CEAT
Supporting Children with Autism
Parents of children children with autism face unique challenges everyday, especially when they have to venture outside of their home and into the community. Many individuals are unaware of what the term "autism" actually means for the child and their family. Parents often worry about their child being misunderstood. The child with autism rarely looks different and as a result people can often mistake them as a "naughty child". Parents can feel that they are being viewed as "bad parents" or as having "no control over her children". These challenges often result in children and their families feeling they have limited choices as to where they can go in the community and the length of time they can stay there. As a consequence opportunities to socialise with other families are extremely limited as on many occassions they cannot visit the same places. Parents of children with autism can often find themselves feeling quite isolated and unwilling to venture into the community.
The local community plays an important role in the lives of children with autism. It is important to ask yourself; how can you or your organisation better meet the needs of families with children with autism? By developing an understanding of how autism affects children and their families you can take steps to minimise the challenges they face in the community. Our training programmes aim to promote autism awareness and equip community members with tools that can help them, not only to have meaningful interactions with children with autism, but also making the child's experience a significant and beneficial one too. Promoting an awareness within your organisation enables your employees to approach autism with a higher level of understanding and patience. By providing your organisation with specific training in supporting children with autism you will be improving the quality of their life and that of their family.
We provide training to public, private and voluntary organisations who wish to enhance their ability to support individuals with autism. Through individual or ongoing training programmes, we can assist your organisation in establishing a standard of support that makes a real difference.
The following training opportunities are available:
Understanding Autism
Autism is a complex disorder that affects a child's development including; how they talk, play and interact with others. The symptoms of autism varies widely as does the impact the disorder has on the child. For example, some children only have mild disorders while others face more difficult challenges. Children with the same diagnosis can often exhibit significantly different behaviours. Understanding Autism provides indviduals and their organisation with a knowledge base that will help to:
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Improve the effectiveness of your service for children with autism and their families
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Improve the quality of service you deliver for children with autism
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Improve the experiences of the child and their family
Promoting Communication
What do communication difficulties for children with autism actually mean? Communication difficulties can include, but is not limited to:
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Difficulty understanding what is being said
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Difficulty making speech sounds
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Difficulty initiating and joining conversations
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Difficulty understanding and using gestures
Communication and language do not look the same for every child with autism; some may be unable to speak while others may have rich vocabularies, be able to talk about specific subjects in great detail but not understand when someone tells a joke, or how to judge whether or not someone is interested in what they are saying. Very often children with autism do not develop enough speech to meet their daily communication needs and this can lead to a lot of frustration and challenging behaviour. Communication and language skills may not develop naturally for children with autism, but that does not mean that they cannot be taught how to communicate.
Promoting Communication empowers individuals to be proactive in seeking to develop opportunities to engage the child in practising their language skills and to expand the number of opportunities they have to engage in appropriate social interactions within the natural environment. This course provides ways to promote communication no matter what stage your child is at.
Learning Through Play
Children with autism generally present with difficulties with imaginative and interpersonal play. They might have a limited range of interests or play skills which can lead to restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviour while playing.
Why is play so important for children with autism? Play is not a stage that children go through to reach adulthood, it is a fundamental part of learning how to have fun, make discoveries and interact with the world. It is a unique medium that supports the development of communication, social understanding and emotional wellbeing, all of which help children make sense of the world.
The Learning Through Play course helps individuals make play a functional learning experience by demonstrating how different activities can be used to promote language development and social and imaginative play. This course aims to educate individuals in;
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How to make play meaningful
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How to extend a child's imagination and creativity
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How to help the child to develop both independent and interactive play skills while presenting them with positive interactions with their peers
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How to adapt these techniques across a wide variety of settings
Managing Challenging Behaviour
Many people with autism are reported to have challenging or disruptive behaviours. These are such vague terms that it is important to understand what they mean. For some, the term is wide-ranging and refers to anything an individual may do which is inappropriate. This can include problems such as; rejecting food, staying awake all night or wetting the bed. For others, the term refers only to those behaviours which are likely to cause harm to the individual or to their carers. Examples include; aggression, throwing tantrums, self-injury or wandering off unsupervised. However, what seems inappropriate to one person may seem perfectly reasonable to another.
This course is for parents, carers and staff who are involved in the life of a child with autism. The course is designed to encourage those attending to think differently about the behaviour and focus on developing an awareness and understanding of the reasons as to why a child may present challenging behaviours. The course also explores a range of methods and approaches that can be used to address them.
Where possible the content of the course is set to the age range that the participants would be supporting. From children in nurseries, day care, child minding, schools, teenage young people to adults.
Home Intervention Services
School Training Services
Community Training Services
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