How many people are personally affected by autism?

Well I am a TA so I work one on one with the kids in the classroom. We use applied behavior analysis (ABA) as our instruction method. I think it works well at times, and not so well at times. It seems to be more effective with the younger kids and I work with older kids that would benefit more from more functional instruction in my opinion. But it definitely is a great job. How did you do in school, what were your struggles?

Ah, good ol' ABA. I've done very well in school, but struggled until I was promoted several grades ahead. I tend to do poorly on 'busy work', if I can beat myself to do it. I have big issues with tasks needing any sort of visio-spatial competency. I have even bigger issues with illogical, bad questions. When I was younger, I had interpersonal struggles with teachers who didn't understand how ridiculous their questions on tests were or how they could be interpreted fifteen different ways from Sunday. I also had a lot of issues with with people trying to cajole me out of my nonverbal periods, people attempting to get me to speak instead of looking at my flash cards, and people trying to desensitize me to certain things that cause me to meltdown. I didn't last long in public schools.

ABA is pretty complicated to explain in a few short paragraph. But basically its an intervention with the goal of changing behavior. There are quite a few components to it. Prompting, reinforcement and task analysis are some ways that ABA incorprates to change or teach behavior. Also, ABA is not used only with people with autism, we all use ABA every day in a sense. For example, we go to work when we're supposed to because we are reinforced with a paycheck. Or we might study hard for a test, and the reinforcement is a good grade, etc. Prompting refers to the amount of assistance you have to complete a task. For example, you might to give your child hand over hand assistance to brush their teeth every morning at first. Then gradually you would aim to give them partial assistance with each step. The goal is to fade the prompts so that he/she is eventually doing the entire thing independently. Reinforcement is what determines the likelihood of a behavior, good or bad. And reinforcement can be anything from attention to candy. Then a task analysis is simply to break a task (such as toothbrushing as mentioned above) into smaller steps and work on one step at a time (giving the amount of prompting needed during each step). So you may need to give hand over hand assistance to help put the toothpaste on the toothbrush, but the rest of it can be done independently. There is a lot of information out there about ABA and can probably be explained better than I can explain it. And this is by no means a broad overview of ABA, there are many more components that I haven't touched on, although those are pretty important ones. Hope this helps:)

I'm glad to hear your son is doing so well :) It is definitely a challenge getting a diagnosis with a mild case of autism. I've talked to other parents who have children with autism and they have relatives and friends that don't believe their kids actually have autism, and it's very frustrating for them. I'm guessing your son's school isn't year round? I hope he's having a good summer. The school I work at is, and I feel like some of the kids could use a break!