Autism Awareness Campaign - Early Intervention

Focus in last three days posters was on Early Intervention.  I received number of questions in my personal WhatsApp as well as by phone.  They include, who does the early invention, what is meant by early intervention, what is done in early intervention, what kind of improvements can be expected during and after the early intervention, etc.. 

Yesterday I received a phone call from Kerala from a mother of 18 months old child.  [I was quite delighted to see the reach of my poster campaign]!!  Seems her son is unable to walk, and doesn’t interact or play with other children.  Elders in the family felt that such delays do happen and not to worry about it, leading to nothing done.  But the mother was worried.  She got to know about my poster campaign through a relative of mine.  I requested the mother to take the child to a ‘developmental paediatrician’.  Developmental paediatricians evaluate kids who aren’t developing, learning or behaving the way their peers are.  Based on evaluation, the developmental paediatrician charts out an early intervention program for the child. Each program is unique, as each autistic child (or a normal child) is unique. 

Today’s poster presents different aspects of Early Intervention.  What it is, what areas of child development it addresses, what kinds of therapies it include, what types of professionals are involved and what methodologies are generally followed.  It was not easy for me to bring all these facets of ‘Early Intervention’ on a single poster.  Somehow managed! I will just touch upon the methodologies here.  The three major approaches / methodologies widely adopted for early intervention are ABA (Applied Behavioural Analysis), Discrete Trial Training (DTT) and Pivotal Response Training.  Will delve up on these in greater details in later posters.  

I didn’t know about ABA till Pratibha was around 20 years old. [Poor awareness]!  Not sure whether these methodologies are applied in special schools.  We did an intense ‘early’ intervention program for Pratibha based on ABA and DTT methodologies, when she was 26 years of age.  ‘Early’ and at the age of 26? Yes, it is possible! Lots of efforts have to be put in to get results. But we did get results!

Form a general awareness point of view, getting an overall idea about Early Intervention is sufficient, and that is what the scope of my poster campaign, during this Autism Awareness month.