TEACHH: Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children

The medical world loves its acronyms regardless of if they are misspelled or not!  In spite of this fact, you should ignore that TEACHH is spelled wrong and instead train your mind to drop the last H and understand that this treatment is all about teaching the child techniques to make their world easier.  With this treatment you won’t be adapting the child to the world; you will be adapting the world to the child.  Instead of trying to force the child with autism to understand how the world works, you will teach the child how to function in the world.

TEACHH or the Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children, is a way of helping the child with autism avoid the behaviors that deem them “strange” or outsiders in the real world.  Instead of a child making a gesture or a loud noise when experiencing pain or other feelings, the child will be taught how to express the feeling with other communication skills.  This is not as easy as it sounds as the root of the initial reaction must be researched and studied, but it has been successful for some.

The criticisms of TEACHH are abundant and argue the idea that the program is much too structured for such an unstructured disorder.  Some would debate that a child with autism that responds a certain way during treatment to an emotion won’t be able to carry over that feeling into the real world.  These critics believe that the line between these two worlds is so blurry for a child with autism that they can’t distinguish one place from the other, rendering the treatment worthless in the end.

While the critics of the critics will say that most children with autism understand the difference in the worlds the fact remains just that, SOME may feel different than others.  The important thing to remember with any autism treatment or therapeutic process is that not one treatment is going to work for every child.  Present different techniques to your child to see what they respond to best and stick with it to see results.

Entry Filed under: Treatment Types