Data from a CDC pilot project, published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, suggest that progress has been made in identifying children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at younger ages. The earlier children are identified as having ASD, the sooner they can get the services they need to help them reach their full potential. Researchers used data from CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network to look at the number and characteristics […]
BY GAIL FRIZZELL A conservative estimate is that there are more than 1 million people with I/DD waiting for services that may never come. My 30-year-old daughter, Lauren, loves her home in a town just a 20-minute drive from Mom’s. It meets all of her wants and needs and has a lovely view from her bedroom window of woods, and an occasional bear. She’s lived there for five years now. Within the next nine months, […]
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE & DENTISTRY BY H. BARRY WALDMAN DDS, MPH, PHD, STEVEN P. PERLMAN DDS, MSCD, DHL (HON), AND MISHA GAREY, DDS “Your age doesn’t define your maturity, your grades don’t define your intellect, and rumors don’t define who you are.” 1 “I hate it when people say, ‘you’re smart for your age.’” 2 “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” 3 (Mark Twain) […]
SIBLING TIES BY PAIGE TALHELM As Sammy’s older sister, I need to look out for him and make things better for him. My brother was diagnosed with a seizure disorder when he was a baby. He has been on anti-seizure medicine all of his life. When he was just about 13 years old, we tried to take him off of it but he had two Grand Mal seizures in a span of 12 hours. It […]
BY J. FREEMAN KING Even though American Sign Language (ASL) and English are totally diverse languages in that one, ASL, is a visual language and English, in its spoken form, is an auditory language, their manner of acquisition is strikingly similar, in that the brain readily encodes both a visual language and an auditory language in like fashion. Certainly, deaf children are born with a predisposition to learn language, whether it be visual , spoken, […]
