Reviews of The Son-Rise Program Autism

Treatment
The Son-Rise Program has the added component of the attitude that you
approach the child with and I never saw that attitude exhibited as a whole by ABA
therapists, its not something that was ever trained. My client, William, was
completely non-verbal. He would try as hard as he could to stay away from you.
[One day] he was jumping on the trampoline when I got to his house and I just
started jumping next to him and really joining him in it, and loving it, and he
immediately started looking at me and he was a child who very rarely had looked at
me when I worked with him in ABA. Then I told him You can tell me jump and he
said Ju! I took a little break and when I came back he ran over to me and said
Jump! More even than the fact that he started speaking to me was the fact that he
was looking at me with a smile and wanting to be with me. It just really showed me
that attitude makes all the difference.
Meredith D., Former ABA Therapist, Virginia

Im a pediatrician. I was in total denial there was anything wrong with my son.
When diagnosed, Patrick was a delightful little 3 year old who never looked at me,
or if he did it was very fleeting. He had no language whatsoever, lots of chatter,
babble noises but never directed at a human being. He would run in circles, he
would flap, he would look sideways. He made no connection with any of us and he
was very happy in his own little world. My Son-Rise Program at our home for our son
ran for a little over a year, thats all it actually ran for in the playroom. He did
amazingly well! Hes just grown 6 years older. Hes in grade four, he is fully
integrated into his classes, never had a helper. And my son is an amazing human
being.
Wendy E., Pediatrician; Canada, Son: Patrick, Age: now 13 yrs., Diagnosis: Autism

The Son-Rise Program Introduction by Raun K. Kaufman

Dear Parent,

You love your child more than anything in the world. In the early days of your
childs life, long before any diagnosis was made, there may have been a hundred
different hopes, dreams, and plans you had for your child. And yet, if you are like
most parents, you may have been told to discard many of those hopes and dreams
and be realistic in the face of your childs diagnosis. It can feel extraordinarily
challenging when you are told all of the things your child will never accomplish as
if its been decided ahead of time.
In The Son-Rise Program, the most important place to begin is to know that you
dont have to accept the limits that may have been placed upon your child. Your
child has the capacity for learning, communicating, experiencing real joy and
happiness and developing warm, loving and satisfying relationships. Children on
the autism spectrum are capable of great change and even, in some cases,
complete recovery.
Who am I to tell you this? My name is Raun K. Kaufman, and, as a young boy, I was
diagnosed as severely autistic, with no language and a tested I.Q. of less than 30.
Completely mute and withdrawn from human contact, I would spend my days
endlessly engaged in repetitive stimming behaviors such as spinning plates,
rocking back and forth, and flapping my hands in front of my face.
Like many parents today, my parents were told that I would never speak or
communicate in any meaningful way and that my autism was a lifelong condition.
The professionals recommended eventual institutionalization.
In an effort to reach me, my parents, authors/teachers Barry Neil Kaufman and
Samahria Lyte Kaufman, developed an innovative child-centered program they
called The Son-Rise Program. After they worked with me for over three years, I
recovered completely from my autism without any trace of my former condition.
(After my recovery, my father wrote a best-selling book recounting our story entitled
Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues later the subject of an award-winning NBC
television movie.) I went on to graduate from the Ivy Leagues Brown University
with a degree in Biomedical Ethics.
In addition to being the former CEO of the Autism Treatment Center of America, and
I remain a senior teacher there and continue to lecture worldwide. As a part of the
ATCA, a division of the non-profit organization that my parents founded and at which
they still teach, I am so grateful to have the opportunity, with our dedicated staff of
almost 80, to enable parents to help their children in the same way that my parents
helped me.
Moreover, I am no fluke. For over a quarter of a century, parents from across the
globe have been attending our weeklong training programs, putting in their time,
energy, and love, and achieving results with their children that often far outstrip
prognoses.

The Foundation
The foundation of The Son-Rise Program rests upon this idea: the children show us
the way in, and then we show them the way out. This means that, rather than
forcing our children to conform to a world they do not understand, we begin by
joining them in their world first. In this way, we establish a mutual connection and
relationship. This is the platform for all education and growth! Since autism is
fundamentally a social relational disorder, creating interpersonal relationships and
social interaction remains our primary focus.
This is the basis of The Son-Rise Program, taught exclusively by the Autism
Treatment Center of America. (The Son-Rise Program Start-Up, a 5-day introductory
training course for parents and professionals, is offered several times a year on our
campus.)

