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.
In this episode of Autism: A New Perspective, Kat Lee talks with special guest Dr. Sarah Wayland, an RDI® Certified Consultant and parenting coach, about raising autistic teens, RDI® and navigating high school on the spectrum.
In this episode of “Autism: A New Perspective,” we continue the discussion about raising girls with autism. Kat Lee is joined by special guest Sharon Sargeant, an RDI® parent whose daughter is now an adult. Sharon talks about the difficulty of getting a diagnosis in the early 90s, trying ABA, and discovering RDI® when her daughter was 12 years old.
In the general population, there’s a spectrum of people. Not everybody is going to be a college professor, and some people are going to have jobs as an assistant at Starbucks, and other people are going to have jobs as engineers. And so when I see someone who has a job as a greeter at Starbucks and has autism and has a girlfriend, I see that as an incredible success.
As children with autism grow up and inch closer to adulthood, there are sometimes lingering concerns–What if we didn’t do enough? What if we went in the wrong direction? What if independence isn’t possible?–but growth is possible into adulthood.
Children with autism have a desire for everything to stay the same, but what if you could help your kids embrace and even look forward to change?
With RDI® all of the simple and everyday experiences we enjoy with our children become huge in terms of their growth.
Do you have dreams for your child with autism? Dr. Rachelle Sheely talks about how we should never limit the dreams we have for our kids, autism or not, and how to help put them on a path to independence from a young age.
This idea of independence is one that we sometimes skirt because we get caught up in the daily routine of the things that we’re teaching or the things that we’re doing, or I think we get caught up in avoiding it because we worry about it so much. We’re afraid to face it.
One of the things at the Pan African Congress For Autism that impressed me and really didn’t surprise me was that parents and professionals alike had the same concern when they were thinking about the individuals that they deal with who were on the spectrum and their families.
