Our Experience after 1 ½ years

Our child became autistic as it was 15 months old (2 to 3 weeks after receiving the vaccine MFR), no interactions, no language, frequently self injuring tantrums, massive and frequent coercive acts, sleepless nights, etc.

We discarded the established "treatment" system and did the opposite of what the established "professionals" advised us to do.

Now, after 1 ½ years of ABA treatment and inclusion in a public kindergarten, we now have a happy, easygoing and highly attentive boy who with great pleasure participates in all the family doings. Rasmus stopped using diapers on his 4 years birthday and he wash his hands himself after toilet visits, helping arranging the table before dinner, clean up after himself etc. In short, he is in many areas normal functioning according to his age. He now has a well developed sense of humor and love to tease.

Rasmus love to go to kindergarten and he enjoys the ABA lessons with his teachers and with his parents at home. On the academic side Rasmus is strong. He is at the time of writing 4 ½ years old and he knows all the letters of the alphabet and can count to approx. 20. His vocabulary is high, but therer are work to do in order to learn him to build long sentences as well as intensive work has to be done on his social skills. He is recently started to have long-term play with children in kindergarten which indicates a huge progress in his social skills.

Let us make one thing clear. Rasmus is not cured. He still has autism, but Rasmus has with ABA treatment got the "glasses", he needs in order to see the public world. Those "glasses" means that he understands the public world and he fits well into it. We, his parents have got a completely different understanding of his sight of life. An understanding that allows us every day to prevent problems arising. For example, to prevent acts of coercion by making life as varied as possible.
You don't have to use much of your imagniation to imagine how much the above mentioned developments mean to us as a family? Imagine that your beautiful normal functioning child (or grandchild) 15 months old, suddenly loses all his abilities, his language, all his social skills. We had the feeling that most of the child's soul was dead and there was absolutely no meaningful access to the child at all. Only an extreme 24 hours a day care was needed. Imagine yourself sitting crying at 4:00 in the morning and try to hold your child's head. Your child is fastened in a belt in his bed and his head turns rapily from side to side without a break and you try to prevent it. You have sat there all night holding your child's head, and you need to be at work at 6:00. There was absolutely no help to get, not a spark of interaction from your child, no understanding of your problems. I have been there .......... Professionals will tell you that there is nothing to do and the established systems only offer is to abandon the child and place it at a special institution without competences and resources to develop the child.

Try to imagine what it means to us, Rasmus's parents and his 3 siblings that Rasmus has become a happy, wellfunctioning member of the family.

To the professionals who then concludes that "this is one of the rare cases where there is a positive development and we can not be sure that it is due to ABA treatment?" To them, I can tell that in a supervised ABA course we always carefully record what we have trained with the child and everything that Rasmus can do today are things we have trained with him. It is not a miracle treatment, but a thorough, targeted and intensive effort (where the child's progress is updated every 14 days) which is the basis for Rasmus's development. ABA supervisors is the essential element in the whole process. The Supervisor keeps the treatment on track and without an experienced supervisor the treatment will not succeed. All Rasmus's skills are due to the ABA treatment.
Yes, the ABA treatment works in varying degrees in much the vast majority of children with developmental disabilities. These are facts which can not be disputed and it does hurt me to see all those children who simply is placed in special institutions where they are so wrongly are put into fixed routines and totally alienated from the general world. We've got our Rasmus back. We know how bad it can be to have an autistic child so our message after 1 ½ years of treatment is: Do not give up, we are not saying that autism is curable, but in most cases it can be treated to a level that gives the child and its family a dignified, meaningful, happy and withholding life.