adjustment. In this essay, how families’ active support and intervention are the significant factors to improve the symptoms of ASD children is focused based on the article, “Mental health treatment for people with autism spectrum disorder(ASD)”.
The well known chief characteristics of ASD are difficulties of communication and social interaction including nonverbal communication.
American Psychological Association(APA) argued, “ASD is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities.” Because most autistic children are not able to initiate and maintain communication with others, parents who have children with ASD have limitation to take care of their children. Whether symptoms of ASD are severe or not, it might be the hardest task for parents to grasp what the children with ASD want without verbal
communication.
In addition to the impairment in social communication with others, APA asserted in the article, “[A]pproximately twenty-four percent of youth with ASD have an intellectual disability and twenty-three percent have low levels of cognitive functioning but not in the intellectual disability range.” Since the children with ASD who have an intellectual disability are hard to learn basic skills such as appropriate eating, going to bathroom or dressing, they need more detailed understanding and repeated and skillful training. The consistent maladaptive behaviors of the children with ASD to learn basic techniques to live may trigger severe parenting stress. Moreover, because intellectual disabilities or low levels of cognitive functioning can’t be improved easily, and also the behavioral problems with impairment in social communication can’t be modified quickly, indeed, it will be difficult to support continuously the autistic children who need to learn social communication and appropriate behavioral skills.
Since the children with ASD can’t address others and some have an intellectual disability, they express their feeling by using emotional and behavioral ways such as tantrum which also causes the family considerable distress. I think these emotional behaviors of the children with ASD might be the most serious problem to deal with. In the article, the authors emphasized that approximately 70 percent of youth with ASD as a sample between 5 and 17 years of age, have emotional problems, and 65 percent have behavioral problems. Obviously, the majority of children with ASD have been seen the severe behavioral problems including self-injury, aggressiveness, and noncompliance, and it may provoke extreme emotional responses of the parents. As a result, these emotional behaviors of the children and emotional responses of the parents effect negatively on both parents and children. Living with a child with ASD influences on the entire family members’ life. According to the article, parents and families need to bear persistent responsibilities for their children with autism. As a matter of fact, encountering the complicated and difficult needs of the autistic children in everyday life will push families, especially parents, into a stressful environment. Parents can struggle out of emotional and financial burden, and sometimes, physical exhaustion due to the children. For example, while focusing on caring and helping their children with ASD primarily, parents might confront their marital problems based on the feeling of guilt about the children or different methods of education. Furthermore, parents might have to spend a lot of resources of money towards various and expensive treatments for the children with ASD first. Finances are always a big issue to maintain families’ well-being, so the considerable expense for treatment will be a immense obstacle to overcome for the parents. The most important issue for caring children with ASD is that the parents should endure all of the prior situations across their life span. A longitudinal research of parents of children with developmental disabilities, over 50% of parents aged 50 or older indicated that they still lived with their child, compared with a rate of 17% for typically developing children (Seltzer et al). The lifelong burden placed on parents and siblings of children with ASD is likely to deteriorate the situations that they met and diminish positive thoughts about their future, eventually, it will affect their child who needs to improve.