Autism is a mental health disease that affects the development of children, specifically areas that are affected by the disease are the communication and interaction of these children with other children. The children who have autism require a lot of attention and they are very complicated children.
I have a neighbor, Maddox, who is eight years old and he has autism. I often have to babysit him and I have never realized until I stated babysitting him that children with autism require so much attention and exactly what goes into having or caring for a child with autism. Maddox has to get therapy everyday to help develop his social skills, and this therapist has to come to the house. Maddox needed to attention a special schools because the schools in our area were unable to accommodate his mental illness. He needed to attend a school for special needs kids that had the teachers who had the proper training to help him become more social as well as teach him things that the kids his age were learning. This disease affects to much of his life, and will for the rest of his life. He is often very shy and is awkward when placed in a situation in which he has to communicate with others, including with his own family.
After I had babysat Maddox for a year, I wanted to learn more about autism so I went to a hospital and asked one of the pediatricians what exactly happens to a child with autism and what the process of diagnosing a child with autism means. She then told me that most parents will bring their child in because they notice that their child isn’t as social as other children. These parents, more often than not, talk about how their children seem to develop a bit more slowly social but then are very bright and develop intellectually much quicker than other children.
After this visit with the doctor, I decided that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a pediatrician so I could help children like Maddox and be able to watch them grow and develop. I would be able to help change the way they live, for better or for worse. This is when I decided that this was exactly what I wanted to do.
Works Cited
Sam, Hall. “School Eases Transition into Mainstream.” Illawarra Mercury 29 Mar. 2011: 20. Newspaper Source Plus. Web. 13 Apr. 2016.
This article “School Eases Transition into Mainstream” by Sam Hall discusses the different ways that schools have changed the way that the students with autism are treated, without having to send them to a school for special needs kids. The children have started to be able to attend schools and normal classes in which they have teachers that work with the kids with autism without taking away from their learning abilities. The article talks about how in 2009, 119 students with autism were transitioned into the elite eight schools without any issues and were able to learn without any problems.
Moon, Jill. “Autism: Getting Help Early for Your Children is Essential for Development.” Telegraph, The (Alton, IL) 10 Apr. 2007: Newspaper Source Plus. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
This article “Autism: Getting help early for your children is essential for development” by Jill Moon discusses the different statistics of children with autism and how autism affects the child’s development. According to Jill Moon, one in 500 children is affected by autism.
The article then goes on to talk about a specific case in which a child by the name of Brendan McRae is diagnosed with autism at the age of of nine, when most children are diagnosed before the age of three. The reason that Brendan was diagnosed was not because he had a low IQ, he, instead, had a high verbal IQ and a significantly lower performance IQ. Brendan has a form of autism that is considered a high functioning form of autism, known as Asperger Syndrome.
As far as Brendan’s development as a young child, he developed quickly. He was speaking at six months and he had a large vocabulary by two years old. Brendan’s mother recounts that when he was twenty months old she had placed the foam letters from his bath out of order and he reordered them in the correct order. Even though he was very smart, his teacher when he was 3 asked his mother if he was deaf. As he got older, they noticed that he was often more withdrawn than the other kids. When he was five, he would hide in the bathroom during free time instead of interacting with the other kids.
Whitehead, Katherine, Diana Dorstyn, and Lynn Ward. “Psychological Adjustment in Families Affected By Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Journal Of Developmental & Physical Disabilities 27.5 (2015): 703-717. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
In the article “Psychological Adjustment in Families Affected By Autism Spectrum Disorder”, Katherine Whitehead discusses the effects that a child with autism has on the caregiver and the rest of the family. Some ways that a caregiver can be affected are through the social aspects due to the amount of time that they spend with the child that has autism. This time can be used to take the child to therapy or whatever else the child requires.
Another way that the caregiver can be affected is by changing their personality to fit one of a caregiver. The child that has autism requires a level of patience, compassion, life purpose, and selflessness that not everyone has. This is best defined as resilience.
This article then starts into the experiment that the preformed in which they took 438 female caregivers and looked at their depression and anxiety levels as well as looking at their resilience level based on the Connor Davidson scale. The results showed that the caregivers stated that the variables are “out of their control” and these caregivers are more often than not avoiding their own poor mental health.
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