To start the history a bit our son was diagnosed as non-verbal autistic. This means that on top of the general autism traits our son also could not talk and so had no method of expressing himself. Three years later he still was unable to talk much, generally a word here or there with some minor exceptions. Definitely not sufficient to make any communication by this form easily understood.
He learned the pecs method of communicating and also developed other physical methods of getting his point across. This included things like getting juice from the fridge to tell us he wants a drink. With the increase in communication and our increase in understanding him, he became far less frustrated. This resulted in him being much more open to additional options and lessons.
It should be pointed out to parents who have just recently had a child diagnosed with autism that this is not the end of the world by any means. Yes, you are going to have to deal with behaviours. Things that you would not expect or even tolerate out of your other children. You have to find constructive ways to try to work around those behaviours. However, you will find that most autistic children can be extremely happy children. This is especially true once some form of communication has been established.
It also should be noted that approximately 1 in 100 children are being diagnosed with varying forms of autism. So again, to those who have children recently diagnosed with autism, you are not even close to alone. Encourage and allow your children to play with various electronic toys (Vtech toys worked best for us when he was younger). You will be surprised at how well they adapt and this does include various complicated type toys like Vsmile and Leapster. If your child is hard on toys (rough, possibly throwing and dropping) then you will find the Leapster is rugged enough. The Vsmile is good, but a bit more fragile. As our son got older we gave him an Ipad and later a Samsung Tablet. While both work well, the Ipad is more fragile.
Our son, at 16, is still essentially non-verbal but he is also largely well behaved. He has come a long way since he was a little boy. While he will be with us forever, we are far less worried about what that will look like.
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