Autism: Mother bugs cuddly toy to capture abuse by care home staff

A mother has caught care home staff shouting abuse at her autistic son, after she bugged his teddy bear.

Christine Anne Mayor, of Wales, UK, hid a small recording device inside her 15-year-old son's cuddly toy and captured the carers making 'unacceptable' remarks to the vulnerable teenager.

The tape reveals voices shouting and swearing at Kyle Thomas, calling him at 'dirty boy'.

On the tape, voices can be heard shouting 'dirty boy' at Kyle Thomas, as well as a series of expletives.

Following a lengthy investigation and formal hearing by Rhondda Cynon Taf council's Children's Services, four employees have been given formal warnings but have remained in their posts.

Single mother Christine said her severely autistic son had been visiting the Nantgwyn centre for four years, spending on spent around four nights a month at the Aberdare home to allow his mother brief respite.

But Ms Mayor said she decided to take matters into her own hands when she heard her child using abusive language.

She said: 'Kyle cannot talk properly and he suffers with Echolalia, which means he repeats a lot of things people say.

'I knew he was getting these words from somewhere, so I decided to take matters into my own hands in October last year.

'I bought a recording device and put it inside the head of Kyle's Waybuloo toy.' 

'When I brought it home and listened to the recording, I nearly had a heart attack.'

'What I heard was completely inappropriate language and I was not happy with the tone of their voices. I felt that the way they spoke to him was really horrible.'

A lengthy transcript of the recording was made and the matter was initially handled by South Wales Police before being handed over to social services.

She said: 'As my son cannot talk properly, he couldn't tell me what was wrong - I felt like I needed to be his voice.

'He would curl up into the brace position whenever we tried to drop him off at the home, and he'd always back away from the door. It could have been happening for years.

'I put my trust in these people and they've let me down.'

Ms Mayor is now looking to complain to the ombudsman about the four staff members being reinstated.

A council spokesman said: 'Rhondda Cynon Taf council can confirm that it received a complaint from an individual in relation to a residential children's facility within the county borough.

'Following receipt of this complaint, a full investigation was conducted and appropriate action concluded in line with council policy.'

Giving children non-verbal clues about words boosts vocabularies

The clues that parents give toddlers about words can make a big difference in how deep their vocabularies are when they enter school, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

By using words to reference objects in the visual environment, parents can help young children learn new words, according to the research.

It also explores the difficult-to-measure quality of non-verbal clues to word meaning during interactions between parents and children learning to speak.

For example, saying, "There goes the zebra" while visiting the zoo helps a child learn the word "zebra" faster than saying, "Let's go to see the zebra."

Differences in the quality of parents' non-verbal clues to toddlers (what children can see when their parents are talking) explain about a quarter (22 percent) of the differences in those same children's vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, researchers found.

The results are reported in the paper, "Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary three years later," published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Erica Cartmill

"Children's vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school," said lead author Erica Cartmill, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago.

"Because preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of subsequent school success, this variability must be taken seriously and its sources understood."

Scholars have found that the number of words youngsters hear greatly influences their vocabularies.

Parents with higher socioeconomic status—those with higher income and more education—typically talk more to their children and accordingly boost their vocabularies, research has shown.

That advantage for higher-income families doesn't show up in the quality research, however.

"What was surprising in this study was that social economic status did not have an impact on quality.

Parents of lower social economic status were just as likely to provide high-quality experiences for their children as were parents of higher status," said co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at UChicago.

More information: Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1309518110

Stepfathers: Three Factors Contribute to Closeness

Although one-third of American children live in a step-family during part of their childhood, little is known about the development of the relationship between stepfathers and stepchildren.

New research from Brigham Young University fills that gap with a study that identified three factors that significantly contribute to closeness in stepfamilies:

• The couple keeps arguments to a minimum
• Mothers help children feel comfortable sharing their frustrations. 
• The stepfather and mother agree on how to parent

Kevin Shafer

BYU professor Kevin Shafer's research on step-families appears in the academic journal Social Work.

"Family roles can be negotiated and there is going to be some bumpiness," said Shafer, who teaches and researches in BYU's School of Social Work.

"The notion that couples should put the couple first and everything else will fall into place is false."

Shafer and BYU grad student Todd Jensen analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of 1,088 children in step-families.

From the children's perspective, frustrations occur when the new dad assumes too much parental authority or when he disrupts the family's normal way of doing things.

"Moms need to let their children know that it's ok to talk if they have a problem with their stepfather because everybody is still trying to figure out this new family dynamic," Shafer said.

And the lack of history between step-fathers and children amplifies the detrimental effects of parental conflict. "Full-blown arguments set up step-families for failure," Shafer said.

Couples typically make one of two mistakes in the transition.

• The first type involves the couple acting as though nothing major has changed. that the new father is a replacement instead of an addition. 
• The second type of mistake is for mom to take upon herself all of the parenting.

The common thread in both scenarios is that the children's voices are missing.

"If you have teenagers, they should be a pretty active participant in discussions of what the family is going to look like and how the family is going to function," Shafer said.

