Occupational therapy practitioners provide sensory-based interventions to support children as they learn academically, develop self-regulation skills, and participate in play and activities of daily living skills alongside their peers. These interventions are used both for children who have a specific sensory-related diagnosis as well as children…

Autistic children and adults who are non-verbal/minimally verbal or have an intellectual disability have often been excluded from Autism Spectrum Disorder research. Historical, practical and theoretical reasons for this exclusion continue to deter some researchers from work with this underserved population. We discuss why these reasons are neither…

Recent workforce trends in healthcare point to a growing need to prepare social workers capable of providing integrated behavioral health care in multidisciplinary settings serving at-risk youth. This article reports on a project that involved the development and implementation of a graduate-level social work specialization focused on integrated…

Foster care is a government-based, temporary system of support for children and adolescents whose biologic parents are either unwilling or unable to parent them. Variability exists with regard to the type of foster care continuity of services offered as well as to the placement homes themselves, and--of the nearly half-million youth currently…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present unique needs regarding sexuality education. While the topic of sexuality has received increased attention in the fields of intellectual and developmental disabilities generally, less consideration has focused on the unique needs of individuals with ASD specifically. This paper presents one…

This article discusses the role in the Netherlands of independent regional advisory teams made up of professionals who have experience with individuals who exhibit challenging behaviors. One team's methods are illustrated by describing the case of a completely isolated 24-year-old man who, after a 7-year intervention, was able to fulfill a long…

A multidisciplinary team, including representatives from medicine, psychology, and residential living, examined 436 mentally retarded residents' regimen of psychotropic medications, with the goal of finding the least restrictive method of behavior management and lowest drug dosage. Significant reductions in psychotropic drug use were observed,…

The time for school psychologists to invest concentrated and intensive intervention is when students are very young and still in general education settings. This paper presents suggestions on ways to accomplish this through data collection, design of an intervention, staff training, modifying an intervention, and teamwork. To illustrate the…

This paper describes characteristics of and educational implications for children with Hunter's syndrome, a rare, genetic lysomal storage disorder resulting from an absence of the enzyme iduronate-2-sulphatase. Boys born with this sex-linked disease are born with little or no clinical manifestations, but generally are diagnosed by the age of three…

This manual for child welfare staff and foster/adoptive parents is intended to provide guidelines for serving abused and neglected children who are in family foster care and adoption. The first section is on substitute care and permanency planning and offers an historical perspective on substitute care and definitions of family foster care and…

The provision of a coherent "parenting," "teaching," and "developmental" program is a complex undertaking. It has all the makings of an organizational, managerial, and therapeutic nightmare when different types of workers, with marked differences in personality and values, become responsible for different children with a variety of problems in a…