•How is the mind of a person with Autism different from a typical person's mind?
A typical child's basic developmental foundation of mental processes automatically faciliate the emergence of critical daily life skills and learning abilities, which rapidly come together from birth to 5 years old. From this innately emergent mental foundation, a typical child can become able to expand and advance during our childhood through all of our own and our parents', siblings's, peers' and teachers' time, efforts, and choices. The emergence of a more typical mind's sensorimotor awareness occurs before birth, and becomes basically integrated before 24 months of age. The emergence of a typical mind's visual and verbal language acquisition and communication awareness occurs after birth and becomes basically integrated around 36 months of age. The emergence of a typical mind's social awareness occurs after birth and becomes fully whole and subjectively interpretive around 60 months of age. These patterns of typical development are the precursors to, and the reasons why, a child becomes able to leave home to go to kindergarten and function fully independent of one-to-one adult support in low adult to child ratio peer group settings.

Due to genetic or environmental causes, atypical patterns of development, and certain measurable losses occur in relation to these mental capacities are why we see the features of Autism seem to emerge during early childhood. Therefore, this condition interferes with the timely emergence and typical integration of the mind's sensory, communication, and/or social cognitive capacities. Therefore, Autism disrupts the course of the innate growth, change, and stablity of the systems of the brain which are typically designed to allow a young child to learn with their all senses at once, communicate with a wide variety of verbal and nonverbal forms for a vast number of functions, and to be fully aware of, and knowledgeable about their own throughts and feelings, and particularly to reflect on and analyze others thoughts and feelings. Furthermore, an Autism Spectrum Disorder alters a person's learning and reasoning processes at a physical level in ways that create a very different mental perception of our outer environment, experience of our inner realities, and functional perspectives of our own and each others' human experience. This is why truly adequate educational and more appropriate therapuetic interventions, which have proven to facilitate the emergence, integration, and functionality of a person's mental capacities, are core inteventions which need to begin as soon as possible, and as needed over the life span of people with Autism. It is also why all Autism providers need significant family and service provider education too.

•How does this change in the development of one's mind influence one's behavior?
In America, we most often view Autism as primarily a communication disorder which then can cause social bonding problems and negative behaviors in individuals with Autism. Yet, negative behaviors and a lack of social attachment are not characteristic features of Autism. (That is right!) Current best practice Autism intervention research and meta-analysis of the last twenty years of Autism intervention research consistently show that social detachments and negativistic behaviors and related social symptoms of withdrawl, noncompliance, or aggression in people with Autism usually result from a break down in mutual communications due to a lack of access to appropriate levels of early and ongoing interventions and needed specific training for all of us as people with, and parents and teachers without, Autism. Therefore, these behaviors are not about the Autism a person has, but about the resources we may or may not have access to as people with and without Autism in our living, working and coping together. This may seem like a real mind bender. However, this reality is where the typical community's mental challenges and capacities in relation to understanding the inner and outer world of Autism become clear, and are unrelenting in nature. Autism requires that we people without Autism need to work hard mentally to learn how to live, work and cope with this disorder. Educational intervention must begin with people without Autism.

•How does a child's ability to speak reflect reflect their mental capacities?
In America, we often seem to confuse Autism with singular speech/language delays or nonverbal communication loss, attention deficits, or unrelated mental health or conduct disorders which have psychogentic (emotional) causes and require typical treatment modes related to those other conditions. These misperceptions cause adult providers to fail to indentify or minimize the sensory information processing, executive function, and social relational problems of the autistic mind. We lose empathy for what it is like for a child with Autism to awake each day in a typical social world. Yet these are the other critical mental functioning pieces to the complex communication puzzle of Autism we need to understand in orde to provide effective interventions. Only by using our typical mental capacities to accurately can we adults define the MUTUAL sensory, communication, and social problems Autism presents to us all. Therefore, to begin to see how to put this very difficult puzzle together, family and service providers may have to first work with our own sensorimotor (judicious observations), mental (communication adaptations), and emotional (empathic response-ableness) to become more ready, able, and willing to objectively notice, accurately name, timely engage, and equitably negotiate the problems within this larger developmental picture of Autism.

