Autism, Sensory & Behavior: The Way I See It - Softcover

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Temple Grandin earned her PhD in Animal Science from the University of Illinois and is currently a Professor at Colorado State University. Dr. Grandin is one of the most respected individuals with autism in the world. She presents at conferences nationwide, helping thousands of parents and professionals understand how to help individuals with autism, Asperger's syndrome, and PDD. She is the author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Thinking in Pictures, Animals in Translation (which spent many weeks on The New York Times Best-Seller List), The Autistic Brain, and The Loving Push, co-written with Debra Moore, PhD One of the most celebrated -- and effective -- animal advocates on the planet, Dr. Grandin revolutionized animal movement systems and spearheaded reform of the quality of life for the world's agricultural animals. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

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How to Be More Sensitive to Sensory Issues

Dr. Temple Grandin draws on her own experience to deliver an essential resource for guiding and nurturing autistic children with sensory and behavior challenges. As always, she gets to the REAL issues of autism--the ones parents, teachers, and those on the spectrum face every day.

Most autistic individuals deal with a variety of sensory differences, and in this book Dr. Grandin sheds light on the best ways for them to adapt and thrive. In these helpful pages, Dr. Grandin offers do's and don'ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips, all based on her insider perspective and extensive research. She has packed a wealth of knowledge into this book, which serves as an excellent reference resource for parents, educators and caregivers on how to manage sensory issues.

Topics include:

• How to deal with sensory overloads, withdrawals and sensitivities
• Learning how to help desensitize individuals to sensory stimulations
• Discovering simple strategies that can have amazing effects
• Best practices for incorporating sensory integration
• And much more!

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One of the problems in understanding sensory issues is that sensory sensitivities are very variable, among individuals and within the same individual. A person can be hyper-sensitive in one area (like hearing) and hypo-sensitive in another (like touch). One person can have a marked olfactory sensitivity and another might not be affected at all in that sense. Complicating matters even further, on a day-to-day basis, in the same individual, the sensory sensitivities can change, especially when the person is tired or stressed.

These many and constantly shifting variables make it difficult to design research studies to test therapies to treat sensory sensitivities. So professionals will loudly make assertions such as “There is no research to support sensory integration therapy with individuals with autism”—tacitly suggesting the therapy is ineffective. The absence of clinical research does not mean sensory therapies are not viable for children or adults. It simply means research has not been done to date.

Furthermore, with the variable nature of sensory issues in autism, we must look at research with a slightly different slant. If twenty children are put in a study and four benefit from the therapy, while sixteen don’t, is it ethical to deem the therapy ineffective? It really worked on four children. Four children’s lives are now markedly different; their world is no longer hellish to live in.

A better approach in situations like this is to delve deeper into why it works for some, and not for others, to continue to explore what is going on in their brains by doing follow-up research between the responders and non-responders, rather than arbitrarily dismissing the therapy altogether.