Watch this CBS news clip of a little boy with Asperperger's syndrome, a form of Autism, and his Golden Retriever service dog Candy running agility. In the three years of blogging here at A Dog's Life, I have to say, this is my favorite dog clip of all time. Maybe even ever!

Many of you tell me that you never watch the movies on blogs or emails. If you have a slow computer or a slow connection, be sure to check this out somewhere else. It is worth it.

While there is no specific scientific proof that dogs help kids with autism (yet!), more and more families report that dogs do in fact help their autistic children. I have seen it personally many times over.

Last last year I blogged my Lab client Hunter, and his little autistic boy Merrill. Many of you have been asking me how they are doing. They are doing well, but due to time constraints, the family was not able to keep commuting the three plus hours to class round trip.I have not seen them since the last blog, although we do continue to communicate via email. My work with Hunter has shown me just how difficult it is for families with young kids to carry out the type of training that an Autism assist dog needs. Not that it isn't possible to train your own dog, but certainly it is much more difficult.

More and more I find myself working with families with autistic kids. This should come as no suprise because 1 in every 166 kids is affected. Some families want nice pets and others are hoping that their dog has what it takes to be a service dog.

Candy the dog in the clip above was trained by North Star Foundation in Connecticut. Click here to visit North Star's web site. It looks like they are doing fantastic work over there.

I wrote the Executive Director, Patty Dobbs Gross, and told her of my intention to blog Candy and asked her if she had a quote to add.

Did she ever!

I have included the entire word document that she sent me because while she talks specifically about her program, she also gives a wonderful explanation about what is involved in training an Autism assist dog and offers help to families. Patty has also asked me to work with one of their dogs that is being placed in Maine this summer, and I will be honored to do so.

We Help Children Find Their Way
by Patty Dobbs Gross

North Star Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to place assistance dogs with children who face challenges. To date we have helped over seventy-five families around the country to meet their children's social, emotional and educational goals through the use of well-bred and trained North Star dogs.

Over half the children we serve are on the autism spectrum, although we also place North Star dogs with children who face a serious illness or who have suffered a loss. We use a different model of placement than the traditional assistance dog model that most people are familiar with, and this is due to the different roles that our dogs play. While most Seeing Eye or Wheelchair dogs need to have a multitude of trained skills, such as turning on or off light switches and picking up dropped items, our dogs tend to have less technical tasks such as comforting a child through a tantrum. Often this comfort doesn’t come from a task to be trained, but from the dog’s relaxed presence and focused attention.

On the surface a long, attentive down/stay seems easy, and not especially glamorous to train; however, the ability to stay calm in the face of a child's loud and emotional upset requires a dog that has a mellow, nonreactive temperament and a long history of understanding that children's tantrums are sound and fury that signify nothing but impending rewards for calm canine compliance. We focus on selecting and socializing our dogs correctly to be able to safely and effectively intervene in the face of a child’s meltdown or anxiety states, and we stress the importance of appropriate and educated supervision for these interactions from families members and professionals alike.

The pups we select to partner with children on the autism spectrum are carefully bred; they have a genetically heightened ability to read the social cues of their children, which helps to strengthen the communication that develops between them. North Star puppies are handpicked for both temperament as well as soundness, and are raised in puppy raising homes with supervised contact with their children as early as possible. Our strongest commitment is to finding the optimal fit between child and dog, and then to support this team as they grow together.

Traditional assistance dogs are placed with their partners when they are over the age of two years, but for a child with a developmental disability, this delayed placement has the potential to influence the success of bonding between the child and the dog. By the age of two years, a dog's temperament is also well established. What if the dog has not had exposure during the early months to the child in question, or the specific challenges they present? With no experience in how to interpret autistic behaviors, the dog may react unpredictably. Children with autism or other developmental disabilities often display unusual behavior; sometimes they throw loud tantrums or fail to grant the appropriate body space that we unconsciously and consistently grant each other. Dogs depend greatly on nonverbal communication, and are apt to be uncomfortable with violation of "personal space."

