People with autism usually lack of social skills. Making friends could be a really tough mission for autistic children, because they always avoid looking at others in the eye, repeat the words they said a lot to drive people crazy, and they often choose to be alone as it is hard for them to get used to strangers. Here’s some tips for teaching kids with autism to communicate.
If your child is going to a school, you could talk to the teacher to get the information that who in their class is close to your child. Then, you can invite him/her to your home to play with your child, or, you can encourage your kid to ask this child if she/he is available on that day, and if your kid can do this, buy him/her a gift for a reward. Think of some good games or activities for autistic children to play with.
Here’s someting to notice, which is, don’t invite too much children to your place once a time, one at a time is better, it’s easier for your kid to deal with and get used to. You can stay with them for a while and be a role model of how to make friends. However, most of the time, you should leave them alone to play with toys together unless something happens.
If your child is homeschooling, then she/he could make friends with kids in the neighborhood, cousins, or siblings. First, ask some child to play nearby, so your child will accept that there’s someone playing at his/her place. Then, you can try to play with this kid yourself to make a good example to your kid. So you can invite him/her to play along. Please notice that, all of this should happen naturally, don’t force the child to do anything, but you can set some limits for the Do and Don’ts.
Some children with autism like to make friends with grown-ups. It’s normal. Typically developing children can also feel anxious about socialising with strangers, for autistic kids, you are going to need a lot of patience, but it will be worth it.
There have been a lot of chemicals and other stuff which were blamed for triggering autism, like pesticides, pitocin, alcohol, wifi, sleep apnea and so on. Recently, studies that focus on the connections between genes and environmental factors have suggested that the cause of autism may get link rapidshare to pet shampoo, according to the results presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research in London.
There is this particular insecticide called pyrethrins in some kind of pet shampoos that is being considered the cause of autism this time. It is reported that families with autistic kids were twice as likely using pet shampoos with pyrethrins as those with normal children. And, if the mother used the shampoo during the forth and sixth month while pregnancy, the risk of the baby having autism will be the greatest. The above conclusions were based on survey results of 333 autistic children and 198 healthy children.
“Autism is associated with an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters within the brain, and one could hypothesise that children with an imbalance in this system may be more sensitive to the effects of pyrethrins,” says Isaac Pessah at UC Davis, who was also involved in the study.
Pyrethrins may increase the risk of having autism and other developmental disorders, however, they are not possible to be the only cause of autism, which is increasingly recognised as being triggered by both environmental and genetic factors.
http://www.autism-world.com/index.php/2008/07/10/pet-shampoo-may-cause-autism/
http://www.autism-world.com/index.php/2009/10/21/how-to-help-autistic-kids-make-friends/