Continuing with the "What does my library have about autism today?" trend... comes this book, Understanding Autism: The Essential Guide for Parents by Professor Katrina Williams and Professor Jacqueline Roberts.
I was immediately somewhat taken aback by the fact that the book claims to teach you understanding of autism... but is only written by professionals. But let's be fair here, the "nothing about us without us," harking back to, "no taxation without representation," is fairly new in the autism world. Prior to autistic adults saying, "Hey, uh, we have relevant information here too," all people had to go on was the word of professionals, and maybe other parents. That said, this book is not 10+ years old. It was published last year.
Another thing: the book covers childhood extensively, and adulthood... really not at all. While I'm aware the major emphasis in autism was focusing on simply getting the kid to adulthood, we really don't stay small and cute. At all. Hi, I'll be turning 28 this year. Good thing I never had a "hip with the times" card, because I'd need to turn it in, and I'm told that realization hurts some people.
All that said, if you need strategies on toilet training, or how to sort out whether a given therapy works using science, or your young child has just received a diagnosis, you may find this book helpful. Oh, especially if you learn best via lots of text. This book is a textwall organized into sections, successively covering the stages of childhood. Also, it's written by Australian folks, which means it comes with amusing words like "weeing" and "pooing" for toilet training. I dunno if that's an upside for anyone else, but it certainly made me chuckle.
A point in the book's favor: each section comes with a set of resources at the tail of the chapter. These are not exhaustive scientific studies, but online web pages with information relating to those sections. In short, the resources they provide are not paywalled. This is important, because scientific studies may be the best information on many things, but they are neither easy to read nor free, often enough. So presuming these resources are good, this is an excellent thing about this book. I did find a couple references to Autism Speaks, the biggest, most malevolent autism-related misnomer in existence, but to be fair, just because the organization is terrible doesn't mean all their information is terrible.
Final word: this is a book written by professionals. They seem to have experience with medicine and with therapy. These are good perspectives, but they are not the whole story. This is not, as the title puts it, The Essential Guide For Parents. It is, however, a good resource for parents just starting out with an autism diagnosis for their kids, and asking, "Now what?"
I was immediately somewhat taken aback by the fact that the book claims to teach you understanding of autism... but is only written by professionals. But let's be fair here, the "nothing about us without us," harking back to, "no taxation without representation," is fairly new in the autism world. Prior to autistic adults saying, "Hey, uh, we have relevant information here too," all people had to go on was the word of professionals, and maybe other parents. That said, this book is not 10+ years old. It was published last year.
Another thing: the book covers childhood extensively, and adulthood... really not at all. While I'm aware the major emphasis in autism was focusing on simply getting the kid to adulthood, we really don't stay small and cute. At all. Hi, I'll be turning 28 this year. Good thing I never had a "hip with the times" card, because I'd need to turn it in, and I'm told that realization hurts some people.
All that said, if you need strategies on toilet training, or how to sort out whether a given therapy works using science, or your young child has just received a diagnosis, you may find this book helpful. Oh, especially if you learn best via lots of text. This book is a textwall organized into sections, successively covering the stages of childhood. Also, it's written by Australian folks, which means it comes with amusing words like "weeing" and "pooing" for toilet training. I dunno if that's an upside for anyone else, but it certainly made me chuckle.
A point in the book's favor: each section comes with a set of resources at the tail of the chapter. These are not exhaustive scientific studies, but online web pages with information relating to those sections. In short, the resources they provide are not paywalled. This is important, because scientific studies may be the best information on many things, but they are neither easy to read nor free, often enough. So presuming these resources are good, this is an excellent thing about this book. I did find a couple references to Autism Speaks, the biggest, most malevolent autism-related misnomer in existence, but to be fair, just because the organization is terrible doesn't mean all their information is terrible.
Final word: this is a book written by professionals. They seem to have experience with medicine and with therapy. These are good perspectives, but they are not the whole story. This is not, as the title puts it, The Essential Guide For Parents. It is, however, a good resource for parents just starting out with an autism diagnosis for their kids, and asking, "Now what?"
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