Family Life

Standing up for your child with autism isn’t always easy, but every parent can learn how to be a powerful advocate and help to improve the system for those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). These key principles can help you get the services and attention that your child deserves both at school and in everyday life.      Image – free for commercial use   Be A Leader   Accepting a leadership role as an advocate for your child will help to boost your position when you interact with doctors, teachers, caregivers, therapists, and others who offer services to your autistic child. You will be on a steep learning curve, and shouldn’t expect to change things overnight. If you do your best and take a…

A sensory garden stimulates all five senses: sight, touch, taste, and sound, all through the use of different plants and materials. These gardens allow autism sufferers to explore their senses in a stimulating, but safe, environment. Early intervention is important for autistic children, and a sensory garden allows them to explore their senses without becoming overwhelmed by them.  Image – free for commercial use   Sight   When you design a sensory garden, it is good to get creative with the colors that you use in the garden, to provide visual stimulation. Color can come from plants, stones on patios, gravel, and bricks. The balance of color is important. Make sure you don’t introduce too many bright colors into one space.    Depending on the…

  Pexels – CCO Licence   When you are trying to save money, it is often natural that you would stop spending money on all but the essentials in order to do so. You may also start buying cheaper versions of the things you need to make further savings too.   This strategy will work out well most of the time, but there are lots of times when you can actually save money by spending money too. Let’s take a look at a few of them now:   Buying food in bulk   When you buy food in bulk, you will need to spend more upfront, but you will actually, quite often, get a discount on a higher volume of food, which means you will…

Research reveals that about 80% of autistic children are selective regarding food. Your child might have problems chewing or swallowing foods, refuse to eat food they have eaten in the recent past, refuse to touch certain utensils and foods or have a challenge sitting with the family for dinner. They might not also like the texture of certain foods, causing them to become picky eaters. Fortunately, this article will help you figure out how to help your autistic child overcome picky eating.     Schedule their meals regularly   Autistic children thrive in an environment where they know what to expect. Ensure you formulate a regular meal schedule and try as much as possible to be consistent. If your child is used to eating their…

All parents go through times when they wonder whether they are doing it all right or not. Parenting is such a tough thing to be able to do properly, and it is so easy to get it wrong a lot of the time that you are going to often find you need to work on a few aspects in order to improve the situation. It can really help to know about some of the common parenting mistakes that people often make, so that you are much more likely to avoid them yourself.   In this post, we are going to take a look at just some of the parenting mistakes that people make, often without realizing that they’re doing so. As long as you can…

Raising responsible children, whether autistic or not, is a challenge in modern times. Our lives are very different from the rest of human history, and the way we conduct ourselves is not the same.      Unsplash – CC0 License   That’s particularly true of how we grow up. Historically, kids would have been employed on the farm, helping the parents sow crops and grow food. Today, though, there probably isn’t a single instance of that in the whole country.   While new approaches to life help to educate kids, they’re not particularly good at fostering things like responsibility. And that’s a problem. If children don’t get that type of nurturing when they are young, it’ll create problems as they’re growing up, and when they…