Planning for adulthood starts in middle school: the Peter Gerhardt transition session, for families (audio overview)

A free audio overview for families, derived from Special Learning's course "Planning for Transition: Middle School to High School, with Dr. Peter Gerhardt" (presented by Peter Gerhardt and Amanda Fishley, hosted by Karen Chung). It is a synthetic voice, not a person, summarizing one session of the course; it is not the session itself.

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Episode notes

• Free tools and guides, no account needed: special-learning.com/free-resources
• The ABCs of Autism guide, free and written for families: store.special-learning.com/free-abcs-of-autism.html
• The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library, written for professionals: special-learning.com/for-behavior-analysts

Transcript

This is a free audio overview from Special Learning. It's a synthetic voice, not a person, and it's summarizing one session of a training course. It isn't the session itself.

The session is called "Planning for Transition: Middle School to High School." It's the first in a series on transition to adulthood, and it's a long one, close to four hours. It's led by Dr. Peter Gerhardt, who has worked with adolescents and adults with autism since 1980 and directs a school for them, with Amanda Fishley, a behavior analyst, hosted by Special Learning's founder, Karen Chung, and joined by a panel of four practicing behavior analysts, one of whom grew up with a sister with autism. It was recorded for professionals. This overview is for the parent of a child of any age, because the session's first and loudest point is that transition planning starts far earlier than most people think.

Here is that point in the presenter's own phrase: adulthood begins in preschool. He says the field of transition has changed less in nearly forty years than almost any other part of autism services, and that he still meets twenty-one-year-olds who can't use a bathroom on their own or cross a street safely, and has to ask how nobody taught them. His answer to that question is the rest of the session. Every year a child is in school is a year with resources attached, and those years end. He calls the people in the room a student's last, best chance at a life of what he names as competence, dignity, and quality.

The session offers a test for any skill on any plan: does the child use it outside the room where it was taught, without being told? A skill that only appears for the teacher, on cue, isn't mastered. One panelist changed how her staff record progress for exactly this reason. Any help at all counts as a no. The presenter goes one step further. He doesn't only want the child to do the laundry when asked. He wants the child to notice the basket is full.

Much of the session is about what to work on, and the presenter is blunt that teaching the wrong skill well is no better than teaching the right skill badly. His way of choosing is to look five years ahead. His school starts a transition profile at twelve and asks the family where they want the child to be at seventeen, across five areas: a career, running a home, leisure, being part of a community, and school. Then the team works backward to what has to start now. The plan is a best guess, he says, a living document, reviewed every six months and changed whenever the data says so.

For a parent of a younger child, the most useful minutes of the session may be a chart the presenter walks through of what typical children do around the house at each age. From two to four they help with almost everything. From four to seven they set their place at the table, put toys away, help with the dishes. From eight to ten they make a bed and clear a table. By eleven or twelve they can do everything around the house, whether or not they do. If a family waits until twelve to start on these with a child with autism, he says, the child is twelve years behind and has twelve years of being done-for to unlearn. He names six skills he wants mastered by ten: using the bathroom alone, dressing alone, showering alone, eating with utensils, a way to communicate that actually works, and taking part in ordinary family life, chores, shopping, holidays.

Two of his questions to parents are worth carrying home. Does your son or daughter get up to an alarm clock? Almost every parent says no, and almost every parent uses one themselves. He calls the alarm clock a safety skill, because it means no one will ever need to enter that bedroom to wake an adult. And: if your child were left alone for twenty-four hours, what would they do? Eat, shower, take medication, get out of bed? Most parents, he says, would rather not think about it. That, he says, is the problem.

The session is candid about a habit that families and professionals share. Doing things for the child because it's faster, kinder, or less of a fight. One panelist describes an adult whose parents said he could do his laundry. He could, except he left it in the washer every time and his mother moved it to the dryer. Another panelist, herself a parent, admits she never made her typical son do what he could do because she was tired at the end of the day. The presenter's answer is that typical children pick skills up on their own and children with autism mostly don't, so the practice has to be built in on purpose, and the frustration has to be allowed. Skill building and happiness, one panelist adds, go together, not against each other.

On expectations, the presenter says he would rather work with a parent whose hopes are unrealistic than one whose hopes are low, because he can adjust the first and can rarely lift the second. When someone says a child will never be able to do something, his reply is that they don't get to say that. The child gets to say that, by trying. A panelist tells of a boy she has known since he was five, who lost skills in adolescence and speaks mostly in single words, and who now works as a sushi chef because he loves to cook and his parents never lowered the bar.

Three ideas near the end change how a family might picture the goal. First, the presenter says his students don't graduate employable. They graduate employed. Second, he says the real aim is not independence but interdependence: a father who finally let his son go into the coffee shop alone found that the staff and customers quietly filled in the gaps. Most people, he says, want to help. And third, in a study his team ran in a city grocery store, they asked customers what mattered most for a young person with autism to be welcome. Rocking and talking to oneself didn't bother anyone. Being slow to pay held up the line. So they taught paying quickly, and the barrier came down. The lesson is to ask the community what counts, not to guess.

The session also raises things families rarely hear named. That happiness can be a written goal, and can be measured. That the parents' own life after the child leaves school deserves a plan too. That leisure is only leisure if the person chooses what, when, where, with whom, and for how long. And that many adults with autism still see a children's doctor, or get their care in emergency rooms, so health care belongs on the transition plan alongside work and home.

A note on time and place. The session was recorded some years ago, and the laws and services it describes are American ones. It says itself that in many countries there are no transition services at all, and that families there are the whole program. The questions it asks don't depend on any country's law. Does the skill show up when no one is watching. What would your child do alone for a day. Who gets to decide what they can't do.

This is general information for families, not clinical advice, and not a treatment recommendation for any individual.

If you want something to use today rather than something to buy, Special Learning's free tools and guides are at special-learning.com/free-resources, no account needed.

The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library; the link is in the episode notes.

This has been a free audio overview from Special Learning.