The Autism Parenting Hub

It is disturbingly and overwhelmingly common for parents of autistic children to put all their energy into having to chase a diagnosis (rather than supporting their child) and then once it is given, to be left with little or no meaningful guidance.

The Transforming Autism Parenting Hub is to address precisely this issue, and to provide extremely comprehensive, navigable, engaging and trustworthy guidance, resources, tools and other support, and to include a strong community element for mutual support and sharing.  One of the Hub’s guiding principles is that everything on it will be exceptional. Another is that it will guide parents by the hand through their Autism Parenting journey so that their energies can be used primarily on their children.  Both will benefit immeasurably.

Help shape the development of our Hub.  Take this Questionnaire about what would be most useful to you.

The Hub will be a coherent and interactive resource of original, well-researched, validated material in one place and in one trusted and authoritative voice. Amongst many other things, our Hub will initially include:

  • Experiences and research on a very wide range of treatments
  • Interviews with parents who have been through such treatments, as well as prominent practitioners
  • Simple, but very carefully put together and genuinely useful, guides through dealing with various common issues or with various authorities
  • Checklists for personal use and for use with health and other professionals
  • Tips and hacks for ensuring the best outcomes in all areas, based on parents’ real experiences
  • Various tools to help parents (for example, we already have our Q-CHAT early diagnosis checklist tool developed in association with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University)
  • Specially created video courses for parents (and practitioners) devised by highly capable and reputable autism specialists (these will be run as live courses with closed groups and Q&A sessions.  They may eventually be accredited by a UK University with a well-regarded child-psychotherapy department that we are in discussions with about such collaboration)
  • Community features for networking between parent
  • An area for each user, where they can post their own content publicly or to share with their contacts
  • Support Forums
  • A wide range of relevant articles
  • Regular Webinars with highly experienced and capable therapists (we already have several of these)
  • Conversations with prominent autism experts and influencers, as well as household names who are themselves perhaps autism parents.
  • This list will continually expand as The Hub evolves

The idea is to save each parent from having to continually re-invent the wheel to know how to give their autistic children the best prospects for happiness and fulfilment in life, so that they can spend more of their energies actually being present with them, building a strong and robust relationship and supporting their development in multiple ways.

Incredibly, nothing like this currently exists, and we are determined to transform the lives of parents and their autistic children with the development of this invaluable resource.

We are in the early days of development, but have so far been receiving pro-bono support from Accenture and Karmarama to scope the Hub concept with a sample of Autism Parents to be sure it reflects the real needs of the community and is delivered in a way that works best for them.

We'll keep you posted as we work towards the creation of this, and how you might be able to help along the way.