Supervision is essential to creating an assistance dog placement with a child on the autism spectrum, for the pairing any dog with a child with autism or related developmental disability comes with risk. The same difficulties with communication that children with autism experience with people can exist with dogs. Dogs take their cues from humans regarding how relationships are structured; training is just a concentrated form of communication about what behaviors we want to encourage or discourage. If a child with autism does not make it clear to his/her puppy that playful nips hurt, then the puppy will naturally nip more. It is important for the caretakers of any child to understand that their role is to ensure that the relationship between child and puppy is consistently gentle and mutually enjoyable.

Careful breeding and educated puppy selection go a long way toward reducing training time and increasing safety, as does establishing optimal behavioral patterns right from the start. Interestingly, there are desired qualities in a North Star dog that cannot be trained; they instead are recognized, carefully nurtured, and supported. A concept Guiding Eyes for the Blind refers to as "intelligent disobedience" is valued in any assistance dog for both adults and children. If a blind person approached an open manhole, it is desirable that the dog ignore the command to "Go forward," and instead lie down in front of his/her partner. This quality of understanding needed to interpret their environment and protect his or her partner is largely found in the dog's genes, but equally high emphasis must be placed on early nurturing and training of the puppies, for a pup afraid of physical correction may well be too afraid to disobey a command and think for itself. It is the interplay between nature and nurture that matters the most here, and this is a dynamic, not a static, process.

When we select a puppy to work with a child we look for superior social skills and a large measure of intelligence and problem solving ability; these qualities are then shaped through the interplay of nature and nurture. Our method of training North Star dogs is completely positive, for a dog raised with correction based training is often anxious and useless in situations that require a dog to have a level of "intelligent disobedience" (i.e., if a child suddenly takes off you need a dog that will shadow him, even if he has been given the command to stay in the yard. This quality cannot be trained, as it is a function of the quality of the breeding along with a training program that offers a dog rewards and encouragement for the act of thinking for itself.) We work with our children's parents, teachers and therapists as we take a holistic approach to our placements. Anyone on a child's team can help to create a North Star dog's role, with siblings especially important members of this team in our work within the home.

All of North Star's placements are family-based, with every member given a special job to perform with their North Star dog. The job assignments are created with bonding issues uppermost in mind. For example, to facilitate bonding, jobs such as feeding will be given to the child with a challenge, but we also try to draw the rest of the siblings into the placement with jobs such as walking or grooming. The dogs we use at North Star are from genetic lines known for sociability within breeds known for their social nature, and the pups we place are determined to form individual bonds with every member of their immediate family. This inclusion of a child with autism's siblings is a unique feature of our philosophy of placement, for the most important group a child with autism should be fully integrated into is within is his or her own family

A North Star dog becomes a moving focal point of the family's attention, and this helps immeasurably to increase the communication as well as fun that takes place within the home. The nonverbal avenue of interacting with a dog is an important advantage here, as sometimes spoken language can get in the way of successfully communicating with a child with autism. For a child with autism who has had an exhausting day struggling to communicate in a manner that is foreign to him, spending time with his dog is a nice way to structure critical down time, which can greatly reduce the frequencies of meltdowns. The concept of "time out" with an assistance dog reliably holding a down-stay to provide comfort can be seen as a positive way that a child can have the rough edges of his or her day smoothed over.

An assistance dog can also act as a bridge between the activities of a therapy session and a child's home program, providing familiar cues and structure to pragmatic language. This helps to generalize language learned in a speech therapy session, and to translate it into conversation spoken in the larger world beyond the walls of the therapy room. Children with autism often have great difficulty in generalizing learned speech to new situations and people. This is due to their overly selective attention and tendency to respond to only a limited number of cues. Using an assistance dog as a tool for teaching pragmatic language at home and in the community can be as simple as rehearsing stock responses to the fairly predictable questions people are likely to ask when they see a well-trained dog wearing a vest with a patch that reads "Please Ask to Pet Me." I recently flew to Ohio with a puppy with such a vest, and I was stopped over and over again during the course of my travels to answer the same few questions. As children with autism tend to be dependent on verbal cues provided by others, this positive and predictable social response is a valuable tool to help with speech within natural settings within the home as well as the outside community. People who may have shied away from the responsibility of starting a conversation with your child, as well as keeping it in motion, often relax and rise to the challenge when a dog is available to help structure the questions and comments.

