H. J. Family January 2009
Sirius Kids Connection’s impact on my family has been huge. My son who is 5 ½ at the time of this writing has Doose Syndrome and is on the autism spectrum. He has had over 500,000 seizures in his short life. His condition is quite severe, and the seizures/meds/syndrome has ravaged his development, and his social skills. He has sensory issues, acts out, has melt downs, hits/bites and looses it when he is not understood, frustrated, or over-stimulated. I wanted to give you a little history before I go on to explain just how much this program has helped him.
First the program has helped with his generally aggressive behavior, at his writing he has gone 10 days without hitting anyone, or loosing it and having a melt down!! I attribute this to a couple of reasons. The most important being the reinforcement of that behavior prior to us taking the class. Albeit negative, it was still reinforcement that helped it along to continue, and in my estimation get worse. We completely ignored that behavior and positively reinforced the desirable behaviors and it disappeared. This is something that Laurie taught us to do with the dog, and with our children via the spreadsheets, our “homework”, she required us to fill out. DO THE PROGRAM IT WORKS!...
The second thing I contribute the cessation of the aggression to is Zaki feeling more in control, and feeling positive and happy about doing something right. Much of Zaki’s day is “not right” He has a hard time with just about everything from not being potty trained, to not being able to sit any given amount of time at the table to do ‘work’ in preschool. This is something he gets to feel good about, and he is doing a great job training the dog. The dog listens to him! And our dog Mater (as you can imagine by the name) is a bit goofy J But Zaki enjoys the training sessions, and he is the boss! No one is telling him what to do, he is in charge and that is such a rarity to him, I believe he thrives in that situation!...
It also helped our family be aware of how we are treating each other. My heart would wrench when at the end of the day I had no initials to put in my kids boxes! It made me aware, and now I have an 11 year old giving positive reinforcement to his little brother!!! Yes please gasp now and reread, it’s true. My son on the spectrum gave me my first positive reinforcement ever after I cleaned the bath tub!! He said “good job mom high five.” For him to notice something outside of his little world was a huge step!...
Overall we were super impressed with the program, and will tell those who we know about it every chance we get. Laurie did a fantastic job. I say that you don’t often meet ‘dog people’ that are people people too, but she is, and was extremely compassionate toward our family.
Sincerely,
Heather J.
