Health

Mackenzie is a young adult with autism. She is finishing her senior year at Pelham High School and plans to attend college next year. She is also an artist and is considering pursuing a career as a teacher. She and her mother, Deborah, talk with NHPR's Sheryl Rich Kern, addressing the following questions:

What prompted you to have Mackenzie evaluated? When did you receive a diagnosis? What was your reaction?

Mackenzie - Were you aware you were different?

This week, NHPR correspondent Sheryl Rich Kern has been looking into the challenges schools face when teaching children with autism.

The parents obviously face challenges too. Providing the therapy some children need costs a lot of money and time. But come January 1st, relief is on the way. 

In our week-long series Challenges of Autism, NHPR correspondent Sheryl Rich Kern looks into the new legislation.

The standard treatment for autism when kids are young is something called applied behavior analysis or ABA.

Kirsten Murphy is the administrative director of the New Hampshire Council on Autism Spectrum Disorders. She was a key advocate behind the passage of Connor’s Law, a mandate that goes into effective January 1, 2011. The new law will require health insurance companies to cover therapies for children with autism. Murphy is also the mother of two teenage boys diagnosed with autism. She talks with NHPR's Sheryl Rich Kern to answer the following questions:

Who are the families that were depending on Connor’s Law the most and how will they benefit?

These days it’s not rare to find a child with severe autism actively participating in a public school. A generation ago, parents would have sent those kids to a private school or maybe institutionalized them.

But studies show kids with autism improve in a regular public school. There they are able to socialize and learn how to communicate better because they’re copying the other children.

But not everyone agrees this approach is good for all students.

If it seems like you’re hearing a lot about autism these days, it’s likely because more kids are being diagnosed with it.

Nationally the rate of children diagnosed with what’s called autism spectrum disorder is 1 in 100. For boys, it’s 1 in 70. To put that number into perspective, it means that one student in 3 or 4 average sized school classes lives with some form of autism.

How schools should deal with it is up for debate.

NHPR Correspondent Sheryl Rich-Kern has this second part in her series Challenges of Autism.

Parents across the board would probably agree that becoming a parent is a lesson in managing chaos and tolerance. And research shows that parents raising a child with autism experience higher stress levels than parents of children with other disabilities.

But some parents of children with autism say their child’s diagnosis has enriched their lives in ways
they never would have imagined.

Dr. Jorgensen is a project director with the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire and is an assistant research professor in the UNH Education Department. She works with public school teachers, parents and administrators to help them include more students with disabilities in general education classes. She is the author of several books on inclusion education, including The Inclusion Facilitator’s Guide. She talks with NHPR's Sheryl Rich Kern and answers the following questions:

Ari Ne’eman is a college student diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He is the founder of the Autism Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), which works to improve the public perception of autism. Ne'eman believes that autism is a different way of being and not a disease that should be cured. He talks with NHPR's Sheryl Rich Kern, and answers the following questions:

You were diagnosed at age 12. Had you always felt you were different? How did you learn about your autism and how did learning about the diagnosis affect you?