How would pet therapy benefit children with autism Research Proposal

How would pet therapy benefit children with autism - Research Proposal Example He further added that the disease targets those areas of the brain responsible for social integration, language, abstract and creative thinking. The symptoms of autism include social impairment, poor communication skills (both verbal and non-verbal), and through repetitive, stereotyped and repetitive behaviour (APA, 2000). Individuals suffering from autism usually struggle with stressful and changing environments, and are also very sensitive to environmental stimuli. Children with autism have trouble interacting with others and people usually have a bizarre reaction when encountering them. On top of this, traditional psychotherapeutic and educational interventions have for a long time failed to present consistent improvements in children suffering from autism. Since conventional forms of intervention are failing to provide reliable and successful intervention, it is important to seek other innovative forms of autism management. This paper seeks to look at pet therapy and the manner in which it can be used to detect and manage symptoms related to autism. For this study, the independent variable will be pet therapy while the dependent variable will be autistic-related symptoms. The pet therapy applied will depend on the types of pets used in a chosen institution while autistic-related symptoms will be taken as a whole i.e. change in symptoms over time. As explained above autism is a neurological brain disorder characterized by communication impairment, social impairment and repetitive, restricted or stereotyped behaviour. The disease manifests itself before a child attains three years of age and persists into old age. The disorder is one of three disorders that comprise the autism spectrum (ASD). As of 2012, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 20 per 1000 children have autism in the United States (Blumberg, 2013). Pet therapy is the use of animals in managing certain psychoneurotic disorders. The