Liam is a lively, sweet and curious 9-year-old boy. He likes construction trucks, playing "carpenter" alongside his dad, swimming, music, and going to the park with his best friend and sister, Claire. Liam will warm your heart with his infectious laugh, and playful nature. He can't get enough of escalators, elevators, lawn mowers, and all things mechanical.
Liam was born February 3, 2001 a healthy baby who developed normally for the first 6 months of life. At some point things changed. He went from being a well nourished, healthy child to a child designated as failure to thrive within just a couple of months. Liam also lost motor skills, his development wasn't keeping up, and he began to retreat into a world we couldn't reach. Liam became sickly, suffering from chronic respiratory infections, fevers, severe diarrhea, multiple ear infections, and he developed strabismus (crossed eyes).
Our search for help quickly revealed that there were no real answers and very little intervention was available. We began to worry that Liam had autism. He didn't know his name, didn't wave bye-bye, showed no interest in toys, preferring to flick a string in front of his eyes and stare at fans or lights, and didn't seem to notice if we were even in the room. When Liam was only 10 months old, we began to ask professionals if they thought he had autism. We were told we would have to wait before they could make a diagnosis due to his young age. Seeing him suffer and slip away from us day by day, we realized waiting wasn't an option and we began to take action.
We discovered there was reason for hope, learning that many children with autism progressed with dietary intervention and early intensive therapy, some even fully recover. We quickly changed his diet, began a daily regimen of nutritional supplements and developed an intervention program using DIR/Floor-Time, ABA, and Sensory Integration. We saw immediate improvement. Liam grew healthier, developed an understanding of language, showed interest in people around him, and began to reconnect with us. Despite these improvements, Liam still struggled to be able to talk. At age 4, he was diagnosed with a profound speech disorder. With his inability to communicate verbally, Liam grew increasingly frustrated and volatile. He threw multiple tantrums a day, hitting us and throwing objects. It became difficult to take him anywhere and we worried about him becoming too aggressive to live at home in the future.
Through a seemingly random turn of events, we met a woman named Emily who introduced us to Verbal Behavior. We developed a full time Verbal Behavior program for Liam at home and withdrew him from school services, which didn't seem to be of benefit. Liam went from a child with very few recognizable words to having a vocabulary of over a thousand words, and discovered the power of his voice. We also saw a reduction in his aggressive behavior. Despite all of his progress, Liam began to plateau and started to rebel against the teaching methods. We were then encouraged by Laura, one of Liam's home teachers, to look into the Son-Rise program. The attitude of love, acceptance, and hopefulness that embodies the Son-Rise program inspired us to embrace this philosophy and start a new journey in helping our son.
We ran a full time Sonrise program for 1 ½ years. Liam made great improvements in his ability to sustain interaction with others, eye contact, imagination and creative play, and drawing and building activities. He also made substantial gains in language, including sentence length, clarity of speech, and social communication. Overall he was just a much happier kid.
One of our Sonrise consultants suggested that we read a book titled The brain That Changes Itself, which is about the brain’s amazing ability to grow and change with proper input. This book inspired us to seek out neurodevelopmental therapy for Liam which utilizes the brain’s plasticity to help develop a more organized brain that is capable of learning faster and better. After much investigation, we settled on and organization called the NACD. We began this addition to Liam’s home program in September of 2009. Today he spends half of is time doing his NACD program and splits the rest of his time among Sonrise sessions and classes in the community to further his social development.
Since then Liam has continued to surprise us with his abilities. His language keeps growing, his awareness and social connection is awesome, he’s learned to use the computer, is doing math and reading, and is more physically competent than ever before. We feel blessed to know that there is always something new to try to help take Liam to the next level.