Ep. 102 The Truth About Early Intervention & Autism
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Why do only 15% of autistic preschoolers receive early intervention before age 2?
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Neurofirm Show. New name. We hit 100 episodes recently. We have this awesome 100th episode celebration. If you missed it, make sure to go back and check it out. It was a full one hour training on neurofirming goal writing that Chris and I did. Lots and lots of great info in there. So if you didn't catch it, make sure to watch it. Then our last episode, we interviewed our autistic friend, Kyle Mansky, and he shared such an inspirational story. The audience loved it. So go back, check that out if you haven't listened yet. And with that, we also created a brand new strengths assessment that we put in the academy. So if you're not yet a member of the academy, go ahead and check it out.
Go in there, grab that assessment. It was based on the conversation that we had last week with Kyle, which is how can we help kids to identify their strengths or how can we identify them as therapists, parents, teachers, so that we can use their strengths to help them learn. So we have this awesome new assessment in there. Go check it out. If you're an Academy member, it is in there for you right now. and today we are talking about something near and dear to my heart which is early intervention we are talking about early intervention and autism and i will tell you that last week i had a parent call and say her her child was about to turn four and she said i'm calling because my child is delayed and we're looking for early intervention
And if you know, if you are a therapist, you know that early intervention is generally birth to three. OK, so the fact that she's calling and asking for early intervention for a four year old who has, you know, a few words. is a problem and we will talk about why that's a problem and how we can change this because yes we're going to talk about why kids miss early intervention and what are reasons why that might be happening but we really want to talk about what can we do to make sure that more kids are getting early intervention Okay, because it is just time and time again, things are being missed. And that's what we're going to talk about today. I have been doing early intervention for 15 years more, I guess.
I don't know. How old am I? Probably around that. Okay. And I did primarily early intervention when I was starting my practice. And I was doing both in home and in clinic. So I've done a lot of early intervention. I've had a lot of these conversations with families for many, many years. And we still see a ton of kids under the age of three in our clinic. This topic came up when I decided that we wanted to cover this topic when I found this recent research study, which just shook me.
What reasons cause doctors to miss early‑intervention referrals for autistic children?
And what that study said is that, and this was just done this year, in April of this year, it said only 15% of autistic preschoolers received early intervention before two. Okay, only 15% of autistic preschoolers received early intervention before two. And you might be sitting here thinking, oh, well, they probably just missed the kids who it wasn't that obvious that they needed early intervention. But that's actually not true. In the study, they said a lot of the kids who are missed had quote, severe symptoms. You guys know we don't talk like that on our show. Okay, we don't use the word severe. We don't use the word symptoms, but we could say the kids who were missed were both kids who had many characteristics of autism that may be obvious to someone and many that were not.
Okay, so these were kids who had a higher level of support needs, who had higher level support needs, as well as kids who had lower level support needs. So kids were missed across the board. And what they have found through research and studies, because this has been highly researched, and I will cite a lot of the research below that we're using, but there's tons and tons of research that supports everything we're talking about today, that families are more likely to receive early intervention if they are high socioeconomic status, so if they're a high SES family. or if the child has a low weight at birth.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do only 15% of autistic preschoolers receive early intervention before age 2?
0:08–3:08
2
What reasons cause doctors to miss early‑intervention referrals for autistic children?
3:08–8:06
3
How do socioeconomic status and low birth weight influence early‑intervention access?
8:06–12:28
4
What are the proven language, IQ, and stress‑reduction benefits of early intervention?
12:28–15:42
5
How much money does each $1 invested in early intervention save in future costs?
15:42–19:06
6
Which developmental milestones should parents watch for at 18 months, 2 years, and 3 years?
19:06–22:54
7
What is the “When to Refer” packet and how can clinicians use it to improve referrals?
22:54–25:25
8
How can families and therapists normalize early intervention and access services affordably?
25:25–26:54
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
Ep. 125 How to Run Successful Social Groups
Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)