Dr Richard Eisemajer (psychologist, The ASD Clinic): When we’re looking at an older child obviously intervention should be more about what in the child’s profile of strengths and weaknesses…obviously intervention would be looking at what the child’s weaknesses are and how is that impacting in the daily life and is there some form of help. The nature of the condition as it changes over time because they grow up is then trying to help them with those weak spots that they’ve got in their everyday functioning and that’s what really therapy is about. Some of them need very intensive work. Some might need a much milder touch on their development through.

Lillian (mother of Tash, 13, who has autism): It was much more intense when she was younger and absolutely more specific. We’re more child-led these days. She learns piano with us, she also attends a special dance class. And we also at the moment do alternative therapies with her.

Dolores (mother of James, 14, who has autism): Now that he’s gotten older we don’t tend to do as much as what we did when he was younger. We still do some other interventions like recently we did some OT which I didn’t do so much of when he was younger because unfortunately I didn’t know enough about it to realise that he needed some of that intervention. And also speech. We did a lot of speech when he was younger which has helped a lot and again, I’m looking at revisiting that because there are some aspects of his communication that I think speech therapy will help with.

Elena (mother of Alex, 15, who has autism): He was really tired after school and we found that…trying to do interventions after school time was proving a little bit not worth it in the end. We found that school pretty much covered everything and his language was improving all the time. We just did things with him just in everyday living to try and make him speak more and be more social.

Dr Richard Eisemajer: One of the issues that we see is that school absolutely exhausts and overwhelms our clients so taking these kids to after school social skill workshops and speech therapy…it can cause more issues and say by high school when the kids are full of hormones, they’re often just saying ‘No more. I’m not going to do it’. So what we often recommend is that the parents perhaps are seeing the therapist and to try to then bring some parts of the program in the child’s daily life.

Lillian: She’s at a special school at the moment so her daily activities are all organised by speech therapists, occupational therapists, music therapists, special ed. So she’s continuously having these therapies. Any sort of academics or any sort of schools, any programs, any outings it’s all organised by therapists.