When Your Sister Has Superpowers:

Growing Up With Autism In the Family

If you are a parent or teacher who needs insight into what it is like to be a teenager growing up with autism, or to be their sibling, this seminar is for you!

Bobbi Sheahan wrote, with Dr. Kathy DeOrnellas, What I Wish I’d Known About Raising a Child With Autism (Future Horizons, 2011), in which she shared lessons learned from the first five years of her daughter Bella’s life, focused on how the family learned of Bella’s autism.  Bella is now 16.  She and her 17-year-old sister Evelyn have shed their pseudonyms from the book and are here with their Mom to share the candid, humorous, revealing and sometimes raw realities of growing up with autism, from both a first-person and a sibling perspective.  Teenagers are notoriously difficult to understand, but Bella and Evelyn are here to enlighten with this fast-paced, compelling and sometimes humorous talk.

By attending this seminar, participants can:

• gain insight into the experience of growing up with an awareness of your own autism,
• gain insight about what it is like to be the sibling of a child with autism,
• learn more about how to support children and adolescents who have siblings with special needs
• learn more about how to support young children’s understanding of their siblings’ special needs, as well as their own.
• learn more about how autism in the family can impact the transition from childhood to young adulthood
• learn how to talk to your child about her sibling’s “autistic superpowers,” and to help her to appreciate some superpowers of her own that come along with having a sibling with special needs