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The Verbal Behavior Approach
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I was a registered nurse with more than a decade of experience, but when my physician husband first mentioned the possibility that my then 21-month-old son Lucas might have autism, I was as bewildered and angry as any parent.
To be honest, I had very little experience with autism and it simply never crossed my mind that my first-born was anything less than perfect.
So what made my husband think that my son had autism?
He pointed out that Lucas wanted to watch television too much and didn’t play with toys, and that, at times, Lucas simply appeared to be in his own world. At that time I wasn’t willing to look at the possibility. I argued that Lucas had language, a good ten words, which wasn’t that unusual for a child under two, and that he was a warm and cuddly baby.
He didn’t look like he had autism, since he didn’t fit the picture I had in my mind of what autism was supposed to look like. He wasn’t banging his head. He wasn’t rocking. He wasn’t doing anything that I considered to be autistic.
I told my husband on that day that he was crazy for bringing up autism. I told him that Lucas didn’t have it and that I never, never wanted to hear the word “autism” again.
Little did I know that a little over a year later autism and its various treatments would begin to take over my life.
Soon after my husband used the “A” word, I reluctantly had to admit to myself that I didn’t really know what autism looked like in a baby. I had to tell myself that, as a physician, my husband might have a better ability than I to gauge Lucas’s behaviors against other kids his age.
So my husband’s comment did plant a seed as I began to carefully watch Lucas interact (or fail to interact) with the world around him. I thought about autism every time Lucas did something odd. If he took toys and methodically moved them from one basket to another I wondered, maybe...
Mary Lynch Barbera - Personal Name
1st Edtion
13: 978-1-84310-852-
NONE
The Verbal Behavior Approach
Psychology
English
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
2007
USA
1-201
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