One of the best ways that I found out about possible services and therapies was by volunteering to serve as a parent represntative on our school districts committee for special education. They meet to plan the IEP's for all the district children including the preschool and early intervention children. I would try to volunteer for the meetings concerning children the same age or just a bit older than my child so I could learn. It was incredibly helpful. I also got to meet a lot of the area service providers which was very nice. All districts are different but I know they are always looking for volunteers. Good luck!!!

There really is no one place to get all the answers you are looking for, and often there is no one to tell you where to go to get services, or even tell you what services are around your area. The services are going to be different from state to state and from insurance to insurance.

We actually moved to a different state because there was nothing where we were that was state funded, and we ran out of money on our own. I would suggest checking with your state to see what you can get, look for the disabilities council for the state or any other state institution that deals with health issues. You will find contacts that you can write emails to that can be very helpful. Also autism speaks is a great resource.

Thank you so much for the info. It sounds like DDS is the place to start.

I am in MA and we got in contact with the Department of Developmental Services, another one called GBHI and the council on disabilities.DSS handles most of everthing and they assigned us a case worker who walked us through everything.

You also have to decide what path you want to go down as well because some services are for keeping your child at home and having people come to your house, and some are for you to bring your child to. The other thing that helped was taking our kids to Childrens Hospital, because they have an Autism Clinic there. I will say everything takes a long time so you have to try to do multiple things at one time sometimes, and that is why my wife does not work, because there was no way she could work and still have the kids at appointments all the time.

I think that it is actually more important to get in touch with agencies that can help you out before the actual therapies, because if you cannot pay for the therapies the appointments are useless. What we did was to make these appointments that we knew were going to be weeks and months out just to have them, and then looked into state agencies that could help us. We even emailed state reps and Senators and they put us in contact with the state agencies that could help us. Once we were in contact with the agencies we got case workers that help guide us through what services we could get.

I will say it takes a lot of time and a lot of emails and phone calls, but unfortunately this is something that has to be done by you because no one will do it for you.