How a Dog Helped Her Son with Autism

Hi, Guideposts viewers. My name is Rachel Turner and I live in Woodstock, Georgia. My story is about bringing a dog into our family to help with my son who’s on the autism spectrum.

I chose to get a dog for Wesley because, right after he was diagnosed, my one goal was to get through to him. He was spending a lot of time closing out the rest of the world, and really I was just trying to find ways to get his attention, and my first thought was, “Who doesn’t love a dog?”

Whether or not you get a dog as a pet or you get a service dog, I feel like introducing a dog into your home when you have a child on the spectrum is just a great part of their ultimate therapy package.

It took Wesley a while to bond with Josie. The rest of us bonded with her in about eight seconds, but it was about four months of him pushing her away and not really wanting her near him before we were driving home from the park one day, and I looked in the back seat and Wesley had fallen asleep with his head tilted to the side and Josie was sitting in the seat right next to him, and she had also tilted her head to the side to where she was almost touching his forearm.

Not only did it show me that Wesley and Josie were going to bond because Wesley was going to bond with Josie, but also, after four months have been pushed away from this little boy, it was Josie reassuring me that she was there and she was going to be there for us, and specifically for Wesley.

Initially, Josie helped us with Wesley because he was doing things like darting into traffic when we were on walks. He wouldn’t look and he would run into the street, or he wouldn’t answer me in the house. I would be looking for him and it would be just terrifying.

So we initially did things like put an extra leash on her and sometimes we would tether Wesley to the leash, or sometimes we would just hand him the leash and say, you know, “You have to walk Josie, that’s your job,” and it would keep him really focused.

I could also say to Josie, “Where’s Wesley?” And she would sort of help me locate him sometimes. Now, you know, Wesley’s grown out of a lot of his behaviors and so she’s really a social tool. She brings other children into our environment, so that Wesley’s forced to communicate with his peers. So, she’s contributed in so many great ways to our family, and specifically to Wesley.

My faith was a huge part of this journey. Right after Wesley was diagnosed, I remember driving home that day in the car, and just crying out to God and feeling like I was so inadequate as a mom and I wasn’t type A enough.

When someone hands you an autism diagnosis, it’s so hard to understand how that’s going to manifest in your future. It’s a social disorder that shows up in so many different ways, in every different kid that you see.

So I didn’t really know what all we were going to be dealing with now, or in the future, and there are so many schools of thought on how to address it as a parent, and how to address it with therapies, and I know God was a huge part of transforming me, as a mother, into somebody that made confident decisions, and understood that, you know, I can only make the best decisions I can make at the time with the information that I have. And a lot of those decisions that my husband and I made turned out to be good ones and it just transformed my confidence in myself as a mom.

Around the Fourth of July, Josie doesn’t particularly like loud noises and she actually has that in common with Wesley. When the Fourth of July fireworks started to go off, both Josie and my son were really overwhelmed by the experience, but my oldest son wanted to be outside. Our neighbors were setting off fireworks and, as a mom, I was going back and forth.

Josie usually hides when there’s something loud going on, and Wesley was sitting on the couch, and so I was trying to come back and forth and watch my other son and soothe Wesley and I finally realized that Josie was sitting on the couch next to Wesley, which she would have never done. She would have been upstairs under her bed. I’ve realized that she was sitting there and he had his hand on her fur, and that they were just sitting together.

About 10 minutes later, my husband got home, and he came in the house. I said, “Good.” I said, “You go outside with Sam. “I need to go inside with Wesley.” And the minute I came inside and Josie understood that we were all home, she ran upstairs and got under the bed. But she was so intuitive, that she understood he was freaked out. She was freaked out, but she wasn’t doing her dog instinct thing of going and hiding like dogs typically do.

But the moment she realized we were all home and that we could spread our attention between the two boys, she disappeared. And, it really just made me feel great about, just the decision, about having her. Wesley was calm. He was sitting there with her. He didn’t feel alone. But she makes herself available, which is what I think is really special about her.