Ep. 60: How Do I Bring Up Autism to Families
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Why is it important to talk about autism with families early?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift for Autistic Kids.
We're an SLP couple from California with four boys.
And we're here every week to bring you neuroaffirming tips, tricks, and tools. Are you ready to make the shift? Let's do this!
Hello, hello. Welcome to Making the Shift. I hope you are having a great start to your week. Today we are going to answer a
question that I get every single day in my comments, in my DMs. Everyone wants to know: how do I bring up autism to families? Okay, so that's what we're answering today. How do I bring up autism to families? The thing is, I don't believe that there is one perfect way. But I believe that there definitely are wrong ways, more, more to come on that later. Okay. But I really don't think there's one perfect way. So instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a few different ways that you can bring up autism to families. You really need to make this decision based on what you think is going to be best for the specific family, which approach you're going to use. I will tell you. In our clinic, we have tried many, many things over the 10 plus years that we have been open.
And when we try to make it a one size fits all approach where we use the same method to talking to them about autism to every single family. it blows up in our face somehow. So I really don't think that there is one perfect way, but I'm going to give you a few different ways and what the pros and cons and things you might want to consider about each one are. And then you can make the decision of what's best for you and the specific family. Okay, so let's talk about real quick the time I created an absolute fire of a mess at my clinic I worked at when I was a clinical fellow. I was seeing this five year old non-speaking boy. had tons of autistic characteristics, um, you know, hand flapping, lots of just stimming, and um I struggled, you know, with engagement and just
I had no idea that the family didn't know he was autistic and I was talking to them. One day after a session, and he had been a client at that clinic longer than I had been there. So I just assumed they knew he was autistic. And I started talking, oh uh well, this other autistic boy I work with does X, Y, and Z. And The The mom didn't tell me in that moment, like
What lesson did the host learn from assuming a family already knew their child was autistic?
I we didn't know he was autistic. Instead she wrote this like crazy, crazy long Emails of the clinic director about how unprofessional I was and it turned into this whole thing and then my the director of the clinic, the owner had to deal with it and it became like a big thing. And then I felt horrible, obviously. Okay. Don't assume family knows that is the wrong decision to make. Okay. So learn that one the hard way. So Another I actually did the opposite of that at the same clinic soon after was that I was like, Well, the parents have never told me this kid is autistic. So I'm just going to let them tell me instead of going to them and telling them because I was so traumatized by my past experience. So there was another family, he was a preschooler and I was talking to mom and I was like, Okay, yeah.
So Um, I don't know. I think I asked if he had a diagnosis or something, which now I see the problem there. But mom was like then wrote this whole long email to the clinic director about like how does this therapist who's working with him not even know that he's autistic? That's crazy. She doesn't know his history. And I was like, I just didn't wanna be the one to bring it up again. I was so scared after the last time. Anyway, needless to say, I've done a lot of things wrong, but I'm excited to share with you some things that work really well and have worked really well in hopes that they will work well for you too. Okay. So Option number one, which I think a lot of us have done, and this is definitely the way that I went about this conversation for a long time, which is I established rapport with the family, established a relationship with them for a while before bringing up autism.
Okay. And Pro to that is that you have the family's trust, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is it important to talk about autism with families early?
0:08–2:57
2
What lesson did the host learn from assuming a family already knew their child was autistic?
2:57–5:16
3
How can building rapport before mentioning autism benefit the conversation?
5:16–7:56
4
When is an immediate developmental‑evaluation referral the best first step?
7:56–10:42
5
How does an autism‑characteristics checklist streamline intake and diagnosis?
10:42–12:46
6
What declarative and reflective questions help families recognize autistic traits?
12:46–15:53
7
Why is thorough documentation and follow‑up essential after the autism discussion?
15:53–18:33
8
How can clinicians shift from fear to a neurodiversity‑affirming mindset?
18:33–21:23
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)