are meant purely to ensure that your child is meeting his/her developmental milestone and if they aren’t, they’re doing...

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “What the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… Research Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5392775/ In the research study we’ll be reviewing today, we’ll be talking about self injurious behaviors and exactly how prevalent this behavior is within children with autism. In 2017, a handful of researchers conducted a population-based study that reviewed a large sample of children with autism to gauge exactly how prevalent Self-injurious behaviors are within the autism population. Self-injurious behaviors (SIB) are quite diverse in its appearance. Common types of SIB in ASD include-head banging, hair pulling, arm biting, eye poking, and skin scratching. Often times these types of behaviors are established because of a child’s inability to communicate their thoughts and emotions. They have learned that when they engage in self injurious behaviors, they get an immediate response from their caretakers, which eventually leads them to what they want, whether that may be attention, release of built up frustration, and/or access to a particular food/object/person. Regardless of the function of the behavior, self injurious behaviors create a huge health and safety concern for families, schools, and within community members. As always, I’ll be including the research article on our Facebook page for you to follow along. The research article shows a table that breaks down the findings from this study to help you better understand the results of what these researchers found. Analyzing the findings of this research study, they found that the prevalence of SIB in a population-based study of ASD averaged 27.7 % over three surveillance years. Due to various limitations and sampling differences in this study, there are speculations that this 27.7% may be an under estimation of the prevalence rate of self injurious behaviors amongst children with ASD. However, regardless, these results suggest that self injurious behaviors within ASD are common and deserve more clinical and research attention in order to further advance the level of awareness and treatment strategies. This study revealed that SIB are a common phenotypic characteristic among children with ASD and that its prevalence is higher than has been reported in children with other developmental disabilities. SIB are dangerous behaviors but it’s also important to note the amount of impact that it carries within the immediate family and community circles. SIB deserve more clinical and research attention but of course, this requires time, effort, and financial means. In conclusion, SIB in ASD is an important public health concern that affects many children. Future research is warranted to better understand its potential risk factors and consequences, in order to develop effective and more targeted treatment strategies. Does your child exhibit SIB or SIB-like behaviors? Does your child struggle in communicating their thoughts, feelings, wants and needs? This may some times result in them hitting their head or banging their head against the wall. Some parents I have worked with in the past have also reported that their child at 18 months used to cry and repeatedly bang their head against the pillow or against their parents’ stomachs. Now, although this doesn’t warrant huge safety/health risks as the pillows and stomachs have cushion, but how will these behaviors manifest as the child gets older and further behavioral patterns are established? Self injurious behaviors raise public health and safety...

Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started… Today I wanted to talk about a research article that was published back in May 2020. It’s titled “Adherence to Screening and Referral Guidelines for Autism Spectrum Disorder in Toddlers in Pediatric Primary Care.” If you would like to follow along while listening to the podcast or if you’d like to review this study at another time, I have left a PDF file of this research study on our Facebook page. But the objective of this study was to identify and study the various factors that are associated with doctors/physicians completing a follow-up interview and referring families to the appropriate next step in services after the initial screening for autism. The American Academy of Pediatrics (also referred to as AAP) recommends that all young children are screened for the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during their regular check ups with their pediatrician. But a common concern that has been discussed is the disparities in the ASD diagnosis and intervention across children of minority. This research study goes into depth on some potential contributors and some possible things to consider when we discuss the diagnosing of autism and the immediate next steps taken by physicians in their recommendations and referrals. Prior studies that examined referrals after developmental screening suggest that patient characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or gender may influence physicians’ responses. One specific study which I’ll also include on our facebook page, found that a girl with language delays was 60% more likely than a boy with similar symptoms to audiology. Among a sample of very-low-birthweight infants who are eligible for early intervention services, referrals were much lower among children of black mothers, mothers without private insurance, or from towns with higher poverty rates. So in today’s research study, the researchers examined a group of children with positive results in their screening to estimate rates of completion of follow up interviews and the physicians’ adherence to AAP guidelines in referring patients to early intervention services, audiology, and/or for an ASD evaluation immediately. In this particular study, the screening that was provided was a M-CHAT-F which is a parent-report tool that involves 23 "yes/no" questions about a child’s behaviors to determine their risk of ASD. There is also a SWYC Milestones questionnaires that includes 10 age-specific questions to evaluate children’s attainment of motor, cognitive, and language skills. As part of routine care, caregivers completed both of these questionnaires and screening measures on an electronic tablet or through an electronic patient portal prior to their visitation with their physician. I won’t dig too far into the specific methods and measurements, but I did want to review the results of this study with you for us to have some type of dialogue of what this could mean for your child if you are questioning potential diagnosis of autism. The results of this study found that there are multiple factors associated with increased likelihood of follow-up interviews being completed. The research study includes very easy charts and tables that break down the various factors, such as ethnicities, genders, etc and the percentage of each population group that are provided with follow up interviews. From this study, researchers found that despite a high rate of screening across pediatric primary care, the level of adherence to guidelines for...

