Sensory Learning
Not long ago, Veronica and I saw an interesting special on television about a new treatment for children with autism and aspergers called sensory learning. I've not written about it here before, but our son has Aspergers. He's a wonderful, brilliant child, eleven years old now, but he also has all of the classic Aspergers characteristics, and both school and life in general has been a struggle for him.
Consequently, over the years we've worked through a number of programs with him. I'm not going to get into details about that -- the story has been told over and over by thousands of parents, but suffice to say that current science has little of use to say about autism, and it's been a struggle to help our son get what he needs to be successful in life. We don't want to "cure" or change him, but we do want him to be able to work around the deficits, build his strengths, and especially be able to develop the kind of relationships in life that make it worth living.
Anyway, "Sensory learning" is a fairly new treatment which is still arguably in the questionable stage scientifically. It's designed to address some of the core issues of autism -- inability to process stimuli in an integrated way. For kids like Khalil, a soft voice can sometimes sound like a scream, and the sometimes chaotic environment of the public schools can be devastating.
As I understand it, "Sensory learning" is designed to help the brain grow new paths to help process this stimuli. So, to make a long story short, Khalil and I are now on a two week visit to Atlanta where he is going through the program. I promised Veronica I'd blog about it, as there's a great deal of interest in this, but not a huge amount of information out there.
First, a quick link -- here's some info on sensory learning.
We arrived in Atlanta Saturday night and spent the day Sunday out at my brother's house in West Georgia. Khalil was a little off balance -- we didn't finish the drive until about 1 am. But, he got to spend the day playing with his cousin, and we settled in at our hotel in Alpharetta last night.
So, from here I'm going to start posting our experience with the program and how Khalil responds. Hopefully this will be of use to other parents considering doing this.
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So, a large number of people have written and commented in the blog asking when the next chapter will be. The answer is, very very soon. Sometimes real life gets in the way, but I think I'm back on track schedule wise.
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When we first finished, the main thing we noticed was a marked increase in Khalil's self-awareness. He could tell us when he was hungry, not feeling well, had a stomach ache: all things which have not been very strong for him in the past. Outside of that, I don't have a strong sense of how much of an impact it had. Incremental is the best I can come up with -- he's still got a lot of sensory defensiveness, but there has been improvement.
Now that we've had six months since we did it, my conclusion is no, it didn't really do much of anything at all. Sorry to dash your hopes. I've heard others report better experiences, but for our part, no, I don't think it was worth the financial or time investment. Charles
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