good evening i will go see and welcome to another edition of focus on tonight my guest is brett bucks and brad is the executive director of the autism family services of new jersey we're going to talk a lot about autism and the individuals with autism and you for a while so thank you very much for watching and for anybody who has more ideas for our show you always feel free to to give george mco a call and we'll be do our best to get those subject areas some of the ideas on the air for you so but bret bret thank you for coming on how know you're perhaps as a guy these days and i know you've done a lot of things and i know prior to your point as executive director you were a professor at rutgers robert wood johnson medical school and you did some did a lot of work in autism you've been in the field way way into the eighty's and i know you've worked in hawaii massachusetts new jersey and in a variety of senior executive level positions and you present it many conferences and internationally and  you're verb announcing what you do so i was hoping that you'd give us a brief overview of autism family services in new jersey you know what it is and who would serve us great thank you very much a pleasure to be here and i really appreciate the opportunity not only to speak about or agency but just autism in general because of how profound it's impacting our society at autism family services of new jersey we support children and adults with autism have a heavy focus on children in particular providing what we refer to as a b a also as applied behavior analysis to families right now we're currently providing that service and mama county and hudson county but we're actually beginning services in mercer county our offices are in hamilton so we feel it's just our duty to provide that particular service locally or loss will be providing that service and burlington county provide some respite supports oftentimes you have families who just need a little bit me time for mom and dad and so a respite worker will go in and provide a short amount of time so the family can go out and do what they need to get done for their regular life and when we provide a b a it tends to be for children who have some significant challenging behaviors kinds of behaviors usually where there's potentially self aggression self harm and we use the a b a to change their behavior and give them a good set of skills hopefully as they go through their childhood and ultimately to hopefully get them and independent as possible for adulthood where part of an organization known as the family resource network and so we also have services where we provide services for families children adults with epilepsy through our epilepsy foundation we also have an organization within our umbrella name caregivers which provide support coordination to adults with intellectual disabilities and autism and then causes and you know the characteristics and that's a really great question and again i really appreciate your heading maybe for that reason right now i always tell people i started my career in the laid out nine hundred eighty s and back then the autism diagnosis rate was one in ten thousand and when you look at supporting individuals with down syndrome and some other developmental disabilities the numbers are still around one in ten thousand give or take but something has occurred with the autism diagnosis where in just twenty five years we've gone from one in ten thousand to one in forty five nationally and one in forty one in new jersey new jersey always has a slightly higher number  towns we don't know why the numbers have increased we know that certainly part of it is better diagnosis autism we call it autism spectrum disorders and the way to describe that is you know when somebody is born with down's syndrome or cerebral palsy or some of the other disabilities we can genetically say that this is down's syndrome certainly with autism it's a little bit more gray and i think part of the diagnosis has increased i  work with adults the autism diagnosis came out in the one nine hundred forty s so i used to work with adults who were born in the one nine hundred thirty s and we kind of knew clinically that they had autism but there they were born actually before the diagnosis occurred so we certainly know that it tends to somewhat at times be a catch all for other disabilities but that's only part of it we clearly know that the diagnosis rate has increased exponentially and we're not sure why new jersey is one of the leading states in the country doing actual research rocker's university montclair state university just to name a few or actually doing genetic research to understand the ca to see if there if it's something from the environment to see if it's you know what's causing the changes that are happening but i think it's more of a i  think as a social worker and as administrator of a nonprofit agency supporting people it's really a profound issue and so far of the implication it will have on public policy for state  country when you're talking about having having every forty fifth child in this country being a child with autism it's every forty first child in new jersey and by the way the all to rates are higher for boys so we know right now the autism diagnosis rate for profound impact on all facets of our society has an impact on schools it's an impact on adult services but it's also an impact on living in a place like new jersey where we're so densely populated and being part of the new york metropolitan area or part of the philadelphia metro area you know we have if you are trying to help people understand the numbers i always use a basic analogy if you stop in your favorite coffee place tomorrow at eight am there's probably fifty people waiting in line or milling around the coffee place and when you have those kinds of numbers of a one in forty one or forty five rate you're one of those people is either going to be a father a mother a grandfather a grandmother a neighbor an uncle and aunt where autism right now is no those one of those issues that will impact most families will impact most facets of our society and ultimately how are we going to support all the children and adults who are going to be coming into our schools and towards all services there's the potential quite frankly i believe that it will max out our services as exists and so because part of reason i appreciate you're having me really is just to help educate people but at the same time hopefully begin the process which i think has not happened one thing you and i were talking about before the show is a majority of people in the media have yet  to i don't think it's any you know anything negative or so much going on in our world but haven't begun to focus on this as a public policy issue alternately i think we're starting to see a little bit of that it's