Have you ever been told that a particular therapy or approach might not work for your autistic child because of their specific diagnosis, or that your child’s needs are “too severe” or “not severe enough”?
It’s a common experience for parents and caregivers to feel caught between labels, left wondering if their child is receiving the best possible support.
In a world filled with categories, subcategories, and often rigid treatment recommendations, Relationship Development Intervention (RDI®) stands out as an inclusive, all-encompassing approach. RDI® doesn’t just focus on the child—it’s designed to support the entire family, helping parents play a central role in guiding their child’s growth, no matter their unique challenges.
What is RDI®? An All-Encompassing Approach for Families
In a recent episode of Autism, A New Perspective, host Kat Lee speaks with Dr. Rachelle Sheely, President of RDIconnect® and head of professional training and supervision, about the broad-reaching benefits of RDI®.
Dr. Sheely calls RDI® a “big umbrella,” emphasizing that the approach is intended for every child and family. This “big umbrella” concept encourages parents to look beyond labels and instead focus on creating strong, nurturing parent-child connections that foster growth, development, and resilience.
Moving Beyond Labels to Focus on Meaningful Connections
Dr. Sheely highlights the importance of shifting our thinking from managing symptoms to building meaningful guiding relationships. Parents often feel overwhelmed by the variety of advice and resources available today, but Dr. Sheely’s message is clear: stay grounded in the guiding relationship with your child. Fine-tune your own understanding of your child.
Avoid chasing every new method and instead focus on nurturing this core bond. By creating a home environment where parents are the primary, compassionate guides, families can find a rhythm that feels supportive and empowering, rather than exhausting or pressured.
Growth Through Gentle, Individualized Challenges
RDI® doesn’t promise an easy journey, but it does provide a flexible, individualized approach that emphasizes learning through challenges. Dr. Sheely encourages parents to allow room for mistakes and learning, knowing that these experiences build resilience and independence over time. Even when parents and children encounter obstacles, RDI® offers a framework to address these without judgment, viewing them as opportunities to learn and grow together.
Supporting Parents to Become Confident Guides
Whether a child is labeled “high functioning,” “severe,” or somewhere in between, RDI® provides a developmental model that empowers parents to become the primary guides in their child’s unique journey, helping them to build a supportive family environment.
If you’re looking for a way to foster development that doesn’t rely on labels and limits, RDI® might be the transformative approach your family needs. Learn more about the RDI® approach and connect with a certified consultant here.
Autism: A New Perspective is available on iTunes!
Full Transcript
Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism, A New Perspective, a podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child, and we always encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee, and in this week’s podcast, I talk to Dr. Sheely about the big umbrella of RDI. RDI is for everyone and every family.
Let’s listen in. Dr. Sheely, I today want to talk about RDI and what I have heard you call the big umbrella, and I love the way you talk about RDI being for all children who need our help, for all families who need our help. I think it’s so important during a time when there’s a lot of information out there for parents on what they can do for their child, for them to understand where RDI is concerned.
We are a program for every family.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: It’s interesting, isn’t it, how we’ve come full circle. I remember at one point we had interactional disorder. We had PDD, PDD-NOS, high-functioning autism, Asperger’s, autism, then all of those classifications, and as we began to wade through those classifications, we realized that there was a commonality in all of them, and those commonalities had to do with autism.
So even if you had too much language or no language, there were some things that were making it difficult for the child to have a guiding relationship with the parents. So let me say that again because I was thinking out loud, but that guiding relationship with parents is fundamental to the growth of the neurological system, and when we see children who don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what you call it, that has to be addressed.
Kat Lee: I think that I still think, as you say, we’ve come full circle, but even in this time, all these years later, the model we think of the umbrella as for the children, but RDI is for the family. It’s for the parents, and I’ve had people say so. The parents are the ones you’re really working with, and it’s a resounding yes, so it’s interesting that we’re really still needing to emphasize the importance of that.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: It is interesting, isn’t it? I think when you look at a family system, families, each member of the family is unique, and each family is unique, so it isn’t as if there is a one size that fits all, but there are foundations that are impacted by every family who’s dealing with autism. It was those foundational things that we’re trying to address, like how do you get into a regulatory pattern with your child?
What does that regulatory pattern look like? How do you create challenges for your child so your child is continuing to grow and be whoever he’s going to be? We feel that the uniqueness of the child can be addressed by RDI because we’re having the parents spend the time with him and see that he has talents in this area.
This is an area of struggle, and so in that way, it really is a big umbrella. It’s not just for children who get categorized under different categories or now with different subcategories too.
