Interviewer Earliest age that you would feel a kid with benefit from anything red flag to that diagnosis of autism. What would be the earliest age you are working out kind of thing?
Doctor: I have never seen a child who has been diagnosed prior to about 14-months-old of age. But, if I was worried, I would start doing a lot of stimulation in terms of trying to get the kid to response as young as possible. But, I doubt to see at this point any type of formal diagnose before 12-months of age unless the child is really seriously involved.
Interviewer: In your school, what is the earliest age you would get kid in any kind of your programs?
Doctor: We start our program at age 3 because we do not do our intervention. But we work with early intervention programs and the see the kid is young as 14 or 15-months of age.
Interviewer: Have you had chosen that early intervention program. You really have to be careful to, don’t you?
Doctor: Absolutely.
Interviewer: You are good and bad, and ugly and anything.
Doctor: Absolutely especially in this stating age where everybody is doing a behave urinalysis, but does not mean that everything is doing it well and you have to keep up on the research and curriculum has to be modified when you are working with 12-month-old. It can be the same curriculum we use in an 18-month-older or 24-month-older.
Interviewer: Usually a pediatrician will know the better programs or whatever it takes care with your child.
Doctor: Yes, I would contact the state autism associations for example. In that island, there is a grace foundation and in New Jersey there is Cosset. Those would be the one that I will contact to really find out which is the best early intervention agencies.
Interviewer: Now, if you do get the kid at age 3 here, what do you do to help these kids so there is better off down the road?
Doctor: Well, we offer in times of behavioral program. We do not—we are not eclectic. We do not go in different direction. We really focus on with behavioral analysis. It is the one intervention that at this point has approving track record and we provide six hours a day of apply behavior analysis and then we work with family so that they will carry this program over at all.
Interviewer: If you can some like explain what that is so that we do not know what it is, we have a better understanding?
Doctor: It is basically behavior analysis. Just taking the principles of learning and using those principles in terms of applying reinforcement to increase behaviors, but more importantly for children on this spectrum. We take the pieces of skills that they need to acquire. We break them down.
The two things we know about children with autism is that they do not process the world the way we do. So what they have—they often do what is called stimulus over selectivity, which means, they over select on something irrelevant.
So they maybe looking at your right ear as suppose to looking to your eyes.
Interviewer: You needed one fixation?
Doctor: It is not so much fixating is that they are not clear of what the important futures of information are and so you think for example, if you are teaching them to identify dog in a picture that they area actually seeing the whole dog. But what they maybe doing is labeling the color, the background color. So then when they see a picture of a dog that has a different background color they cannot level it. In other words, they are over selecting off and time on irrelevant information. And so that is why their learning is very challenge.
And the other problem that we know is that they do not response to the same social contingencies that typically developing kids use so smiles and praise, and those things in early on are very reinforcing. So what we do in a good behavioral program is we will take these scales, we break them down with a such small pieces that we know that they are attending to the most relevant pieces because there is no destruction and we do a very careful assessment of what we know they like and we use their like, I mean their personal preferred reinforces and we ad
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