More on RDI

April 3, 2002

RDI stands for Relationship Development Intervention. It's a program developed

by the husband and wife team of Gutstein and le Sheely. They are

psychologists based in Houston. The goal behind RDI is to get kids on the

spectrum to relate to people for motives other than just getting their needs met

(instrumental interaction). Intervention consists of a series of games and

interactions designed to get ASD kids to developmentally normal levels of

" experience sharing, " or the joy/desire to interact with other people without

some sort of tangible reward. I can't explain it nearly as well as Dr. Gutstein

does in his book, " Solving the Relationship Puzzle. " This book is available

through a number of places, including Amazon.com.

It's an excellent book and he really does a good job pointing out the

emotional/social differences between ASD kids and NT kids.

After reading the book and talking to some other parents who've taken their

children to Houston for an evaluation and program set-up, my husband and I

decided that this really was the missing piece for . After 10 months of a

VB program, she's doing so well in language and cognitive areas, but we've seen

very little advancement in the social arena. She'll be done with the ABLLS very

soon (except for math and reading, obviously) and the main holes still left are

related to social skills. Still, even when she's met those goals, all she will

have gained is an ability to do the right thing in social areas. In other

words, she will have gained some skills, without the inherent desire to want to

interact.

Don't get me wrong...we absolutely believe that ABA has done wonders for our

girls and we have seen some improvement in her social relatedness. In the

social/emotional area, however, we don't believe it has everything we're looking

for, which is why we're going to supplement her program with 10-20 hours a week

of RDI. 's SLP is receiving professional training from Drs. Gutstein and

Sheely, and she will be guiding 's program from here (St. Louis). will

no longer be doing regular speech-language, because she doesn't really need it.

Her language skills are above age level at this point, but the gap between her

social abilities and language contines to widen.

I'd be happy to answer any more questions. I would like to hear from anyone

who's already doing an RDI program.

To learn more about RDI, get Dr. Gutstein's book, and/or go to

mom to , 34 mos, and Siobhan, 19 mos, both ASD

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