Assistance dogs can also be used to help children meet other therapeutic goals, such as those established in occupational or physical therapy, but perhaps the most important way North Star dogs help children is to increase their self esteem and feelings of social and emotional competence. Engaging a child to take an active and nurturing role in raising a puppy is an ideal way to teach responsibility as well as empathy. In order for empathy to develop, a child with autism must be able to take another perspective, something often quite difficult for children on the spectrum. As dogs are much simpler to understand, they are far easier for a children with autism to relate to, and it has been my experience that most of the children we serve become very solicitous of and attached to their North Star dogs. These relationships can serve as a stepping-stones to understand the give and take nature of the more socially and emotionally complicated relationships they will form with people.

Unfortunately, some children are not good candidates for placements involving a dog, such as children who are aggressive or rough. Some children with poor impulse control may still be appropriate candidates for an older, more stable dog with the necessary guidance and supervision, but a young and vulnerable dog would obviously not be appropriate in this case. Children who tend to lash out physically are not good candidates for any dog, assistance or not, at least not until these tendencies are brought under strict control, both for the safety of the dog as well as the child.

Parental involvement is crucial in a three-way placement of a child and a young dog or puppy, and although time-consuming, this job is not unpleasant. On the contrary, combining a well-bred and well-trained puppy or dog makes time spent working on a child's social, emotional, and educational goals more focused and fun. Attention paid when the child and the pup are together must be consistent and educated, but the parents I have come to know pay this type of attention to their children already. These parents also come to crave the emotional support their North Star dog gives them so freely. It is part of the joy of my job to watch these parents begin to understand that they get to love this dog as much as their children, and to reap the benefits of having an assistance dog in the family.

Puppy raising families with children become partners in training North Star dogs to meet a child with autism's specific needs. This community involvement is at the heart of our work, for I believe there is no better way to teach tolerance than through the eyes of a puppy being trained to mitigate a disability. Both puppy raising families along with the families that will receive our dogs work together with their North Star trainer, and are asked to enroll in a training classes together that emphasize positive reinforcement techniques to deal with the adolescent dog's desire to push the limits he or she has previously accepted with good-natured puppy charm. Many puppy raising families end up friends with the families who have received their puppies, something we encourage and appreciate.

Although our waiting list to receive a North Star dog is quite long, we also serve as a source of information and referrals for families who contact us. We have put together a list of ten organizations that place assistance dogs for children that is available upon request, and we are also happy to advise anyone with a specific question relating to selection or training of an assistance dog to work with a child. We provide this service free of any charge to keep kids safe, as it can be dangerous to partner a dog with a child with challenges incorrectly.

I have written a book entitled THE GOLDEN BRIDGE: A Guide to Assistance Dogs for Children Challenged By Autism or Other Developmental Disabilities (Purdue University Press/July, 2006). This book can be ordered directly from the publisher at www.thepress.purdue.edu or from Amazon.com. I have also produced several DVDs about the work we are accomplishing at North Star Foundation. These DVDs include “Raising Your North Star,” about how we select and train the pups we use in our work, “Northern Lights,” about how we incorporate our dogs into children’s therapeutic programs, and “Home Before Dark,” which documents our work with children on the autism spectrum. These DVDs are available to families of children with challenges free upon request, as education is an important part of our mission.

I thank you in advance for any help you can offer us, and we in turn are ready to offer help to any family who requests it, striving to be as constant a source of light and direction for children who face challenges as the real North Star…

Kind regards,

Patty
Patty Dobbs Gross

Executive Director

North Star Foundation

20 Deerfield Lane

Storrs, CT 06268

www.NorthStarDogs.com
northstarfoundation@charter.net

E-mail this entry to a friend