The study contains one pleasant surprise:

Communicating openly and avoiding arguments contributes to closeness regardless of family income or education level.

"It really is the interpersonal dynamic that predicts family closeness," Shafer said. "You can build these bonds in spite of financial challenges."

The Power of a Mother's touch

Mothers who stroke their baby's body in the first few weeks after birth may change the effects that stress during pregnancy can have on an infant's early-life development, researchers have found.

Researchers at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, and Kings College, London have been studying whether stress in pregnancy can lead to emotional and behavioural problems in children for many years.

Attention is now moving towards how parents might alter these effects after birth.

Researchers are aiming to improve understanding of the issues to help enhance information services for pregnant women and their partners.

Scientists believe that stress in pregnancy can have an effect on an infant in later life by reducing the activity of genes that play a role in stress response.

Studies of early care-giving in rats have found that high levels of mothers' licking and grooming their pups soon after birth can increase the activity of these genes and may reverse the effects of prenatal stress on their offspring.

Some studies suggest that impacts of prenatal stress on an infant's development can be either positive or negative depending on the type of environment a child encounters. It is thought that some children may experience the effects through being more prone to high levels of fear or anger.

The team at Liverpool, Manchester and London followed first-time mothers from pregnancy through to the first years of their children's lives as part of Medical Research Council (MRC) funded research, The Wirral Child Health and Development Study.

It showed that links between symptoms of depression in pregnancy and subsequent infant emotions of fear and anger, as well as heart rate response to stress at seven months of age changed by how often a mother stroked their baby on the head, back, legs and arms in the early weeks of life.

The results suggest that stroking may alter gene activity in a similar way to that reported in animals.

Dr Helen Sharp, from the University of Liverpool's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, explains: "We are currently following up on the Wirral children in our study to see if reports of early stroking by their mothers continue to make a difference to developmental outcomes over time.

"The eventual aim is to find out whether we should recommend that mothers who have been stressed during pregnancy should be encouraged to stroke their babies early in life"

The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Autism: Researchers Continue to hunt for causes

For many families, the quest for the causes of autism has grown more urgent with the news that the estimated prevalence of autism grew by 23% from 2006 to 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report out last week.

In most cases, however, scientists can't tell parents what caused their child's autism, says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. In large part, the causes of autism — which is likely not one disease, but a group of conditions with related symptoms — remain a mystery.

For years, scientists had only a few clues about the condition, noticing that autism is about four times as common in boys as in girls, for example.

Recently, scientists have found a number of risk factors for autism, many of which point toward problems that develop very early in life, such as during pregnancy or delivery, or even during the process of creating eggs and sperm, says Craig Newschaffer, a professor at Philadelphia's Drexel University.

To better understand causes of autism, researchers at four major universities are following 1,200 mothers of autistic children through a project called the EARLI study, or the Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation.

Because researchers know that these moms are at high risk of having a second autistic child, they closely follow the women's subsequent pregnancies, testing blood, urine, hair, even vacuuming dust from the women's homes, says Newschaffer, one of the study's lead researchers.

Researchers ask pregnant women to keep lists of any illnesses, since infections during pregnancy are suspected of playing a role in autism.

Doctors can confidently reassure parents that one thing doesn't cause autism — vaccines, says Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Nearly two dozen studies have failed to find a link between autism and vaccines, whether given alone or in combination.

Researchers have clues to other causes:

Genes. About 15% to 20% of autistic children have a genetic mutation that causes their disorder, Insel says. Certain genetic disorders, such as Fragile X syndrome and Rett syndrome, are well-known for increasing the risk of autism.

Even when genes are the main contributor to autism, however, it's possible that most children have a unique mutation or set of mutations, says David Amaral, research director of the University of California-Davis MIND Institute.

Family history. If parents have one child with autism, the risk of having a second child diagnosed with the disorder is nearly 20%, according to a landmark study from U.C.-Davis. Among those with two autistic children, the risk of having a third is 32%, study author Sally Ozonoff says.

Environmental pollution. One California study published last year found that babies whose mothers lived near a highway while pregnant were more likely to be diagnosed as autistic.

Older parents. Both older father and mothers are at higher risk of having autistic children, Newschaffer says. Research from Israel and the Harvard School of Public Health also suggests that infertility treatments, which are more often used among older patients, are linked to a higher risk of autism.

Prematurity and low birthweight. An October study in Pediatrics found that, among babies born weighing less than about 4½ pounds, 5% had been diagnosed as autistic by age 21.

Medications. Many studies now show that a seizure treatment called valproic acid can increase the risk of autism in children exposed before birth. A single study published last year found a higher risk among children exposed prenatally to antidepressants. Using prenatal vitamins is also linked to a lower risk of autism.

Closely spaced pregnancies. In a 2011 study, children who were born less than one year after an older sibling were three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism, compared with children born three years after their mom's last pregnancy.

Can Playing Maternal Voice and Heartbeat Sounds Benefit Premies?

Nearly five years ago, Amir Lahav became a parent of twins born prematurely at 25 weeks. They weighed just over 1 pound each.