•How does this situation impact our adult mental capacities to teach and parent?
Autism impacts communication. Communication controls 90% of learning and therefore teaching. Therefore, Autism can impact 90% of our early parenting and educational efforts. However, if we typical adults learn to use adaptive communication strategies within best Autism practice models, then we may overcome many of the mutual communication obstacles that Autism presents to us all. However, to fulfill our purpose as adult parents and teachers, we must first meet our needs to increase our understanding of the complex nature of the atypical sensorimotor, communication, and social cognitive development across the full spectrum of Autism. We must adjust to how its functional impairments relate to the levels of adaptive and appropriate developmental supports and demands needed across each environment. This requires that we become more calm, open, and flexible thinkers. This helps people without Autism increase our own understanding of these same essential developmental capacities. That can help us all gain mutual social skills and avoid equally mutual and unnecessary negative behavioral symptoms. Only then, we may we become fully ready, able, and willing to help people with Autism approach our maximum adaptive sensory, communication, and social capacities, and avoid unnecessary negative behavioral symptoms. Then, together we can all realize our optimum functional potentials. This is why we adult providers must begin to reduce the impacts of Autism by timely noticing and accurately naming the mutual communication conditions of people with and without Autism.

No matter what the real and true causes of Autism are, the answer to the eternal provider question, "Why did my child/why do people with Autism have this very difficult developmental condition?" may become, that the purpose of people with Autism can have in our world can be a great one. They may cause us all to learn how to work together to help each other, despite real obstacles. Maybe then we can all work together when the only thing stopping us is the obstacles we create. This can help us all reach our fullest but most often, unrealized human potentials. This idea can lets us wrap our mind around who we need to BE and what we need to DO as one whole human reality. This web site is designed to help us begin that journey, with less confusion about our destination. It has been built to address the stages of development of adults without Autism as we learn about, explore options, access resources and practice effective stategies as parents and teachers. This is why it is not your typical "what to DO about Autism" information resource. It is about who we may need to BE, before we can figure out what to DO. We need to become people who are ready, able and willing to choose to put in the time and out the effort to become aware of what we do and do not know about this complex condition. The pay off for this courageous and caring LEAP are enormous. You can do it--because if you do, it you can help people with Autism make the same LEAP. If those if us with Autism can be expected to focus our senses to become better observers of the environment, increase our communication skills to understand objects, places, people and events better, and to extend ourselves to care about people who are different from ourselves--then so can those of us without Autism. However, people without Autism need and MUST DEPEND on people without Autism to be the leaders in this hard mental work. We CAN make it together.

•How can a parent new to the educational service system figure out what to do?
From the moment we hear the word Autism we parents are thrown/we teachers enter into a world of new ideas, vocabularies, and people with diverse functional and cultural realities. Having a child with any significant able-loss always changes the family. When the diagnosis is Autism those changes often feel overwhelming. We may want help, but at the same time, we may resent all the feelings, changes and intrusions that come with that help. This is all very understandable and real.

Life span public services MAY/MAY NOTE be funded and available by going through a specific process of evaluation for eligibility, skill-based assessments, and individual planning. This then may result in: an Individual Family Service Plan (IFSP) for families of children ages birth to 5, an Individual Educational Program (IEP) for students ages 5 to 21, or, for adults, an Individual Service Plan (ISP). In general these plans describe strengths and weaknesses, identify related goals/objectives, and determine the nature and types of the services needed and the placements and time frames in which services will be delivered. Threshold always encourages all parents to explore any and all public services for the resources, expertise, and opportunities they provide. See our RESOURCES page links for a GRIDWORK of contacts that can lead you to build your own global, national, regional, and local NETWORK of Autism support services and programs.

Children with disabilities age birth to 21 are eligible for “free and appropriate public education” related services under federal law. However these rights to public services laws are all currently un/underfunded mandates and so, do not facilitate optimum levels of service. Both family and service providers must then work together to create a feasible plan using our available resources and placements. Families may need or want to explore private services, but these are all presumed to be paid for by the family, unless the service team determines that no public placement is appropriate. With very limited public funding levels this will not often happen.

Therefore the main task of parents, once they have recovered from the impact of diagnosis, is to negotiate for a service plan with their provider team. While the universal best practices link lists “best” Autism intervention features, federal law only provides for our children’s “free and appropriate special educational programs” with adequate “services reasonably calculated to show growth.” However, the general language in the law and its emphasis on meeting the “child’s individual needs” and how evaluations must focus on the “impact of the disability” give parents and providers the mutual task of negotiating between the optimum and minimum service realities of Oregon’s existing Autism budgets. So most likely neither the “optimum” nor the “bottom line” of budgets should predetermine your child’s public services. This does not mean you must start by viewing “the system” as your adversary. Positive family and person-centered team building is a key to all our children’s futures. So, instead, you may now see your family as a full member of the team that addresses the needs of your child, with you in the role of advocate. So we must emphasize the need to work together as a mutually supportive and respectful community, as we handle the demands of providing for people with Autism.

Parents of adults with Autism face the difficulty of not necessarily being seen as members of the team, as well as the lack of any legal mandates for specific services for adults with only Autism. But new state regulations require that all persons with developmental disabilities are now eligible to receive services. So we will keep walking this long road with that new hope.