A JBU student asked me to share our experience with Logan as part of her Educational Psychology class for a presentation she will be making. Here was her question:
Briefly discuss your experience on the “path” of determining appropriate support for your child and family, from first observing and defining a special need to receiving proper, beneficial assistance.
And here was my answer:
Logan's pediatrician recommended that we seek a specialist to check him for autism when he was about 18 or 20 months old. We were shocked and devastated. We were in denial. But we did get some diagnoses and as the months went by, we finally realized that the symptoms we were reading about were very conspicuous in our son. It was unmistakable. And he gradually grew worse: more intolerant of bright lights, shrill sounds, and crowds of people. He never made eye contact. He fixated on opening and shutting doors and drawers, which put him in a trance. He couldn't relate to people at all and preferred being alone with repetitive movements. The only way he would communicate was by screaming and tantruming, or by wild erratic laughter. It was depressing and scary.
But we finally found an in-home therapist named Beth McKee who would commute from Rogers to help us twice a week. Her connection with Logan was electric and immediate: she got him to echo her words and look her in the eye on her first visit! After a few months, Beth announced she was opening an autism center in Fayetteville, and that Logan could be first on the enrollment. We were elated.
But the cost was extravagant. We used all of the inheritance from my uncle to put him in the clinic for 2 years, and we had to commute to Fayetteville twice a day, every weekday. The time and tuition and gas money just wasn't sustainable, and Logan needed to enter kindergarten after already sitting out a year. We are certain that the ABA therapy for 2 years was worth it. Since he quit the clinic in August, Logan has maintained most or all of his skills and has been happy in the transition to public school. Without ABA, he would never have learned how to learn. Nothing else that we tried was working.
And those skills have stuck with him. His favorite therapist from the old clinic now commutes to our home twice a week to keep up his ABA training. He has a long way to go -- he is still non-verbal -- but he consistently demonstrates that he is capable of learning new things, like using picture cards to request what he wants. We have also benefited from the NW Arkansas Support Network for Autism, whose monthly meetings put us in touch with speakers and resources and books with practical advice about the school system and how to advocate. It has been a long, exhausting journey, the toughest thing we have ever faced, but it has also been the most rewarding and important work we have done.
The Lord has taught us things and reached our hearts with this when nothing else worked. That's not why he made Logan this way, it's just a blessed side effect. He made Logan this way because He loves to hear the praise of Jesus, the Son of Love, on the lips of all his children, great and small, in their infinite variety. Logan often utters the name of Jesus. Our Lord's ways are inscrutable because His imagination is limitless. No one can guess what He will do with this sweet child.
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