Shanker – the Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative  

So in the year 2004, Milt and Ethel Harris created this institute: The Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative at York, and we had several mandates, Milt wanted this to be a state of the art developmental/cognitive-neural science institute, so the idea was that we would work with young children with autism, young children between the ages of 2 and 4, and we would look at the full spectrum of kids with autism, so not just high-functioning but any child, and we would use a method of intervention developed by Stanley Greenspan whose been my partner, was my partner for many years until he died a year ago, and Stanley’s method is called DIR, and essentially the key to DIR is that you take teams of therapists to work with the child, and those teams will have a speech-language therapist, and occupational therapist, mental health specialist, psychologist or if necessary psychiatrist, nutritionist, and we do very intensive work with the child for two hours a week.  

Now, the way the program works is that we are convinced that the key to helping these children learn how to self-regulate, and by learning how to self-regulate how to enter the social world, we’re convinced that they key is mom and dad have to be the primary deliverers of this. So the way the institute works is the parents literally have to sign a contract, and the contract stipulates they will do a minimum of 20 hours per week applying the things that they learn with us in their two hour session, and in exchange they’ll get free therapy for a year plus all of our tests, etc. When we started this we were very concerned about how parents would respond to, you know, this is a fairly demanding commitment on their part, in fact our parents have done on average about 24 hours a week, you know it’s close to 4 hours a day, every single day, and so we thought we better measure parental stress before, during, and after, because even if the program worked it wouldn’t be a long term success if parents found this too great a burden.  

And to our great surprise, not only have the children done extremely well, so what we’ve seen is that the kids to begin to self-regulate significantly, I mean, optimal regulation, and we see significant, meaningful changes in their social behaviors. We see significant, meaningful changes in their ability to initiate interactions, their ability to engage in shared attention, we see significant changes in their overall affect, their happiness, and basically they become happy, and they become committed with their parents. 

Well what was happening with mom and dad, that was our other big question, and to our amazement, we saw a huge drop in parental stress, so even though they were doing all this work, their stress dropped, and their overall stress dropped, their parenting style starts to change, so what is going on here? What is going on here? Well, we’ve talked a bit about the sort of attitudes that we have to kids with various problems like obesity, or behavior, and once you start thinking in terms of self-regulation, you’re really trying to understand what’s happening with a child, you’re trying to understand what’s going on inside the kid. Why is the kid having this reaction and what can I do to ameliorate it, to avoid it or reduce the load on the child, you’re starting to see you child with very different eyes, a different lens. You’re not longer judging the child, you’re not angry at the child; you’re not seeing the child as being willfully non-compliant. Instead you’re seeing that the child is having trouble staying regulated. The reason why we saw this is because of the work we did with our parents in the autism treatment program, as soon as; we had parent after parent telling us the same thing, as soon as they began to understand what was happening with their child, they felt this enormous load being lifted off their shoulders. It was a load that was socially imposed, it was a load that came from, you know, having a child with autism in a society that frowns on the kid that, you know, behaves in a certain way in a supermarket because, quite simply, the child’s been overloaded by the bright lights and the cold air and the hard floors in the supermarket, and so they could let all that go, and as a result their overall stress was dramatically reduced.