Week 8- Final Reflection

Working as a habilitation provider has really helped me take a closer look into what goes on inside the home of a family with a child with special needs. As I have stated before, I have worked in a high school special education classroom for the last two years, and now I have a deeper understanding of what it's like to teach and take care of a child with disabilities round the clock. I have worked in and out of the classroom now and with a different age level, from high school students to a six year old boy. I believe this exposure has been extremely beneficial to my future career with Child Protective Services as a social worker. I have been able to learn the different special needs services, therapies, support groups, and types of doctors and medicines that are offered to a child with disabilities by the state. I feel this information and experience in working with children with disabilities also helps with furthering my knowledge of the human development. As a Family & Human/Child Development major, obtaining this work experience only benefits my knowledge of the process in the human development as it pertains to the disabilities aspect. I am also a sociology major so working with students with autism at the various age levels and environmental differences really helped me to better understand the social disorder aspect of autism.

As a habilitation provider, I would help take care of a families child who had autism for a few hours a day after he attended summer school at a private school that was also the same agency that hired me out to this family. This was only a summer position as the family uses the rest of their habilitation hours during the regular school year towards the private school's tuition. I was offered this position for the same family next summer allowing me to believe they were happy with my services as their habilitation provider. Unfortunately this isn't something I would want to do for the rest of my life, however it was something that I used as a tool to further my career in social services. I learned how to develop the kind of patience I never knew I had working with this child. In the beginning, I had a hard time getting him to want to pay any attention to me or follow any of my directions, but as I worked with him daily and followed his mom's helpful tips in gettin him to sit still we eventually developed a mutual respect between us that allowed him to want to listen to what I had to say and gave me the patience to work on our communication skills together as a team.

This job allowed me to learn how to record important developmental and academic data that pertained to his goals in his Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that he uses year round. For instance, one of his goals that he struggles with his to be fully potty trained. This may not be an academic goal, but he has many behavioral and social goals that he needs to work on and will continue to work on while he is in school. This data is recorded and than sent to the L.I.F.E., the agency and private school, where the team of professionals transfers the data to his IEP that he will work on at school as well. The child has a certain percentage to meet for each goal and if he doesn't meet his goals during the school year than he has may qualify for free summer school since he regressed in his goals. I have also learned the proper skills and techniques in working with a younger child with autism. In comparison to working with the high school students I normally work with during the school year, working with a six year old boy is a lot harder than working with students in the age range of sixteen to twenty-two years old. A younger child with autism is more hyper and physical than the older autistic students. He also seemed to have a harder time sitting still for longer than fifteen minutes at a time, but that could also be more of his age than the actual disorder. Children without any disabilities have a very short attention span as it is, so I think that had a lot to do with it.

I found my position as this families habilitation provider to be a positive experince, and it truly helped give me the full experince of what it's like to have a child with autism. I cooked meals for a child with many allergies and on specific diets. He was picky, yet always hungry so I did what I could to meet his needs. I would sometimes attend outtings to the groceries store or doctor's appointment to see what it was like to take him out on an everyday errand. I discovered how hard it really was to make sure this child's routine wasn't effected in a way that would change his mood and make him have a bad day. The temper tantrums he would throw were nothing like that of a child without autism. I commend his parents for holding the family together, and they are doing a great job in involving both of their children in play time and family time. I feel like this job has made me grow as a person in the sense that I have a new respect for parents with children with disabilities, and that I feel more close to understanding how autism works. I have a new found patience that I can apply at any work place as well as in my own personal life. Now when I'm working for CPS, and I'm speaking with a parent of a child with special needs, I will be able to better relate to what they are talking about and going through and will know the services that are offered by the state to families with children with disabilities.