Safeguarding Your Child with Autism: Strategies and Tools to Reduce Risks (Topics in Autism)

Safeguarding Your Child with Autism focuses on preventing unintentional injuries to children, teens, and your adults with autism. The book explains that there is a much higher rate of preventable injuries to people with autism compared to their typically developing peers. Deficits in communication and comprehension, as well as certain dangerous behaviors and fixations can have devastating consequences (poisonings, burns, falls, injuries from vehicular collisions, drowning). The authors, experts on autism, offer ways to reduce hazards and teach skills to help people with autism negotiate the world safely, and cover:

Models for safety-- top-ranked Sweden's approach to child safety; caregiver surveillance approach; root cause analysis of close calls; Behavior Analytic Approach to determine the reason behind a specific behavior; the Haddon Matrix, a prevention planning tool

Instructional approach-- visual supports; Social Stories; prompts & reinforcement; role-play; modeling; Behavioral Skills Training; Direct Teaching

Specific strategies for major risks--barriers; supervision; pedestrian safety skills; water safety skills; family action plan; IEP; behavior assessment; bullying prevention; protective gear for sports; hazards removal from environment

Devices and technology

Collaboration with law enforcement and first responders

Special attention is given to monitoring and preventing elopement and wandering tendencies, which create very dangerous, unsupervised environments and can lead to unintentional injuries.