Is your son enrolled in your state's Long Term Care program? Does he get medical insurance through medicaid? You should talk to your caseworker about doing an ABA program. About school, does your son require a one-on-one aide in the classroom? Both of my kids have one-on-one aides, the youngest in her special needs preschool room and the oldest in her mainstream kindergarden room. If you child is not independent in the bath room, is an elopement risk (will sneak away/run away) and can possibly be violent towards other children then the school district should not be able to refuse to give him a one-on-one aide. We walked out of our first IEP meeting without signing and returned with a hired advocate from Phoenix to show them that we were serious and would not send our girls to school without one-on-one aides. Because we have a robust home-based ABA program with college and graduate students providing the one-on-one hours at home we insisted that the IEP state that our kids need ABA trained one-on-one aides which meant that they had to hire the girls from our team whom we have hand picked and have paid to have trained by our BCBA. It can take some work and planning and a bit of an expense if you hire an outside advocate like we did, but if you are scared to send your son alone I would insist that he needs his own dedicated one-on-one aide. Having aides in the classroom may not be enough. Also you can either try to have someone you know and trust hired to be his aide, or you can develop a personal relationship with his aide so that you can discuss what happened daily. We have a notebook that goes back and forth from home to school where I write in if one of the kids didn't sleep or has had some change in routine or something and the aides write back about what happened at school that day. It's very reassuring since my kids can't yet tell me themselves about everything that happened.

Hi there!

Your son is so cute in that picture! I just love the joy on his face!

It is scary sending your son to school for the first time. Is it a preschool?

Listen to your heart. Do you feel like it's right and he may grow from this? If he starts school and it falls apart, can you pull him out? Can you wait another year? Do you want to?

Listen to your heart. Trust yourself.

Communication will come. It will. There is a great book called more than words by Fern Sussman. I used it like crazy in my therapy sessions.

It's a bit pricey but maybe you can find it used. It sounds like it would be a great one for you.

For now. Get down on the floor. Play with him like I know you already do. And try to let communication happen in his world. Play with whatever he is focused on. Join him. Be patient. Wait and watch him. Try to really understand what he is already telling you with his body.

It will happen. you are doing great.

In love and support,
Laura

You cannot force the child to speak until they are ready and sometimes that takes a long time. My daughter is 7 and still non verbal. She uses PECs and also sign language which seems to help out with the aggression because she cannot tell us what she wants or needs. This on top of speech therapy seems to work the best. If your child is truly non verbal no medication or supplement is going to work unfortunately we have been there and done that and all it we got was a waste of money.

I can understand you’re being worried about school because your child will not be able to tell you if something happens, but you will know by your child’s actions that something is up. The truth is that most schools and teachers are good and would not consider hurting your child, but we all hear of the bad ones. I would worry more about your child getting the services they need in school rather than them being hurt there.

We tried diet and supplements without any luck. She is still non verbal. It's worth a try though just keep in mind it's not for everyone. We still keep up with the supplements. She is making progress everyday. We started with pecs and then moved on to an iPad with the proloquo2go app. Now she is in the process of getting a more sufisticated speech generating device. If I can get medical to fund it cause it's over $7000. I too was not willing to let her go to school. Looking back I'm glad I did. It wasn't till kindergarten that she was miss treated. Even though she didn't verbally tell me her behavior did. She had always been an easy going child. Well that year she started head banging and eating and smearing her poop. She only did it at home so it did take a while to put the pieces together. My advise is to pay close attention. Visit the school as often as you can and start a way of communication.

Have you tried any nutritional support yet? I have found that my DD's gains from speech and preschool have been of the "slow and steady" kind, while the big jumps have come as a result of adding certain supplements. Specifically, Behavior Balance DMG, acetyl-l-carnitine, and Coenzyme Q10. All of these are available over-the-counter relatively inexpensively. After starting the methyl B12 injections we saw a mild acceleration of the rate of improvement, but those are pricier and require a doctor's prescription. Some people see speech gains with Omega 3's, but we personally didn't. N-acetyl-cysteine is one of the next things we're going to try, but DD had to be treated with Nystatin for yeast first since NAC can exacerbate yeast.