Advice for High Schoolers on the Spectrum -- with Claire LaZebnik






Since I don’t have any experience whatsoever with parenting teenagers, let alone teenagers on the spectrum, I had to find an expert that had survived the teenage years and lived to talk about it for my back to school series.

And I did just that. Meet Claire LaZebnik.

Claire co-authored the book, Growing Up on the Spectrum, with Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel and is proud to be an Autism Mom -- and is also giving away a copy of her book (Totally radical, dude...nevermind, that was cool when *I* was a teenager...not so much now....). So, who better to ask for tips to help parents that are just entering this new realm of life with their child than a woman who had done just that?

Since teenagers notably have a short attention span, let’s get right to the answers, shall we?

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Hi Claire! Welcome to HLW3B – so happy to have you here! Tell me a little about yourself, your family and your son?

Thanks for inviting me. Let’s see . . . I’m the mother of four kids: the oldest has autism, the second oldest has Celiac Disease, the third (and only girl) has Addison’s and Hashimoto’s Disease and the youngest has so far dodged any diagnoses, but we’ll see what the future brings. In spite of all that, we’re a happy, silly, busy family and everyone’s doing great. My husband and I are both writers. He’s a co-executive producer on “The Simpsons” and I write books—mostly novels (my fourth one, IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW comes out this September) but I’ve co-written two non-fiction books about autism with Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel who, with her husband, Dr. Robert Koegel, runs the Koegel Autism Clinic at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I originally met Lynn to consult with her about our oldest son, who was five or six at the time. I was blown away by the program she and her husband had developed: it all stems out of ABA (applied behavioral analysis) but they had spent time reviewing tapes of old clients to see how they’d progressed over the last decade or so, and used that knowledge to pinpoint certain “pivotal behaviors”—behaviors which, when appropriately addressed and improved, bring about even greater widespread improvement. Everything she suggested we do with our son made a huge difference. I’m happy to say that this kid—who was completely non-verbal at three and still mostly echolalic at six—is heading off to college this fall. It’s been a long journey.
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