Welcoming two newborns into the family certainly changed his life, but as a neuroscientist, it also ended up changing the course of his research.

Lahav studies how the brain processes sounds, and worked primarily with neurologically impaired adults, but with the birth of his twins, his paternal instinct kicked in.

He approached the chief of newborn medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where the babies lay in incubators.

“Could I put a recording of my wife's voice in there?” Lahav asked, convinced that hearing their mother’s soothing tones would improve the babies’ development. The answer: It's certainly worthwhile.

Using his computer, Lahav recorded his wife’s voice telling the babies they’re fighters and urging them to be strong.

He also included some soothing piano music, figuring it could prove relaxing for preemies. Then he tinkered with the sound to make it resemble what a baby would hear in utero.

While we hear through air, babies in the womb process sound through fluid so what passes as hearing consists of more low-frequency vibrations. (Think about slipping beneath the surface of the bath as someone talks to you, or try speaking while putting a finger in each ear.) “It’s as if babies are living in a micro-subwoofer,” explains Lahav.

The twins seemed to like the recordings, and doctors and nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) were intrigued.

Moreover, it proved therapeutic for Lahav and his wife. “It was not a controlled trial,” says Lahav, “but just a crazy father trying to do something because especially in the case of premature babies, you feel very helpless.”

Once his twins left the hospital, Lahav returned to thank the chief for letting him experiment.

One thing led to another, and they found themselves in a serious conversation about prematurity and how the focus of neonatal medicine has changed from saving the lives of these babies, doctors have grown expert at keeping preemies alive, to helping them grow into healthy children.

Studies have shown that premature infants are at greater risk of having low IQ and developing metabolic or chronic conditions in young adulthood that can shorten their lives.

Could keeping them bathed in mom’s comforting sounds lower the incidence of some of these adverse effects on their health? Lahav wound up with a job offer to find out.

Read more: Can Playing Maternal Voice and Heartbeat Sounds Benefit Premies?

Cartoon for a Saturday Afternoon

Two Steps Forward One Step Back

You know what I am talking about. Any parent raising a special needs child knows about the setbacks.

The kick in the stomach, racing heart, internal restlessness, sleepless nights re-evaluating and reassessing the situation until you can’t think straight.

That fear that grips you and makes you doubt yourself as a parent, yup, welcome to special needs parenting setbacks.

If there is one thing I can tell you with absolute confidence it is this, there will be setbacks, many setbacks.

There will be those days that out of no where you are struck with the enormity of it all, the days that you just break down and need a good cry.

I remember the days that I measured progress and setbacks in hours. Days that drained me both mentally and physically.

With time and with my childs acquirement of calming and coping skills the hours turned into weeks then turned into months and dare I say, with fingers crossed and pajamas inside out , now years.

I can catch my breath, I can go to the store without a knot in my stomach and a cell phone on loud
clenched in my hands.

Its been a long road of two steps forward and one step back. Smooth sailing you are thinking, not quite, the fear and insecurity I believe will say with me for many years to come.

The panic and constant state of anxiety parents of special needs children experience almost become a part of you. It consumes you.

The nature of the beast becomes embedded in our brains and we know that with so many variables to triggers that we can never completely let our guard down.

Read more of this article here: Two Steps Forward One Step Back Still Gets You Ahead

Baby Hears his Mother's Voice for the First Time

For the first eight months of his life, baby Jonathan had never heard the sound of his mom’s voice, but a cochlear implant changed all that. Jonathan’s dad captured the touching moment on video:

A Mother's Experience with Scotopic Sensitivity Dyslexia: Ilen Syndrome or Visual Stress

After a five-year struggle to help her son overcome a debilitating reading difficulty, a Chester mum has set her sights on giving hope to hundreds of other children in the area who are affected by a specific form of dyslexia.

Special needs teacher Eileen Morgan from Hoole dedicated hundreds of hours of research in the hope of alleviating her son Edward’s reading problems.

“Edward suffers from Scotopic Sensitivity, also known as 'Irlen Syndrome or Visual Stress – a form of dyslexia where text appears to move on the page, and letters and words appear to reverse These are symptoms that will be all too familiar to hundreds of young people,” she said.

Sufferers also often display poor hand-eye coordination and can be particularly sensitive to fluorescent light. The condition makes people lose their place when reading and it can also cause itchy eyes.

Colour overlays and tinted glasses, which can help some people with similar dyslexia-related difficulties, proved to be no help.

“I lost count of the number of specialists and consultants we visited over all those years,” said Eileen. “Day after day I was searching the internet and talking to experts. There were lots of theories but no one seemed to be able to offer any answers.

“It was all so frustrating, especially for Edward who was rapidly losing ground at school and naturally feeling insecure, upset and different.

“We were getting really concerned how badly this would affect his future prospects, and gradually coming to realise how many other families were facing the same frustration.”

The solution, Eileen revealed, came in the form of specialist filtered lenses which help synchronise the message transmitted from the eyes to the brain.

To read more about Eileen's story click here