Julia Moor: Playing, Laughing and Learning with Children on the Autism Spectrum: A Practical Resource of Play Ideas for Parents and Carers (Second Edition)

Many professionals who work with individuals with autismare often asked by parents to suggest books that are not‘‘too technical’’ and that provide speciﬁc examples of ideasthat can be easily implemented at home. Julia Moor’s book,‘‘Playing, Laughing and Learning With Children On TheAutism Spectrum: A Practical Resource of Play Ideas forParents and Carers’’ is an example of one such book. In theintroduction, Moor explains that she was driven to write thebook after her son was diagnosed with autism. Moor, aspecial educator, sought to compile a book of simple playideas that parents can try at home to increase their child’splay and social skills. Moor’s book is comprised of 16chapters that include speciﬁc strategies, examples, andresources for parents and other care providers.Moor begins with a brief explanation of why play is animportant skill, while clearly indicating that the book isintended to be a general resource and starting point forparents, not an instructional manual or program to be fol-lowed in its entirety. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 include infor-mation about different strategies for play interactions andinstruction, as well as plenty of speciﬁc examples of how toimplement the strategies. The information is often pre-sented in an easy-to-read bulleted format, and then inte-grated into brief narrative scenarios involving a child andthe use of a particular strategy. The other chapters eachfocus on speciﬁc play areas (e.g., music, turn taking,computers, physical activities, outdoor play, arts and crafts,etc.). Moor continues to use parent friendly language andeach chapter brims with practical ideas, examples, scripts,and resources.Unfortunately, some of the strategies recommended byMoor have weak to no research base behind them. Forexample, Moor speciﬁcally mentions Intensive Interaction,explaining it as a teaching strategy geared towards fol-lowing the child’s lead, and focusing on interactive, asopposed to directed play interactions. A quick review ofthe literature on this instructional method indicates that itsuse with individuals with autism is largely based on casestudies and data collected from interviews and question-naires (Nind 1999). Moor mentions Auditory IntegrationTraining (AIT) in Chapter 7 and goes on to devote a largesection of Chapter 9 to Sensory Integration Therapy. Nei-ther of these therapies are supported by strong empiricalresearch, nor have they routinely been subjected to rigorousscrutiny in peer reviewed journals (Dawson and Watling2000; Myers et al. 2007; Rogers and Ozonoff 2005). Moormakes the bold statement: ‘‘All children on the autismspectrum have sensory-processing difﬁculties to varyingdegrees.’’ (Moor 2008, pp. 142) However, she provides nocitation or reference for this claim. A brief literature searchindicates that researchers have concluded while atypicalsensory responses are present in many children with aut-ism, not all individuals with autism experience these unu-sual sensory responses (Dawson and Watling 2000; Myerset al. 2007; Rogers and Ozonoff 2005).In contrast, other teaching techniques that have a sig-niﬁcant research base are sometimes deemphasized byMoor. For example, home-based programs using tech-niques of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) are very