Issues and Challenges
Many children with autism can be taught in mainstream schools which are carefully adapted to suit the child. Baugh and Roberts (2011) stated that “Careful evaluation of each child, the availability of a range of supports, creativity, flexibility, and good communication with parents are critical ingredients to success”.
Benefits of including children with autism include learning age-appropriate social skills, raising their confidence level as they make friends (Travelplus, 2010) and provide opportunities to participate in a wide variety of interesting and creative activities. (Allen & Cowdery, 2009)
With the good comes the bad. There are many concerns about including a child with autism, such as whether the teacher is aware of Autism (Travelplus, 2010) and Allen and Cowdery (2009) raised concerns on are there any specialized services for the child such as occupational therapy. Teachers need to be trained and understand Autism to provide the necessary adaptations for the child. Teachers also might not understand how to cope with an autistic child’s challenging behavior.
The pace of learning in a mainstream classroom might be too fast for the child to cope with. With this, accidents may happen in class if the child is stressed or gets irritated by his peers.
The child with autism might be bullied in class by their peers. When children see someone acting weird, they would conclude that the child is not normal and begin to tease and bully. Isybee Family (2010) also mentioned that “kids can be very cruel and this can impact severely on the development of an already sensitive individual with learning difficulties.”
As Crow (n.d.) said that children tend to imitate the behavior of others, no matter whether it’s a good or bad behavior, children will imitate the child with autism’s behavior such as flapping and spinning. By doing these actions, they are teasing the child with autism.
Would parents want to risk undoing all the progress done by the child with autism?