unfortunate to me that either mr trump or secretary clinton are talking about autism and again i don't think it's gotten up to that level yet but when you talk to many families in new jersey and across the country again this is an issue that is becoming a part of their family  in the family who has an autism diagnosis and i always use it as an example because i think that's a family going to start to see when again when you look at these numbers you come from a large family you probably already have a grandchild or a cousin or somebody who has the diagnosis right and if you have a smaller family it's probably also something that you're going to start to have to address at some point you know somebody in your family has a child it seems like it's touching you know when someone's that's right so we talk about individuals and services that vailable and independent adult that's a really great question depends upon the needs of the child and i think one of the things that we're that's very important if you think you have a child who has that becomes or any intellectual development disability becomes critical to start earlier intervention a soon as possible and you know we meet families who are beginning to get diagnosed they have  thought or an idea that something isn't right they go to a pediatrician and we're seeing children being diagnosed at eighteen months two years old and those families immediately start early intervention but not all children will show the signs and so it becomes complicated you might not get the diagnosis until you're three or four and a noob lost the ability to have lost the first two years for intervention so that first begins with early intervention as soon as you possibly can that you know that begins to set the child up for later in life your question is a really important one and what we tell families is you begin five a nineteen year old daughter without a disability and i remember you know her mother and i planning her future when she was six months old and most families do that and it becomes critically important if you have a child who's a month and a half old eighteen months old two years old you've got a diagnosis but you actually begin planning out their all some families choose to graduate early but the the earlier service begins and then having that in mind most of all tell the family you know if you want your child to be employed want to become an adult and even though the child is four years old you're going to begin directing services and school personnel to get that child as independent as possible as early as possible and sometimes children the children we support as i mentioned earlier have significant behaviors and so the reason we're addressing those behaviors as early as we can is ultimately for the same reason if we can through the use of a b a begin to change those behaviors hopefully ultimately by the time they become adults they're either going to land in some kind of employment or some kind we have a lot of post secondary programs that are cropping up new jersey as a leader in post secondary programs for people to autism you know being able to go to have a college experience for some people it might be you know staying at home for two days a week but volunteer ing and so there's a lot of different different paths towards adulthood that we start that as early as possible and through intervention through addressing the behaviors if they exist they don't always exist which is you know sometimes people if you sometimes people who think with autism that everybody's going to be the same that's not true because you  know you have something like dr temple grandin who you know has a ph d in you know makes movies and you have other people who might work three days a week and so it really is when we use that term spectrum that's a good definition for that reason i think you know a lot of times you talk about early intervention and a lot of times you know parents you know maybe concerned and they may say well maybe my child is not developing the way other children are at the certain signs that parent or parents can look for at the birth of baby and you know it's never too early i'm sure you know as you said peterson's have input into that but what should parents be looking for so that's a great question some of the  some of the more standard ones i think are still propre it you know limited eye contact what we're finding so the research that i think is very interesting is that young children with autism have less of a concept of self so were some time to run tests with little children mirror tests and and oftentimes children spectrum you know you put a mirror in front of a child and they kind of instantly realize that the reflection of themselves child with autism sometimes doesn't have that reaction it's very interesting that's we're starting to see people do some of that work but then more traditional you know sometimes we so children who  it may appear that they're there have issues of hearing issues and hard of hearing but that's not that they're hard of hearing it's that they're not processing the information they're saying to them and so it might look like there's a hearing impairment  that's not really the case and then oftentimes too we're seeing children who more stereotypical behaviors are doing some of ready doing some of the you know the yelling and the crying and some of the self stimulatory behavior i think this individual to become productive citizens because they're all capable of being productive citizens absolutely and getting away from that stigmatization that individuals with autism cannot be productive and it just is they can be hard for you know employment they can be assisted and supported so how do we move society in that direction it's a great question when so it's very important for your families who may be watching you have a teenager with autism what's very important  vocational rehabilitation services if they're invited they will the tenth of the child fourteen page you might again as i was mentioning earlier you might say well my child going to be in high school to at least age eighteen potentially to new jersey one thing that i think is a very effective service is what's known as community based instruction and that gets children and teenagers with autism into the community to have real work experiences volunteer experience national movement to really increase the amount of people with autism to be employed and usually when we look at people disability that's an inclusive minority and so that because people autism and multiple different kinds of disabilities and about twenty percent of people as a minority group are employed and so we realize a number of years ago we really need to focus on helping people get jobs come out of high school go into some of the post secondary programs but if not that's