Welcome back to another episode here at What the Autism?! We hit our 10th episode, and I want to thank YOU the listeners from all around the world for tuning in and showing your support for our podcast! We have over 200 listeners from 24 different countries that are tuning in and I’m very excited to see our family here on this podcast channel grow! For those of you that are new here, welcome to What the Autism?! You can follow us on our Instagram and Facebook page, @whattheautism, for daily updates and if you have any questions or stories you’d like to share with us, you can email us at whattheautismpodcast@gmail.com. To celebrate our 10th episode here, today we’ll be running a Q&A session with questions that were submitted by our listeners. If you think of additional questions throughout today’s episode, feel free to email us or dm us on IG and we’ll answer those questions throughout the upcoming podcast episodes or in future Q & A episodes. Question: Why did you start this podcast? I started What the Autism?! not only because I’m passionate about the work that I do, but also because throughout the 8 years I’ve been working as a clinician, I’ve witnessed so many family members who regretted some of the choices that they made throughout the years. And it’s not their fault. These parents feared the future of their autistic son/daughter. What would happen to their child if something happens to the parents? Is anyone out there to care for their child? And out of that fear, they wanted to provide anything and everything to their child in hopes that something sticks. But often times, that results in regrettable decisions that have left many families broken, financially, relationally, mentally, and emotionally. The purpose of this podcast is to help all our families understand the scientific research that is out there and to help parents make the most INFORMED decision when it comes to treatment and diagnosis. Time is of the essence and any wrong decision can waste money, and most importantly, time...time that your child cannot afford to waste. So before making any decisions on treatment, make sure you seek out the appropriate specialists, get multiple medical opinions and make sure you are well informed of type of services your child may need. Is it hard for high functioning Autism to be diagnosed? When we say high functioning, this typically means that the individual doesn’t engage in high rates of maladaptive behaviors and can functionally communicate with others. Although high functioning autism may be less noticeable in the community, a credible psychologist should still be able to quickly identify if a child has autism no matter how severely impacted the diagnosis is. A high functioning autistic individual may struggle with emotional sensitivities, social difficulties, resistance to change, or certain fixations. But regardless of what type of symptoms are present, an individual that’s less severely impacted by the autism diagnosis should still be able to be diagnosed with autism if they meet the diagnostic criteria. In Episode 2 of my podcast, I review the diagnostic criteria for autism and what checkboxes psychologists are looking for when it comes to the autism diagnosis so make sure to give that episode a listen to see if your child may meet the qualifications for the autism diagnosis. I think my child has autism...what do I do? The most important thing is to get your child diagnosed! Autism can be diagnosed as early as 18 months! Don’t let anyone tell you other wise. If your insurance provider and/or any agencies are telling you to wait till your child is 3 years old....don’t! Because when a child turns 3 years and then action is taken to schedule a diagnosis, by the time your child starts treatment, your child is 4...and maybe even older is some cases. If this happens, your child’s window of learning opportunities gets smaller. But, if your child is over the age of 5, don’t think it’s too late. It’s...