helping your child with autism make friends: matt & max.

This summer Max spent mornings with his junior respite worker, Matt. As part of working with Max, Matt wrote a weekly blog about his experience.

Here is Matt's take on how week 6 went:

With the pain of teething still hurting Max, he continued to try to hit and scratch me in frustration. However, an awesome thing happened when spent an afternoon at blueballoon - the clinic where Max goes for all of his therapy. At blueballoon, he was amazing - using full sentences, singing, matching pictures and he spoke so clearly. He was also full of smiles when we would play games there. He giggled a lot and it was a really positive experience with him. Also, his therapists gave me suggestions on how to deal with his scratching and pinching. The biggest thing I learned is to just ignore it and walk away - which was actually quite successful. They also suggested to sometimes tell Max I will take certain things away when he isn't behaving. This was slightly less successful but still worked. Using these tools led to less scratching by the end of the summer.