OHIO — The sounds of happy children fill mom Jackie Barlow’s home. She’s raising two boys: Johnny, 4, and Oliver, 3.
“So, even though he’s not verbal I know he knows his colors and his shapes because he’s able to do all the puzzles,” she said about Johnny.
Both of her sons have autism.
“Every kid is different,” she said.
Barlow has a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and knew early on something was going on with her oldest son.
When Johnny was three months old, she noticed he got really upset around large groups of people and he started to lose some words and skills around 13-months-old.
“John started to flap his hands, and he started to walk on his tiptoes,” Barlow said. “He started to do a lot of spinning.”
When Johnny was two, he was diagnosed with autism. Barlow was pregnant with Oliver at the time, and at first she blamed herself.
“I must have done something wrong,” she said. “This is my first one, but something that his therapist told me, they were like there’s nothing you would have done. He’s going to be born this way no matter what. There’s nothing, you can’t. You just work with him at this point. It’s nothing that you did.”
She had a much easier time processing Oliver’s autism diagnosis.
“I don’t know. I guess I was almost kind of grateful because it’s like now they can both kind of grow up together and not have to feel alone,” Barlow said.
According to the CDC, the disorder can be genetic, and Barlow is interested in genetic testing.
“I think with early intervention, I mean I have no doubts that these two will be able to be independent one day and if they can’t you know I’ll be there,” she said.
She said early intervention has helped both boys a lot. They go to Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Center for Autism in Rocky River.
“There are definitely programs who try to extinguish the behaviors and push you toward more of a societal norm I suppose, but my program really allows them to be themselves and learn how they want to learn,” Barlow said.
There’s no shortage of love or acceptance in this family, and spreading awareness about what it means to live with autism means a lot to this mom.
“More than one way to live a life, huh?” she said before kissing Oliver on the cheek.
Spectrum News spoke with the boys’ behavior analyst, Chiara Graver, and she said their progress is in part due to Barlow’s willingness to jump right in with therapy and follow through with the work at home.
“Both boys have made really quick progress,” she said. “They are both mastering their own types of communication. So, Johnny is using right now it’s called a PECS Book, Picture Exchange Communication System, where he will select a picture from the book and hand it over to a communication partner. So, he’s initiating a request. He’s not just waiting for us to say ‘what do you want.’ He’s looking through and making those decisions on his own. And Oliver has recently started actually using some verbal communication. So, he’s repeating things that we’re saying and over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen him use generative language, so instead of just repeating us he’s coming up with his own things.”
Graver said shifting the emphasis from awareness to acceptance helps reduce the stigma of autism and promotes inclusion among the neurodivergent community.
