TAMPA, Fla. — One in 36 children have been identified as having autism, according to a report from the CDC. A new study also shows autism is being diagnosed more frequently in minority children.

What You Need To Know

  • The CDC reports minority children being diagnosed with autism more frequently

  • There are many barriers for Hispanic families who are looking to get help for their autistic child

  • Selena Flores shares her son was diagnosed a year ago and how she’s adapted to helping him

Clinical Psychologist Dr. Patricia Hernandez says Hispanic parents sometimes face challenges when their child is diagnosed with autism. She says testing is expensive and getting a diagnosis can take a while.

“It takes a long time sometimes for people to get in to therapy or an evaluation and get diagnosed,” said Hernandez. “Then when you do find the diagnosis, it’s ‘what do I do and what does this mean?’”

That path is something Selena Flores is familiar with. A year ago, she says getting to spend playtime with her son Julian would probably not have been possible.

“He was super delayed in everything, he wasn’t crawling when he was supposed to, he wasn’t sitting up, he wasn’t meeting the milestones that he was supposed to meet,” Flores said of her son’s early symptoms.

Things are much different now after an autism diagnosis last year.

Through physical, speech and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapies, she’s noticed how much of an impact it’s had on him in just a short amount of time.

“Now he’s actually picking stuff up wanting to play with them,” said Flores. “Before we tried to interact with him, but he didn’t really want to.”

Flores says hearing about Julian’s diagnosis wasn’t easy. Especially since no one in her family had ever been diagnosed with autism.

“They don’t really tell you anything, they just hand you the papers of him being diagnosed, and that’s it,” she said.

Flores took matters into her own hands, doing research and reading lots of books about autism to educate herself and figure out how to help her son.

She says finding the right program for him was difficult and there was a lack of access to facilities with availability. The CDC reports stigma, lack of access to health care services due to non-citizenship or low-income and language are some of the barriers to identifying children with autism in the Hispanic community.

Flores stresses the importance of knowing what treatments are available. She says step by step they’re moving forward; her hope is that both she and Julian will continue to grow and adapt.

“Building that community and finding those resources together and saying hey they’re open here,” said Flores. “More ways of how we can help him and just how to better communicate and understand him.”

Research shows that many families seeking autism evaluations for a diagnosis take up to more than a year and those evaluations range from one to two hours.