Joining
The crucial starting point for The Son-Rise Program and one of the first principles
taught to parents in the Start-Up course is called joining. Instead of stopping our
childrens repetitive stimming behaviors, we join in with these behaviors. The
idea is that our children are performing their behaviors for reasons that are
important to them (and, as an increasing body of research shows, these behaviors
often serve a physiological purpose, as well). When we show interest in what our
children are doing, we establish a powerful bond around this common interest. This
is so important, because we find repeatedly that children begin to display an
interest in us when we have an abiding interest in them. Whats more, this interest
is spontaneous, not forced. These children interact because they want to.
When deciding to join, youll want to look for behaviors that are both repetitive
(occurring over and over again or with sameness) and exclusive (non-interactive,
being performed as a way to tune others out). Then you simply engage in this
behavior with your child, displaying a genuine interest but not trying to change the
behavior. At this point, wait for your child to initiate connection by looking at you,
stopping his/her activity, speaking to you, taking your hand, etc.
Joining establishes a strong connection between you and your child. We see time
and time again with the thousands of families with whom we work that when
children on the autism spectrum are joined, they become less interested in their
activity and begin to look at us more, pay more attention to us, and even initiate
interaction with us.

Motivation
Once we have our childrens willing engagement, the door is open to help those
children to learn and grow. One of our key teaching principles is to capitalize on
each childs own motivation. With children on the autism spectrum, traditional
learning modalities will rarely be motivating. Therefore, we customize the
presentation of any curriculum to match each childs highest areas of interest.
Instead of pushing a child repeat a task (and receive rewards) over and over again
as a way to facilitate mastery, we build games and activities around the interests
that child already has (such as Thomas the Tank engine, dinosaurs, or physical
play). This way, we work with each child instead of trying to teach against the
grain. Thus, learning is exponentially increased - with a powerful benefit: we have
our childrens willing and excited cooperation. And when a child has learned
something not memorized it, but learned it it becomes a generalized skill that
he/she can use spontaneously (rather than in a more robotic manner).

Socialization
When it comes to creating child-specific goals, helping children to achieve them,
and tracking how far along each child is, we use a special tool called The Son-Rise
Program Social Developmental Model. The centerpiece of this model, the Four
Fundamentals of Socialization, include eye contact & nonverbal communication,
verbal communication, interactive attention span, and flexibility (this last
Fundamental being the most underappreciated goal in traditional learning
environments).
Most crucially, we focus on these social goals before academic goals. Academic
goals, while important, will do nothing to help our children overcome their central
challenge of connecting with others socially. As first priority, do we want our
children do have more math or more friends? Do we want our children to
compensate for their socialization challenges or overcome them?
For this same reason, we want to prioritize the interaction over any one goal. No
matter how important we think a particular goal is, interaction and connection will
always get our children further in the long run. For a child to accomplish a
particular goal on a Thursday instead of Friday is much less significant than for that
child to continue to build a bridge of interaction between his/her world and ours.
So, if you start to see that sticking with your goal is creating tension, conflict, or
resistance, set the goal aside for the moment and keep the interaction alive.

Attitude

The single most overlooked area when it comes to autism treatment is attitude.
Having a non-judgmental, welcoming, and optimistic attitude toward our children
determines whether they feel safe and relaxed enough to interact with us and learn.
Over the decades, we have continued to see that children with autism tend to move
away from people they perceive as uncomfortable or judging and towards people
they see as comfortable, easy, fun and non-judgmental. Thus, our attitude can
provide the impetus for a challenged child to reach out to us, or it can unwittingly
act to drive that child away. We spend time in our Start-Up and other programs
helping parents with their emotional and attitudinal challenges because it really,
really matters.
So no matter what you are told, please know that there is hope for your child. Of
course, experts who dont know your child will see what your child has not done
yet and speak as if they know what your child cannot do ever.
But you are the parent. You have a love, a lifelong commitment, and a day-in, dayout experience with your child that no one else can match. You may sometimes feel
pushed aside, but never forget that you arent in the way, you are the way.
You have every right to believe in your child. You have every capability to see the
possibilities for your child, even when no one else does. And while we cannot know
or promise in advance what any particular child will accomplish, we will never
decide in advance what your child will not achieve.
The only reason I can write this letter to you today is because my parents believed
in me when no one else on earth did. And that is a special role that you, as a
parent, can have with your child. And no one can ever take that from you.

Youre not about to give up on your child. Neither are we.

With the deepest respect,

Raun K. Kaufman
Director of Global Education

The Son-Rise Program

Autism Treatment Center of America
2080 South Undermountain Road

Sheffield, MA 01257 USA

Phone: 1-800-714-2779
International: 001-413-229-2100
correspondence@autismtreatment.org
www.autismtreatment.org

Autism Treatment Center of America - Full Recovery Videos

Brandon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wcMgrKUqR9o&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=23&feature=plpp_vide
o
Laura
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=zMIlJk0et5A&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=47&feature=plpp_video
Patrick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV40Fexz5Y&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=76&feature=plpp_video
Jake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ej22w5Hgne0&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=102&feature=plpp_vide
o
Oscar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=kXpf4hwO860&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=150&feature=plpp_vide
o
Simon, short
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=swRBOlPKsX8&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=182&feature=plpp_vide
o
Simon, long

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wgjkXg38wCY&list=UUSe17rMtJoau4FRLFRIrmSQ&index=229&feature=plpp_vide
o
Jade, part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3LeEg_8TQ
Jade, part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbVEW5RO91g
Jade, part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rEJPw6qWxw