The Autism Treatment Trust is initiating a respite play project to assist our Edinburgh-based families.
It’s a great project! Let me tell you a little more about what this project is about.
The project aims to relief parents from some of the pressure they commonly experience. We propose to spend some time with your child, or his/her siblings or both and assist in stimulating some activities. These activities will be selected by yourself. For example, our volunteers can assist your child to participate with his siblings in some cookery or art activity. The respite would take place at your home or at the ATT clinic, but importantly, one of the parents will remain on site. We can also assist in providing one extra support to your home programme for those families who are running a home programme; this will be entirely run under your own direction.
The volunteers have been CRB checked. Whilst undertaking such control tends to be daunting for parents to do, we are glad that our charity can assist in this, as it is for us free to run and very straightforward.
The volunteers we have are fantastic- for one, they have all postgraduate degrees in areas that are very relevant to autism, the majority being a Master in Psychology. And secondly, they have worked professionally in educational settings (nursery nurses, social worker assisting families of children with autism) which have given them knowledge of children and autism. But most of all, they are young, enthusiastic and very supportive. The volunteers are following further training in verbal behaviour, and natural environment teaching, however, they will not be working as a tutor, unless it is under your own home programme directions. They are simply genuinely informed and much intended people.
There is no cost involved- simply our volunteers want to get more experience of being with people with autism, whilst we as a charity, hope to potentially build this support to assist yet further families. We are all together with autism!
We hope this will be of some help!
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