Wondering how to support your autistic child at school? Keep reading for some amazing tips!
No matter where they attend, all children deserve a proper education. School plays a crucial part in your child’s learning and development. Many parents with autistic children will choose to home school or enroll their child into a special needs school.
How to Support Your Autistic Child at School
All children are different, and this can work better for some than others. It tends to depend on the form of autism they have. Whatever you choose to do, your child must get the right level of education. Today, we will be looking at how to support your child’s school experience.
Find the Right School
When it comes to education, there are multiple platforms for a child to attend school. These include public school, private school, parochial school, online schooling, and homeschooling. Finding the right school for your child is very important, as you need to know if their health and needs will be sufficiently supported.
For example, Visitation School is a great school to consider. Visitation provides a warm, welcoming environment and is highly diverse. They offer plenty of academic support to their students and also have a social, emotional, and physical health support service.
Choosing the right school for your autistic child is just the beginning step to supporting their education. When deciding what works best for your child, take some time to evaluate your options. For many, a public school may be the best or even only option and that is okay too! Your child is an individual, so what works for one child might not work as well for yours.
Advocating
If you can afford to hire an advocate to have a look at the school program offered to your child, then you should. An advocate will provide you with a fresh opinion. They will seek out areas in the program that require improvement, or they will be able to reassure you that your son or daughter is being provided with the highest level of care and support.
It is handy to know an advocate if you need to have an IEP meeting because it removes the stress of having to find one.
Volunteer at School Functions
You should volunteer at school functions where possible. Volunteering at school functions is a great way to get familiar with and educate the parents, administrators, and teachers at the school, your child, goes to. It also allows you to see how your child behaves around their peers.
If there is anything that makes you uncomfortable about their behavior, you can try to correct it yourself at home, and you can let other parents know why your child may behave this way.
Parenthood can be lonely, and volunteering at school functions is an excellent way to make some friends.
Support Them at Home
Whether you choose a mainstream school or a specialist school, your child will need the right level of support at home to ensure they thrive and are happy during their education. They may need a little extra time to fully understand things they learn at school and how to behave in the right way around teachers and students.
Bullying is also prevalent in some mainstream schools, so you will need to be prepared to deal with this if it becomes an issue.
How to Support Your Autistic Child at School
As parents, we all want to do what’s right for our children. Unfortunately, these choices can be a little more complicated when your child has autism. Make sure you do plenty of research. Don’t be afraid to reach out for advice and support from others.
We hope you found resources and support with these tips on how to support your autistic child at school. To learn more about parenting autistic children, check out more of our autism parenting articles and sign up for our newsletter below.
