TITLE: Navigating Autism: Nine Mindsets for Helping Kids on the Spectrum (Kindle Edition)
AUTHOR: Grandin, Temple, Ph.D. and Moore, Debra, Ph.D.
SUBJECT AREA: Autism-Education
PUBLISHER: W.W. Norton
PUBLICATION DATE: 2021
NUMBER OF PAGES: 384 (for Print Edition)
In among the sea of guidebooks for parents and teachers of children with ASD, Navigating Autism: Nine Mindsets for Helping kids on the Spectrum, stands out from the crowd for its format. It is based on nine principles for the reader to implement to insure progress and success in children and teens on the autism spectrum.
Beginning with Mindset 1, the person with ASD is more than the diagnosis. A child with ASD may come to school every day in tears and can’t focus on schoolwork, only for the teacher to discover that a relative has just passed away and Jane is only eight years old and can’t understand what happened. A teen in a special ed. program may be in constant motion because he is bored to death, not because he is autistic. Teachers need to look beneath the surface of a child’s behavior to analyze what may be going on and this mindset purports to do just that.
Mindset 2 guides the teacher through the evaluation and testing process with the whole child in mind. The evaluation should be more than just IQ scores or scores on standardized tests-the whole individual needs to be kept in mind and this part of the book helps the teacher through this complex process.
Mindset 3 focuses on designing individually tailored interventions to meet each child’s unique needs including building a team and including parents as part of the process. Subsequent mindsets include looking for any physical and psychiatric conditions in the child including ADHD, sleep disorders and eating disorders as they often co-exist with autism, working with the child’s strengths instead of focusing on deficits and teaching skills for the real world.
Last but not least is mindset 9, helping the teenager with ASD move into successful adulthood which is a critically important step. Each chapter explains that particular concept in detail and has specific steps on implementing that mindset to help the teacher or parent guide the child successfully. The language is easy to understand, and the layout is well organized. This is the best roadmap for teachers and parents of children with ASD I have seen and much like navigating a ship through choppy waters, this guide can help parents and teachers navigate the ship of autism.