Wikipedia
Son-Rise is a home-based program for children with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities, which was developed by Barry Neil Kaufman and Samahria Lyte Kaufman for their autistic son, Raun, who is claimed to have fully recovered from his condition. The program is said to be a parent-directed, relationship-based play therapy.
Parents are trained at the Autism Treatment Center of America (ATCA), the division of The Option Institute in Sheffield, Massachusetts that teaches The Son-Rise Program. There, the Kaufman family and their fellow staff members teach families how to be aware of their attitudes—a core principle of the therapy—for bonding and relationship building, as well as creating a low-stimulus, distraction-free playroom environment so the child can feel secure and in control of the over-stimulation. Parents and facilitators join in a child's exclusive and restricted stimming behavior until the child shows social cues for willing engagement. Then encouragement for more complex social activities is done in a non-coercive way. If the child moves away from social interaction, the facilitator gives the child their space by using parallel play in order to gain the child's trust. To encourage skill acquisition, the program uses the child's particular motivation for learning.
The program's developers claim if the parents learn to accept their child without judgement that they will teach themselves to interact with others, and that this will allow them to engage in social interaction because they chose to learn the skills. However, due to the lack of adequate training with the parents during the training sessions at the center, no published independent study has been able to accurately test the efficacy of the program. A 2003 study found that involvement with the program led to more drawbacks than benefits for the involved families over time, though there was a strong correlation between patterns of intervention implementation and parental perceptions of intervention efficacy. A 2006 study found that the program is not always implemented as it is described in the literature, which means it will be difficult to evaluate its success and failure rate.