Supporting an Autistic Child at Home: How Respite and Intervention Fit Together

Two services, two entirely different jobs, and families are routinely offered whichever the provider happens to sell.

**Intervention** works on your child's goals. Somebody is running a plan, collecting data, and trying to move something.

**Respite** works on your capacity. Somebody competent takes over so that you can stop being on duty. Nothing is being worked on. That is the point, not a limitation.

Both are legitimate. Confusing them is how a family exhausted to the point of collapse ends up being sold more therapy hours.

How to tell which you need

Ask what the honest bottleneck is this month.

**If the answer is about your child** — a skill that is not moving, a behaviour that is getting harder, a plan that has stalled — that is an intervention question, and it belongs to the supervising clinician.

**If the answer is about you** — you have not slept properly in months, a sibling has not had unhurried time with a parent since spring, an appointment keeps getting postponed, you are running on something that is clearly not sustainable — that is respite, and adding therapy hours will not touch it.

Families often need both. What they rarely need is one presented as the other.

What respite actually is

Care for your child so that you get a break. Someone competent, following your child's existing routine, on your child's terms — their order of events, their preferred activities, their food, their regulation strategies. Not a programme somebody brought with them.

It is not therapy, and it should not be sold as therapy with a different name. Nobody is working through goals or collecting data on a respite shift.

What you do with the hours is nobody's business. Sleep, work, a hospital appointment, unhurried time with a sibling who has been waiting their turn, a meal eaten sitting down.

How they fit together across a week

For families using both, the useful frame is that they are load-bearing in different directions.

Intervention hours are scheduled around the child's best windows — when they are regulated and able to engage. Pushing a session into a bad afternoon buys nothing and costs goodwill.

Respite hours are scheduled around the *adult's* limits, and the mistake almost everyone makes is booking them reactively, after the point of desperation, rather than as maintenance before it. Respite booked as a standing arrangement does far more than respite booked as an emergency.

They should also not collide. A respite shift immediately after an intensive session is often the worst use of both — the child is depleted and the adult gets a shift that is harder than it needed to be.

Who should be in the room

Different work, different requirement.

For **intervention**, the supervising clinician's credentials are the thing that matters, and for BC autism funding for a child under six, whether that supervisor is registered on the RASP decides whether the hours are fundable at all.

For **respite**, what matters is whether the person can read your child. The practical difference is between someone who understands a meltdown as dysregulation and someone who reads it as misbehaviour — which is why Puffin's respite is being staffed by BI-trained specialists working as respite rather than running a programme.

Both are CRRP vulnerable-sector cleared, as every Puffin caregiver is.

Where Puffin is

Being straight about the stage, because it differs between the two:

**Intervention (BI, SLPA, OTA) is in development and not bookable.** There is an interest list.

**Respite is $42/hr and can be arranged today** — not through online booking, but by email at hello@puffinservices.com or by phone on (604) 283-2829. A person will tell you honestly what can be arranged, and will say so if the answer is no rather than leaving you on a list.

If you are near the end of your rope

The thing worth saying plainly: needing a break is not a failure of parenting, and it is not something to earn by coping for longer. Respite works best booked before you are desperate. If you are already past that point, call.