Dogs are amazing helpers of children with autism

A Golden Retriever helps a child with autism.

When I started to research The Healing Power of Dogs, I already knew how much the presence of a dog could help his owner recover from illness. I’d seen examples of it in my own life. What really surprised me was how much dogs could help autistic children.

The first person to bring it to my attention was a Lhasa Apso owner at the Kentucky shows several years ago. We were chatting in the amiable way dog show exhibitors do while waiting for groups to begin. She mentioned that she had a Rottweiler at home to take care of her autistic twelve-year-old son.

“How does he do that?”

“He stays with him, walks him to school, picks up things he drops and carries them.”

“You let him walk to school by himself?”

“No, one of the family goes with him, but we don’t hold his hand. We just let the dog take care of him.”

“Who trained the dog to do that?”

“I did. When I first heard about service dogs, about eight years ago, I knew my son would benefit from it. I got on all the lists, but they all told me, ‘the wait is at least two years.’

“I thought, ‘in two years, I could train my own dog.’ So that’s what I did.”

“By yourself?”

“I went to a training school. The trainer was a former K-9 handler. He had never trained a service dog for an autistic kid, but he said, ‘I think we can do it.’”

She said that her son had to be kept away from video games, which was hard because her other two sons loved them. When he started playing video games, he lost contact with reality and started to yell, scream, and throw things. He could hurt himself or someone else. “We trained Lance (the Rottweiler) to come get me if Jeff picks up the game control board. The other day, I was folding laundry and I heard a banging on the door. I opened it – it was Lance. I said, ‘How did you get out there?’

“He looked at me and ran to the steps to the basement. Jeff had the TV on and was banging the controls. He had shut Lance in the tool shed, but Lance got out.”

Another story came from Ellen de Generes’ chauffeur in Orlando, Maria. She told me, “A dog helped my daughter.”

Her autistic daughter was four years old but would not speak. Maria and her husband consulted myriad specialists, to no avail. On a routine trip to her own general practioner, Maria mentioned the problem. “He said, ‘Get a dog.’”

Maria had never owned a dog, but she purchased a Maltese puppy. She watched a change come over her daughter. “One day, I was walking by her room, and I heard talking. My daughter was talking to the dog. She had never spoken to me, but she talked to the dog.”

After that breakthrough, the little girl picked up normal speech as if she’d done it all along.

The inventor of the service dog concept, Bonnie Bergin, told me, “Dogs help children with autism. There is no question. One really critical area is touch. I don’t know why, but they are more comfortable touching a dog than letting a human touch them. For the parents, they can attach the kid to the dog and then hold the dog’s leash. The kids react much better to that. The dog keeps the kids more engaged.”

National Service Dogs train them to prevent a child from bolting and running into traffic, from leaving home or classroom without supervision, and to summon help. They find the dogs improve the child’s quality of life, independence and safety.

It’s another example of how wonderful dogs are.