Kat Lee: There is a lot of categorization and labeling, which you and I visited before in our podcast about how honestly dangerous that is for the children. In either way, they may not get what they need, but I think the other thing is I have a lot of families coming to me. My child is very severe.
I don’t know if RDI is going to work for them, or my child really doesn’t have a lot of issues, but X, Y, Z. I don’t know if RDI is going to work. What I always say is, well, RDI is for everyone.
It’s that umbrella. There isn’t a child or a family that it cannot help. I think that’s so wonderful in the work you do, but I think continuing to help parents understand how important that family system is for their children wherever their children are right now is so key.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: I think it’s telling that most of our consultants who are younger and have children say just RDI because it makes sense. It’s a developmental model, and it kind of shows you how to stay one step ahead of where your child is, where to get started, stay one step ahead, and how to introduce something and understand if you’ve gone too far. As we begin to think about that, we know that our children all have potential, and if a child is severely impacted, we know that we just have to understand that child, have to take more time and understand it.
It doesn’t mean that the system in the family has to revolve around him. It just means we have to help him become a better apprentice to his parents.
Kat Lee: And help the parents know how to guide. I think one of the things I see from families is wherever their child may be or whatever label they may have been given, what have you, the issue is the guiding. How do I guide my child with the obstacles that they may have?
I think the whole obstacle assessment that you’ve designed, which is a system without judgment, is just helping the parents solve obstacles their children may have or that they may have through no one’s fault, and then helping them overcome that. That is so much the key of what we do.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: And to understand the difference between a challenge and an obstacle. Sometimes a challenge can be difficult, but if a child or a student is in a position to be able to figure that out for himself, then we don’t want to treat it as an obstacle. We don’t want to start doing a lot of different things that are going to kind of increase that static thinking or make it more difficult for the parents to guide that child.
I really think that if you take the time you need to understand what’s going on with the child, what’s going on with the parents, you’re going to see both move forward, moving forward together and with you as a consultant or the consultant in training becoming less important.
Kat Lee: You know, I think as a parent too that you and Dr. Gutstein have talked about that making mistakes, uh, not succeeding, even if one wants to say failing, which, you know, can have a very negative connotation, that those things are not bad things per se, that they’re actually important things.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: If we’re working with a student and I believe that everything’s smooth and everything’s perfect, I have to ask myself, what am I missing? Am I spinning my wheels here and everybody’s so comfortable that nobody’s being challenged to move forward? Because at some point we want it to become difficult, not in a negative way, but difficult in a way that challenges me to say, I don’t know.
I don’t know what to do. What should I do? Can I figure this out?
Because when I do figure it out and if I’m given the time to figure it out, my brain’s going to start functioning better than it was functioning before. It’s going to be better integrated and I’m going to have that feeling of competence to take on my own learning.
Kat Lee: So the big umbrella of REI, all those years ago, and we were just talking in our last podcast that we’ve known each other for now 20 years, and you and Dr. Gutstein have RDI even longer than that. From the beginning, you had this big umbrella desire, this desire to help all families. So what is your message to families?
And particularly in today, like we said, we’ve kind of been in a little time machine here, going back and then coming back forward. One of the biggest things I think in that time is that there are so many voices, so many voices, whether it’s social media or other well-meaning professionals, whoever it may be. And that can get pretty loud for families.
Almost so loud, it drowns out what they need to do.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: When I’m talking to families, Catherine, I want them to feel that they are in the driver’s seat, that they can make decisions that will impact their family, siblings, and the child on the spectrum in a positive way. I don’t want families to start going down bunny trails because there’s so much stuff out there. And all that stuff out there is begging for attention and time and emotional connection.
And it’s really doing so much harm because the more you do, the less time you have to guide. So stay with the guiding relationship. And if you run into a problem that is confusing to everybody, take another look.
Is there something going on that wasn’t noticed before? Is your child having seizures? And nobody noticed it because your child was so active.
You didn’t see that there were seizures going on. Is there something going on that needs to be addressed medically? Don’t decide also that everything is autism because you will have doctors say, but that’s, of course he’s doing that.
It’s autism. No, not everything is autism. And so you want to really begin to fine tune your own understanding of your child.
Give yourself some grace. If you find that you are feeling tired and this just seems like a lot of work, you’re on the wrong trajectory. It shouldn’t feel that way.
It should begin to feel like, ah, this is what I thought parenting was going to be like. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the developmental stages your child’s in. It just means that you figured out what that dance looks like.
And you’re both dancing together and you’re both moving forward together.
Kat Lee: And thanks for joining us for Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child. And we encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee.
See you next time.
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