Parenting Your Child with Autism: Practical Solutions, Strategies, and Advice for Helping Your Family

Amid a bewildering range of treatments that promise to alleviate or even cure autism, even the leading researchers can’t predict what will work for your child. As a parent, you are in a unique position to become the practical expert on your child’s needs and strengths. Parenting Your Child with Autism will equip you with family-tested and science-based approaches for meeting the challenges ahead.

You’ll learn how to get a diagnosis and navigate the health care and educational systems, make sense of your child’s treatment options, and tap into expert opinions and your own observations to find a treatment program that works. Perhaps most importantly, you will learn how to become your child’s best advocate, and build a better life for your child.

This book focuses on the processes and decisions parents of children with autism face every day. To help you build an everyday life that works for your child with autism and other family members, this book shares suggestions that range from practical and educational to philosophical, closing with some personal and professional advice for your journey ahead.

Anjali Sastry, PhD, is senior lecturer in system dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She investigates global health delivery and management, focusing on systems thinking and practical business-based approaches for increasing medical and prevention services in low-resource settings via numerous field studies in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. She serves on the boards of Management Sciences for Health and the Learning Project Elementary School. She, her husband, and their two sons, both of whom have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, live in Brookline, MA.

Blaise Aguirre, MD, is an expert in child psychiatry including psychotherapy and psychopharmacology. He has worked extensively with children and their families and is an author and speaker on various aspects of mood, personality and development in children and adolescents. He is medical director of 3East at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, a residential dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) program for young women exhibiting self-endangering behaviors and borderline personality traits. He has been a staff psychiatrist at McLean Hospital since 2000. He is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and lives in Lexington, MA, with his wife and their four children.