On the road again. Enabling School Psychologists to work with families of children with ASD

On the road again

Enabling School Psychologists to work with families of children with ASD

This week I was in New Orleans, where I gave a presentation before the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), on the topic of “Working with families of children with autism spectrum disorder.” You can download a copy of my PDF from that presentation here. Even though my session was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Saturday (not a prime slot!), it drew a large audience, and seemed to go over well. (I’ll let you know when I get the audience ratings.)

The short version of my talk can be summarized as follows:

Due to the strongly genetic nature of ASD, every child with ASD has at least a 50% chance of having at least one parent with significant cognitive or mental health issues (we’ll go into these in a future post).

Given this risk, a strong case can be made for proactively performing family function assessment on the families of all children with newly diagnosed ASD.

When assessing a family, Rule #1 is to get both parents involved. (When I was in private practice, I required both parents to attend the evaluation. The only exceptions were if one parent was unknown, completely uninvolved, deceased, in jail, or stationed overseas with the military.) Much of the time, however, schools wind up meeting with only one parent – usually mom, but occasionally dad – and only rarely do schools get into the business of assessing the inner workings of the family, and how that may be impacting the child’s behavior and learning at school.

Common excuses offered by one parent or the other for not both attending school meetings include: Read the rest of this entry »

Father knows best – Or does he?

Father knows best – Or does he?

Doctor Coplan reflects on the road trip we call life.

Those of you who follow this space on a regular basis have noted my absence for the past couple of weeks. My apologies, and a word or two of explanation. I’ve been on a long road trip – both physical and psychological. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas my wife and I logged a couple of thousand miles researching retirement communities: Getting up at 5 a.m. and driving 2 hours before breakfast, meeting new people, always putting our best foot (feet?) forward, trying to envision “what would it be like to live here?,” debriefing (I kept a daily log of our travels), recovering (while sleeping in strange quarters, and not knowing how to find the bathroom in the dark because the layout of the bedroom is not like at home), then getting up the next day and doing it all over again.

I dutifully brought my laptop with me, but at the end of each day (or at 5 o’clock the next morning), I didn’t have the energy to do much blogging. So, somewhat belatedly, let me share a bit my experience. Although not directly related to ASD, some of what I learned is germane to surviving under stress –something I’m sure you are familiar with! Read the rest of this entry »