T.E.A.M. Habilitation & Respite

 T.E.A.M.'s  Approach to Provider and Child Relationships

1. Children learn from people with whom they have positive emotional relationships. T.E.A.M. Providers are encouraged to be fun, animated, energetic and entertaining. 
2. Autism particularly affects children’s ability to engage in social relationships. T.E.A.M. Providers use every opportunity to teach social interactions and prepare the client for social situations.
3. With T.E.A.M. Habilitation & Respite, teaching is embedded within positive social relationships between the Provider and Child. 
4. We foster warm, appropriately affectionate and playful relationships as part of day to day, moment to moment treatment. This relationship allows positive affect during teaching, which is the core part of the T.E.A.M. Habilitation & Respite success.

 What is T.E.A.M.?

 Train

We use basic Floor Time Play and Shadowing to develop a relationship between Provider and Client. We teach children first to find pleasure, then purpose and function. While we play we teach nouns, then layer with verbs, then adjectives, then adverbs and so on. T.E.A.M. also Teaches Communication, Play Imitation and Social Skills and Typical Age Behaviors all while playing and entertaining the child. 

 Enrich

We enrich the child’s life with Social Skills, Self Help Skills, Age Appropriate Behaviors, Peer Relationships and Family Bonding. We first start by playing with play figures or dolls and act out hugs, kiss, walking, sitting, standing. Then we encourage the child to “kiss mommy” possibly for the first time we have helped to structure a true physical contact between the child and the parent. Things only build from there…It enriches not only the Child’s life, the parent’s life, also yours when you see the product of your work in life altering ways…how great is that?

 Accommodate

Children With ASD are very special. They have sensory issues, behavioral issues and integration issues. T.E.A.M. believes we should accommodate these issues and give the child new ways to live in a non-accommodating environment. For example, helping children that are soothed by jumping simple ways to attain the same soothing sensation by shrinking the behavior into something much smaller and more accepted like bouncing their leg or standing up briefly to stretch muscles during class or services. These children need the comfort the stemming behaviors bring. So if it's hand flappers, we can shrink that behavior into tapping a finger. Behaviors that mark them as unusual can be replaced with more typical behaviors everyone does.

  Mainstream

Our Ultimate goal is to mainstream children with ASD. Mainstream them into peer classrooms, peer relationships. Later on to adult relationships, independent living and work skills, marriage, parenting, self acceptance.