Anna
My heart goes out to you. We adopted a 4 yr. old boy, Josiah, and his normal twin sister. Josiah is autistic. He has echolalia..doesn't understand almost anything, though he tries to get it right. He did not have anything but echolalia until last month. We have been doing intensive "Applied Behavioral Analysis" with him ourselves, and he can now label objects and can say a few sentances on cue (barely). All of it came with highly intensive work that they did not do with him in the programs he was in before being adopted by us (we homeschool). I have a book called "Behavioral Intervention For Young Children with Autism" by Catherine Maurice. When I got it and saw the stuff in there I believed I had made a mistake since Josiah had been worked with previously with no progress to speak of and in this manual were all sorts of things that I felt he would never be able to do. But, he did. It worked. It was very, very intensive. I know a couple in Washington who has a 7 yr old girl with autism who did not speak a word till she was 5, not even echolalia. She now expresses herself with words. Another option for you is sign language. Here again, I did not think this would help us, because I could not imagine him being able to learn it. He still cannot express himself at all with it, but he understands it better than spoken language, for sure. Alot of kids with autism never do talk, but they learn to sign fluently. My heart goes out to you, and I know that alone, frustrated feeling. I have cried at my computer many a night. I just want to KNOW our son...I want him to be free of this. Our son was tested today for Fragile X, which may be the cause of the autism and other motor problems he has as well. We'll see. If you want to talk, e-mail me. May God comfort you and give you strength. ~~~Anna MamaThorburn@aol.com