Programme: European Commission Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities DG
Project summary:
The proposed project aims to develop a new crisis programme and test its impact on families with children with autism focusing on their social inclusion, social interaction and quality of life. The project partnership will establish a crisis intervention programme for families with children with autism. Pilot testing of the programme will take a form of a call line Autism 112 where a team of trained experts will be available to help families of children with ASD in the most critical situations. They will be able to ask for a help in order to manage the behavioural and communication problems of their children.
An expert team for autism will provide an expert help and will recreate a normal situation in the family. The main goal of the project is to show that improvement of behaviour of children with ASD leads to better functioning of the whole family. The fact is that a child’s disability directly affects all family members. Parents experience greater stress, feelings of grief, lack of energy and time for hobbies and professional growth, they lose their social contacts. The same is true for sibling of children with autism who often do not have good relations with each other. All these problems lead to critical situation when the family does not see any further solution.
It is also true that the challenging behaviour of children with autism is always a reflection of unsuccessful communication and misunderstanding of social situations. That is why the proposed crisis programme will include the whole family and teach them all how to react and control the critical situations. The social experiment will therefore test to what extent the family situation improves in terms of stress reduction, enhancing social activities of the family, enabling parents to dedicate more time to their professional growth and therefore giving them more opportunities in the labour market
after taking part in the crisis programme.
Project partners:
– Pyramid Educational Consultants, Ltd UK (United Kingdom);
– Ministrstvo za delo, druzino in socialine zadeve (Slovenia);
– VsI Socialiniu inovaciju centras (Lithuania);
– Fundacja SYNAPSIS (Poland).
Project duration: 2011 July – 2013 July