Is Autism Parent Guide medical advice?

No. Every page is general educational information. It is not a substitute for assessment, diagnosis or treatment by a qualified professional. We say so in the footer, on every article, and here.

Can anyone pay to change a verdict or ranking?

No. This site has no ads, no affiliate rankings and no sponsored placements. Money cannot buy a mention, bury a caution, or change what we tell parents to skip.

What happens if something is wrong?

Email hello@autismparentguide.org. We review, correct the page, update the last-reviewed date, and log the change on /corrections when the change is more than a typo.

Trust

Editorial policy

This is the contract for every Learn page: how it is built, what we will not publish, what triggers a correction, and why money has no say.

How do you write a guide?

Every Learn article starts from reputable medical and education sources, is rewritten in original plain language, is checked by the parent editor, is reviewed against a professional role for accuracy, and is dated. We do not copy other sites, invent statistics, or imply first-hand clinical experience we do not have.

The sequence is always the same, whether the topic is signs of autism or an EHCP appeal:

Source. Facts come from bodies such as the NHS, CDC, AAP, NICE, GOV.UK (for England-only processes), IPSEA, and named peer-reviewed summaries. Each page lists the sources it used.
Rewrite. We never paste source text. The page is original prose in the language a tired parent can use at 11pm.
Parent edit. A parent reviewer reads for usefulness, tone, and whether the first 60 words actually answer the question.
Professional check. A relevant role — speech and language, occupational therapy, SEND advice, developmental paediatrics — reviews accuracy. Until a named clinician has agreed to be listed, we credit the role, not a invented person. We will not fabricate a reviewer's name to look more authoritative.
Date.The visible "last reviewed" line and the sitemap lastmod are the same date. We do not bump dates without changing the content.

Who is this site for — and who should skip it?

It is for parents and carers of autistic children, or people who are worried their child might be autistic, who want plain-language answers and free print-at-home tools. Skip it if you need a diagnosis, a personalised care plan, or emergency medical advice — those come from qualified professionals and local services, not a website.

We write for a global-English audience (nappy/diaper, IEP/EHCP) and flag when a process is country-specific, as on the England EHCP guide. Typical UK baby and toddler shopping advice lives on our sister site Clever Mum — we link it only where it is on-topic, never as a dump of unrelated product reviews. UK health questions (symptoms, when to use 111 or 999, NHS-framed condition overviews) go to HealthAnswers, which is medically reviewed by UK doctors. We do not send parents of children to adult Talking Therapies self-referral pages as if that were CAMHS.

What will you not publish?

We will not publish cure claims, vaccine myths presented as fact, invented statistics, copied charity or commercial text, or anything that tells a parent their child is broken. We will not use a trademarked programme as our brand. We will not mark up supplier ratings as Google reviews of other organisations.

No "cure autism" products, protocols or guarantees.
No "vaccines cause autism" framing except to state that they do not, with sources.
No fabricated prevalence numbers, wait times, or success rates.
No copying Boardmaker, Widgit, or charity copy. Symbols here are original.
No PECS-as-our-name. PECS is a separate trademarked programme; we say so when the question comes up.

What triggers a correction?

A factual error, an out-of-date legal timeline, a broken source, or a sentence that could be read as personalised medical advice. Typos are fixed quietly. Anything that changed what a parent might do is logged on the corrections page with the date and the old claim.

Email hello@autismparentguide.org. We aim to review within five working days. The last-reviewed date on the page updates only when the content did.

What can money not buy?

This site has no display ads, no sponsored rankings, and no affiliate modules on Learn pages. A donation via /support pays hosting. It does not change a verdict, add a product, or remove a caution. The free official route — NHS, your local authority, SENDIASS, a school SENCO — is named when it wins.

Optional donations use a Stripe Payment Link. Card data never touches this site. Tools stay free whether or not anyone donates.

How do you handle YMYL (health) topics?

Autism information can affect a child's care. We keep an urgency box when delay is unsafe, we never diagnose from a checklist, and the signs-notes tool is explicitly not a screen. MedicalWebPage schema carries lastReviewed and a professional role, not a fake clinic.

Interactive tools that matter for citation — the card builder, schedule maker, meltdown helper, signs notes — ship with a complete HTML fallback so a crawler that does not run JavaScript still sees the steps.

How do you link to other sites?

We add a dofollow link only when the destination answers a question this page cannot: typical UK parenting on Clever Mum, or doctor-reviewed NHS-aligned health information on HealthAnswers. We do not sell those links, and we do not dump unrelated URLs in the footer for PageRank.

Autism-specific how-tos, printables and parent language stay here. If a parent needs "is this fever 111 or 999?" they should not have to reverse-engineer that from a meltdown guide.

Who owns this?

Autism Parent Guide is operated by Elite Digital AI Solutions Ltd, registered in England and Wales, Company No. 17250017. Method detail lives on /method. Privacy and the medical disclaimer live on /about/trust.