Kristie Patten is the chair of the Department of Occupational Therapy at New York University whose cutting-edge work focuses on using strength-based approaches in autism. Join us in this episode as we delve into:

– How most OTs wound up using a deficits-based model with autistic kids and why this is not serving our clients well

– Why we should move away from withholding kids’ interests from them. We’ll also talk about how first-then schedules and even limiting screen time may fall into this category

– How we can support autistic clients to build from their strengths to support their joy and participation in life, leisure, and work

– What we should be doing instead of social skills groups

– Why it’s really easy to be a bad therapist and really hard to be a good one (plus some concrete steps to take to help get us there!)