In this episode of Autism: A New Perspective, host Katherine Lee brings in a former RDI® student who is now in her 30s. Alysia Elliot and her mom Sharon Sargeant talk about Alysia’s life with autism, before RDI® and how starting an RDI® program changed everything.
The beginnings of the Relationship Development Intervention (RDI®) program happened around 30 years ago, when Dr. Steven Gutstein and Dr. Rachelle Sheely began to ask some questions about autism, like “Why do intelligent, capable adults on the spectrum struggle to maintain independence? What is it about autism that sets people up to not be independent?”
RDI® can help all families, and your child can benefit from starting RDI® at any age, but the program is designed to promote growth, learning, development, and the ability to have relationships and perform necessary life skills, and, eventually, independence in adulthood. Your child can benefit from RDI® into their teen years and into young adulthood, if they are not yet ready for adulthood.
As parents, we can use RDI® concepts to introduce our children to more variables and increasingly dynamic situations, when they are ready. Children with autism are more than capable of achieving growth, development, and quality of life, just like neurotypical children, but they must be given the chance – and they must be able to move at their own pace.
In this episode of “Autism: A New Perspective,” Dr. Sheely talks about the things that might trigger a state of crisis again for some parents, how to know if you’re in a crisis state, and what you can do to move yourself out of it.
Dynamic Intelligence is thriving in a world with partial predictability and getting used to living in a world of uncertainty.
Sometimes there is a misconception that RDI does not work with children who are non-verbal, that this is not for them. But Dr. Rachelle Sheely talks about her work with children on the spectrum that were non-verbal and how RDI® can be used with every child.
A lot of people think there’s this continuum of dynamic on one end and static on the other, where you got this opposite… That sort of the opposite of static, and it’s not at all. On the one end, you’ve got static, but on the other end you’ve got chaotic or random. And that’s what systems theories tell us, and there are two very important ways in which dynamic situations or systems are different from their chaotic ones.
For some reason, the necessary MindGuiding Relationship that typically forms between parent and child during the first year of life doesn’t happen with autistic individuals–but with RDI®, it is possible to re-establish this relationship and nurture the growth mindset in your child.
