Whitney Priar’s son was diagnosed with autism at 2-years-old, one of the 1 in 40 children who have been diagnosed with the complex neurobehavioral condition. Now an 11-year-old sixth-grader at College View Middle School, Priar said her son is thriving.
World Autism Awareness Day falls on April 2, and Priar said she’s grateful to live in a community like Owensboro — one that supports and acknowledges conditions like autism, not only on Autism Awareness Day, but every day.
“I think World Autism Awareness Day is primarily about celebrating the individuals who’ve been diagnosed — how unique and wonderful each of them are,” Priar said.
Priar said each individual with autism is incredibly different from the next, and that each person, and each parent of an autistic child, has to take his or her own journey through the ups and downs that accompany the condition. Autism can be diagnosed on a level of one, two or three, depending on the individual’s severity.
However, autism is a lot more common than it used to be, Priar said, and that alone has encouraged the general public to acknowledge and pay attention to it more than ever before.
Autism Spectrum Disorder shows itself in children who use limited verbal language, experience self-stimulatory behaviors such as hand-flapping, under-react to pain and over-react to sounds, have very good gross motor skills and weaknesses in fine motor skills.
“When my son was diagnosed, he was non-verbal until he was 6-years-old,” Priar said. “With the support and resources in town, he’s thriving and doing really well. We still have our struggles sometimes but, overall, he’s doing great.”
Priar said her family will be celebrating autism awareness with some other families by having a Hawaiian luau on April 18. As creator of the Owensboro Autism Network (OAN), Priar said she’ll be hosting other events in the upcoming months, such as the second annual OAN Autism Acceptance Walk on June 8.
Priar believes part of the support in Owensboro comes from its being a smaller city filled with people who either know, have met, have worked with or have raised a child with autism.
“Locally, here in Owensboro, we have an amazing community. A lot of other cities don’t offer what we offer here,” Priar said. “I’m really proud of Owensboro for being so accepting and supportive of autism.”
