Dr. Jacob A. Burack, a researcher and a professor in McGill University’s educational and counselling psychology department, was in Toronto late last month to speak at the Current Trends in Pediatric Neuro-Developmental Disabilities conference, co-organized by the Zareinu Educational Centre.

His work over the past 30 years has focused on the development of attention and perception among people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and Down syndrome.

Burack spoke to The CJN about how research developments have changed the way special needs children are and should be treated.

What was it 30 years ago that prompted you to want to work in this field?

I always wanted to work with kids. I worked for three summers at Camp Reena – the Reena Foundation is still around, but the camp has been closed for quite a few years. So I spent three summers working as a counsellor at Camp Reena, and that’s what changed my life, and I started focusing on that.

In your 30 years of research, what would you say is your most significant finding, most surprising finding or the most interesting thing about your work?

For autism specifically, I think that I found a kid with autism has a lot of strengths and people always focus on the weaknesses. Specifically, in the type of work that I do about how children retain and perceive objects in the environment, they actually have strengths, quite a few strengths, that in some way are to their benefit, but also lead to them seeing the world in a different way than some other people might.

We actually have a theory with a colleague of mine at the University of Montreal, Laurent Mottron, called the enhanced perceptual functioning model of autism, and it talks about how autistic behavior is a result of better-than-average perception. It’s become very popular. It’s one of the ways of understanding people with autistic behaviour.

Have there been a lot of changes in the past 30 years in the way children with disabilities are treated?

There have been. But I think what’s more important is the attitude toward people with disabilities. I have a close colleague who was actually one of my former graduate students who is now spearheading all sorts of work in Quebec about transitioning young people with disabilities from school to the work force, into college programs. We have an understanding that people, even with disabilities, are people who have aspirations and hopes and that is the most important thing. We are much more looking at the strengths of people with disabilities and we see that, as my old graduate school adviser used to say, seeing them as a whole person and not just thinking about them in terms of their disability.

What’s your message to the Jewish community about special needs children?

What’s really important is that the Jewish community needs to make more of an effort to include people with disabilities to be part of our community. We find in schools, in synagogues, and maybe most important, in the social fabric that people with disabilities need to be integrated to be part of it.

I think there is a stigma. I think some schools don’t want to deal with it. Many of the Jewish schools may be very success-oriented. I’ve travelled all over Canada, all over Quebec and in the most remote places, like the Gaspé region, they have many fewer facilities and resources than we have, but they have no problem including those kids. If you belong to the community, you’re in that school with the rest of the kids in that community. I don’t think that happens with the schools here. I think young adults don’t have the kinds of social lives they should be having and that should be a priority for the Jewish community and see it as one of our major missions.

 Is there anything you’ve learned about children with autism or Down syndrome that could maybe help parents give their children the best treatment?

As I tell my friends who are parents in general, for the most part, parents need to trust their own instincts in a lot of ways. Too often they’re being told they need to do this or that, but most parents have good instincts. They know their own children better than anyone else. I think especially if their child has some kind of a disability, or is different somehow, those parents know them the best. I think it’s important for parents to keep that in mind. The unfortunate reality is that parents need to be on top of the system. Children can fall through the cracks and they need to be persistent as much as they can. The third thing I would say is that parents need to be wary or careful about these “miracle interventions” or popular interventions. It’s something I often speak about. Parents, in a lot of ways, want to do anything to help their children, and then they get taken in by people. Unfortunately, a lot of people make a lot of money off children with disabilities.