Joe’s Wish To Talk

Joe was diagnosed with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder)  at 2 years old. From a young age, Joe presented as a clever and intrigued little boy. He loves numbers, words, patterns, looking at books, musical instruments and discovering how things work, but part of his presentation of Autism was that he was a couple of years delayed in his verbal skills, so his family enlisted the support of Tree of Hope to fundraise £10,000 to fundraise for speech and language therapy, as well as learning to build his play and interaction skills.

As well as weekly speech and language therapy sessions, Joe’s family also sought a semi-intensive individualized early intervention programme of 15 hours a week of ABA therapy (Applied Behaviour Analysis), to address his difficulties. ABA is an adapted teaching style derived from the science of behaviour, which uses positive reinforcements, and is data driven and scientifically proven to be effective. A combination of these two therapies have been really beneficial to Joe as well as being fun and it has given Joe new challenges. He has grown in confidence and understanding and even from very early on in his journey he started making more recognisable speech sounds and words and has gone from strength to strength.

Joe is now in main stream school and is reading and writing and his family are really pleased with the results the combination of speech and language therapy as well as ABA have helped him to achieve. The support they received from Tree of Hope with the initial fundraising “was invaluable! Please do keep supporting ABA families” Mum Nicola told us.