Turn Autism Around

An Action Guide for Parents of Young Children with Early Signs of Autism

By: Mary Lynch Barbera PhD RN BCBA-D

Narrated by: Mary Lynch Barbera PhD RN BCBA-D

Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

This is the first book of its kind that calls attention to an important fact: Parents can make a tremendous impact on their child through behavioral practices taught at home. Dr. Barbera has created a tool kit that any parent can use to help remediate - and in some cases eliminate - some symptoms of autism and other developmental delays in young children, even in as little as 15 minutes a day.

Developmental delays and signs of autism usually show up before 18 months of age, yet children are often not diagnosed until they are four or five years old. In Turn Autism Around, Dr. Mary Barbera explains why parents can't afford to worry and wait in long lines for evaluations and treatment while not knowing how to help their children. She empowers parents, caregivers, and early intervention professionals to regain hope and take back control with simple strategies to dramatically improve outcomes for their children.

Dr. Barbera has created a new approach to teaching kids with developmental delays that uses the science of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) married with a positive, child-friendly methodology that any parent can use - whether or not their child has delays - to learn to teach communication skills, socialization strategies, as well as tackle sleep, eating, potty training, and behavior challenges in a positive, effective, and lasting way.

Turn Autism Around is the first book of its kind that calls attention to an important fact: Parents can make a tremendous impact on their child's development through behavioral practices taught at home, even in as little as 15 minutes a day. Her program shows these autism and developmental delays can be remediated, and in some cases, delays can be caught up altogether, if parents intervene while the child is young.

This book is for parents of young children aged one to five years who are passionate about helping their child as well as learning how they can change the trajectory of their child's and family's life.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2021 Mary Lynch Barbera (P)2021 Hay House, Inc.

Great resource tool

I found this book to be a very helpful resource with actual tools you can use to help teach your child with autism. What Dr. Barbera presents are simple steps with repetition. As a grandparent of a child with ASD I wanted to learn more how to help my 4 year old granddaughter. I wish I would have found this book 2years ago.

Great easy guide for parents of autism!

I already enjoyed the first 3 chapters so far!!! It a simple easy to read guide for parents and caregivers...it gives me hope for the future of my child and to all children with special needs...early intervention is key! Looking forward to reading the rest of her book on audible along with the hardcover book as well!

Thank you for your wisdom.

As a grandma of a Autistic grandson, I much appreciated step by step in our journey. Hope all of us grow a little each day to help our special loved ones that is all around us, diagnosed or not.
Blessings 💫

Action guide for parents

Finally a book that tells me how to help my child in easy to listen to language. Already seeing progress.

All Parents and Professionals Need this book!

As a special education professional and now a parent of a young child I can’t recommend this book enough! This book is an action guide indeed! It gives step by step processes that everyone who reads it can use to begin helping their child and/or clients. Please stop waiting and get started with this book today you will see the differences!

Easy to follow

Nice easy to follow, while driving
It validates. Lot that i do already
I hope she comes out with more books specially on VB-MAPP

Good for beginner parents but not in-depth enough

I love Mary Barbara and her podcast and I don't want to take away from her level of expertise and the valuable information I have gained from her. But, this book was somewhat of a let-down for me. I was expecting more of a step by step of how to create my own program at home but was only offered fluff about how she is "going to" explain the Turn Autism Around approach. Somehow I missed the actual explanation altogether... there were some practical tips included but I felt that she could've really pulled more out of those and left out some of the repetitive anecdotes. With her knowledge and experience, I feel that this book could've been twice the size and offered much more for the parent as far as really holding their hand through the process. She even mentioned the fact that there are not many ABA therapists and BCBAs out there to help us! Please consider creating a therapy manual! And no offense-but please consider having a professional reader for the audiobook next time!

Horrible Advice

Her child is autistic because she allowed him to watch Barney and Friends nonstop when he was a toddler. It’s called “virtual autism.” Look it up as your child may be misdiagnosed too! Stop the screen time, correct the autistic like symptoms. From a mom who knows firsthand.

No good at all!!

Talks as if autism is a disease to be cured. If there is a magical plan to cure it. Not something to be cured. Book is framed wrong. The point of view is wrong. Autism is a beautiful mind and should be talked about how to help an autistic kind.

Don’t stop here

I ordered this book when my child was showing signs of autism. I tried to implement the strategies as well as I could, paid to be a part of Mary’s parent training & enrolled my child in ABA.
But what I regret was not knowing that ABA is not the only option.
After about a year and a half of ABA and minimal improvement we turned to functional medicine.
My child made dramatic improvements immediately with heavy metal detox, parasite cleanse & overall improved gut health.
He is now thriving in typical PreK and no longer meets the criteria for ASD. He previously had a level 2 diagnosis. Everyone is floored.
So, all I’m saying is don’t stop here.
I commend anyone that helps ASD children and I am not putting down the author or her work! But I wish I knew about functional medicine before I did. I had never even heard of it until this point. I will say though, my child does not need ABA anymore. Find an integrative MD, DO or naturopath. Find the root cause of your child’s dysfunction. You may be surprised to see ABA not be needed down the road!

The most helpful book I found was Jenny McCarthy’s book Healing and Preventing Autism. If you get no other book get it.

Also I want to say I never felt encouraged reading Mary’s books or doing her trainings. The information was always very dry and not optimistic. It definitely felt like Mary was committed to the belief that autism can’t improve dramatically. I know she talked about her goal of her son being indistinguishable from his peers and it not happening. She then goes on to say how “it rarely if ever happens.” This may be true if you rely only on conventional medicine. But in functional/holistic/integrative medicine this happens as it did with my child. I still appreciate the effort Mary makes, but if you’re like me and don’t want to give up and settle for disease management, go to root cause medicine in functional/holistic/integrative medicine.