Service Dogs Provide a New Future for Children With Autism By Mary Robins | Updated: May 13, 2021
Then Arty came along.
Arty the Golden Retriever Reunites a Family Arty is a Golden Retriever trained as an autism support dog by Paws with a Cause. Founded in 1979, Paws with a Cause has placed more than 3,100 dogs trained to assist people living with a variety of disabilities, including hearing dogs and seizure response dogs. The nonprofit’s newest program, founded more than a decade ago, places service dogs in homes with a child aged four to twelve who’s living with autism—with dramatic results. There are currently 68 Paws dogs living with a child with autism. Among them, Arty.
Arty climbs on top of Cal on the examination table—a “squish” method that works like a weighted blanket, calming Cal enough to have blood drawn. At ten years old, Cal’s life was a struggle. He had been diagnosed with autism a year earlier, and his family was working with a team of psychiatrists and counselors to find the right treatment for him. But life was hard: he was “just not a happy kiddo,” says mom Brandy Keippala; “always upset and angry” because it was so hard for him to communicate his needs. Almost every weekday, there were long car rides to therapies: occupational, physical, speech and language, psychological. He was heavily medicated—so much so, in fact, that the state government requested that his psychiatrist validate why he was taking so much medication. Medication had been a last resort, but with Cal frequently acting out, running away from home, or stripping and eating the foam from the padded walls of the isolation room at his school, and with his two siblings living with family and friends because home was no longer a safe environment— something had to give. And even bigger changes were on the horizon. The situation had grown so untenable that Cal was about to enter the inpatient child psychiatric unit at the University of Michigan.
Mom Brandy says of the moment Cal and Arty met: “It was an instant thing for them.” At that point, she notes, Cal “would wear his hoodie and keep it up over his face 99 percent of the day. And when we left Paws, he put his hood down. It was the first time he was in public with his hood down.”
Cal takes his hood down in public for the first time, shortly after meeting Arty
In fact, the change in Cal was so instant and so dramatic that when the University of Michigan called three days after Arty’s arrival to say that a place was available in the inpatient psychiatric unit to which Cal had been scheduled to move, his parents were able to turn the room down. Within two weeks, the family was living under one roof again, and six months later, Cal was off 80 percent of his
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