Do you look at your therapist or consultant as the authority that possesses the main role in your child’s autism treatment? You are the one that holds the dreams for your child’s development in life, and you are also the one that can best provide home-based opportunities for your child’s mental and self-growth. Your consultant is a professional in the treatment of autism but the key role in your child’s therapy in the RDI® model is held by you, the Mindful Guide.
Parent’s Role as a Mindful Guide
Life is tough for a family living with autism. Most parents of autistic children naturally adopt a highly directive and compensating role as their child advances (to no fault of the parent) from passive to active avoidance and emotional disengagement. This leads to restricted and abnormal development in the child, and opportunities for mental and self-growth are typically lost.
Your role in RDI® autism treatment is that of a growth-promoting guide, a Mindful Guide, that restores and stimulates your child’s Growth-Seeking and provides a second chance for your child to thrive in our complex world. As the active guide, rather than a parent who is directed to be less than involved in your child’s treatment, you get to experience your child’s development first-hand.
Parent’s Role in Growth-Seeking
You, the Mindful Guide, are trained to open your child’s ability to develop ways to think, communicate, and to relate dynamically in everyday life situations and functions. Not only do you strengthen your relationship with your child (What parent does not want that?), but as your child gains awareness and understands this engagement in everyday life, they begin to want to seek growth. They become Growth-Seeking vs. an autistic child that by and large avoids situations and easily becomes overwhelmed.
In your home environment, your role as guide edges off anxiety, fear, and the stunting of growth, compared to treatment through forced therapies that can stave off your child’s desire to grow. You open the gates up that allows your child to develop in their own time.
You are the guide that perceives your child as engaging. You guide rather than buffer your child from the world.
Your child might not naturally seek growth without your guidance, but as the Mindful Guide relationship grows, your child will observe and will organically become growth-seeking through the process.
Your Role as the Guide – Not Forced Intervention
Your consultant is a participant in your child’s autism treatment as they train you to guide your child. You, the parent, can call yourself the primary treatment-giver in your child’s development.
The RDI® model is much different than conventional autism therapies that involve meeting with a therapist in an office where your child is observed, but not in a familiar home environment, and where your child is analyzed “by the charts,” based on developmental stages by age, rather than by the increased development of your child in quality of life. In this setting, parents are more in the role of the bystander, and not observers and guides to your child’s development in reciprocal communication, the gain of genuine friendships, confidence, and independent living. All of which are markers of success.
Your Ongoing Role with RDI®
Family and daily home life are at the foundation of our program. Your role as your child’s guide with RDI® autism treatment includes ongoing training, communication, video submissions (from the privacy and comfort of your home), and together with your consultant, treatment is individualized based on progress and current objectives.
You are your child’s best guide and daily observer. In the RDI® treatment model you are not chained to typical autism interventions that get involved with your child and discourage you from a higher level of participation.
Access to RDI® Online Help
Do you need help in your role as a parent in autism treatment? We have thrown open our doors and have made resources available to you for only $5 a month through June 30, 2020. Learn more at https://www.rdiconnect.com/join-the-rdi-learning-community/
[…] we focus on you, the parent, guiding your child and edging off anxiety, fear, and the stunting of growth rather than through […]