Background:

Over the years, I have had countless informal conversations with carers, classroom assistants or additional attachment figures in families, day-care centres or preschool settings. These people shared many interesting observations about the interactions with the autistic children in their care, but in between consultations and tight scheduled professionals meetings, there usually was not enough time to give these important questions due consideration and attention.

However, these brief and off-the-cuff exchanges inspired me eventually to bundle relevant topics into subject groups and finally give them the structured framework of an online training course with 3 different stages. In this way, support workers from different geographical locations could become part of a diverse learners' group jointly expanding their knowledge by gaining access to a platform, where their informal and unanswered questions would take centre stage and be given the time and attention they truly deserved.

In my opinion, the unique contribution these professionals make on a day-to-day-basis, is not always sufficiently appreciated: Through their close connection and the regular 1:1 time spent with the children, care workers and assistants establish early key-relationships outside the nuclear family. They provide an important developmental stepping stone for the children to begin exercising and transferring their initial homegrown skills and achievements to important others in a first step away from the parents. 

As a transitional group of people placed between family and wider social context, they also play a significant bridging role in the effort to integrate autistic children into same age peer groups in mainstream education, which, to me, remains the gold standard, when successfully conducted and mutually beneficial for all children involved. Being surrounded by and imitating other children's spontaneous and playful behaviour on a regular basis, holds the key to many further developmental steps down the line, that cannot be replicated or substituted by adults.

The my:PART-training aims at supporting this inclusive effort. With this course, I want to enable the workers, who actually spend most time with the children, to learn in more depth about the crucial contribution that reflecting and developing the quality of their own relationship with the young autistic child makes in facilitating continuous development and a successful integration.

So, why "myPART" and what is a "re(gu)lationship"?

My:PART
Perspectrum
Autism
Re(gu)lationship
Training

"Re-gu-lationship" is a play on words that combines 'relationship'  with the word 'regulation'.

In the broadest sense, regulation describes the inner process of making sense of emotions and modifying behaviour, thoughts or physiological reactions that arise from them. Developmentally speaking, this is closely linked to the development of a sense of self, as well as playing a vital role in all learning-processes and in establishing successful social interactions with other children.

Yet, only in the context of a relationship can a child be helped by an accompanying adult to perceive, regulate and classify different emotions that arise for example in unfamiliar or changing situations or whilst attempting to process sensory stimuli or new impressions.

As children with an autism-spectrum-disorder have profound difficulties forming relationships, sharing attention and interacting with others in an emotionally attuned and reciprocal fashion, the development of their emotion-regulation is often delayed and beset by complications.

Consequently, young autistic children benefit enormously from co-regulative and attuned adult presence, that from the outset prioritises and emphasises joint processing of emotions. In my experience, many therapies and teaching methods can be implemented much more successfully, if at first sufficient time was invested in regulation-focused attachment work with the child.

Being an empathetic and emotionally available caregiver, offering orientation and assurance in crises moments or challenging situations, is a complex and demanding task.

Therefore, it is very essential, that those support workers, who become "PART" of a helping relationship by serving as important attachment figures for young children on the autism spectrum, receive adequate training and supervision. The myPART®-training course is a small contribution to this overall endeavour.