About two years ago, Mia's special education teacher Barb told me about a program called Hannen. It is a parent lead form of therapy to improve communication between parents and their children on the Autism spectrum. Hanen is a fourteen week program, in which parents attend without their children. The parents learn how to become therapists to their own children. I attended my first session last Friday.
I arrived at Children's Hospital at 10am. I was escorted into the back and saw two tables, one on each side of the room. I found an open chair with a workbook on the table. We started with introductions. We each told a little bit about our families and our children. We were asked to tell about our most recent outing with our kids. I talked about taking Mia to see an iMax movie at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I left out the part where an old woman said the F word three or four times as she made her way past us. She was muttering something about kids shouldn't be allowed in the theater.
During the class we watched "case studies" about other families who participated in the program. They were all wearing 90's attire so I deduced that the program is about 20 years old. We were asked to observe what the parents did to promote communication. The first case showed a little boy who was constantly on the move. One second he was jumping on his little trampoline and the next he was lining up his toy trains. They then cut to his dad getting ready to help him jump high but before he did he waited for his son to prompt him with the word "up".
We also did some group excercises, we were asked to line up by our birthday but were not allowed to talk. We had to figure it out using other methods. We were also asked to participate in a spelling test, Kayla (the teacher) read the words quickly while playing music and flipping the lights on and off. The point was to give us some idea of the sensory overload our kids could be experiencing.
The class was helpful, I found myself using some of the techniques they taught us throughout the weekend.