not an option to go through support employment and and i believe very strongly that similar to what you just said that most people with autism and or disabilities can be employed with the right supports and ultimately that should be the goal it's not going to be the goal for everyone and that's under tangible for the majority of people that we support and love it should be the goal because ultimately employment whether employed for one day a week or five days a week and we talk about community integration you know we still live in a capitalist society and you know our you know you and i and everybody  you know we're you know what do we do we grow up we say you know what i want to be what you want to be when you grow up in a you know we are part of our culture part of our personality is shaped by what we do and we should have people disabilities and autism and particular should have that right but families have to drive really have to drive that support and service and it's complicated because it's also easy to say everybody should be employed when they turned fourteen they should begin doing committee based instruction at the school offers and some of our districts i think have really embraced that concept or some version of it that might not give somebody an internship but you know they're working on life skills and they're trying to get them prepared for independence and i think the high school in particular in new jersey have really shifted towards you know get up you know they're going down the finish line so to speak and you know it was employment or some level of independence the goal is it should be how do we get that person to that finish line but we also tell families again start as early as possible you know if you've got somebody i know a family a very good friend who give you a very quick example her husband that he many years ago was a bartender not his career a lot of us go through when we're younger but then around ten he kept the connection with the restaurant and one day a week for the past  five or six years and he and his autistic son will go into the bar a prep to bore clean all of the glasses get it ready they've been doing that now all for a number of years ultimately going for the end result  you know how do i get him ready for adult life and they're doing that on their own that's not supported by the schools or even when the schools are going to use as many services that are possibly can but you also do it on your own you know and it's just you just take the kid and you've got somebody who you know has a landscaping business a bar or restaurant whatever business your name is like and we just come out for monday you know he wants to and he also works in an ice cream place same situation you know and families can sort of drive that as they go forward ok neither of the major presidential party candidates have really addressed the situation and so you know we welcome those individuals who may be representing you know either one of those candidates any one of the four candidates if they want to come on the show and talk about autism and social services and what their plans are for the future just contact princeton t v and we'll get some show before the election but i don't anticipate that happening now  i would say that is an opportunity to get your voice out there in the herd and let people know where you stand on the support very important issue but the last question we get in at a time brett i think one of the things that i want to talk about i know you have a lot  my phone number is seven three two two six two zero two zero i'm actually an extension to a five we welcome volunteers we do our beach bash which will be doing again next september  in the spring time we do an event for epilepsy foundation and event at stone pony which is actually just a lot of fun thank the pony that's right we do we also do run a lot of walks  runs and that's people really seem to respond to the walks in the run lately and we do want to liberty state park next month but the other thing which you know through the family support center through autism s middlesex county because we want to make sure that the families have the supports in the services they need if we can help you you know there's there are multiple organizations they all do great work and but that's the that's part of the problem it's not that sometimes families are in crisis and they just want to talk to somebody who first off can listen and point them in a direction you know if we can help them you know how  think we're talking about sort of events and i think one of the things is not only volunteering but we're always looking for people who want to do the do the work and people who are looking for employment whether that's a respite worker or being a behavior  h or quite frankly working with families and being an ambassador meeting other family groups you know our agency ultimately is a family focused organization the family resource network  organization and so our that's at the core of our mission is to work the families and provide the services and support they need a lot of times it's really helpful to have other family members be a part of that families know best you know  mentioned earlier my daughter's nineteen and doesn't have a disability and i always say that families you know are she's in her second year of college and so our relationship dramatically changed last year you know i'm still her father  know love her very much and i'm still probably always going to be the bank system with all of you know as if you have got kids in college but she's an adult now and so families of a child with autism even when adult an adult with autism gets employed a family member in the the mother in the father always still in the role of care provider and so i'm no longer my daughter's care provider you know our relationship is shifting but when you've got a child with a disability doesn't matter how independent they are the family is always going to be the care provider and if they're not independent and we know that there's many families with children and adults again similar to the children we're supporting where they're at home we have elderly care providers you know who may have a forty or fifty year old adult with autism or disabilities with limited services or it becomes even that much more challenging when you've got somebody you're starting to have aging issues yourself and now i've got a child and  who have autism are very productive citizens in society need your support and need your need your help and will do everything possible to make sure that they will you down if you give them a chance anyway i'm lugo's themes i want to thank you for watching tonight and focus on what have another guest next week so until then stay healthy stay focused and i'll see you next week another edition of focus on