I was reading another blog today and someone had written in, asking for help about how to keep their autistic children from climbing all over everything. It reminded me of when Logan was first diagnosed...we could not keep him out of the kitchen sink! We would take him off the counter forty, fifty times, tell him no, it didn't matter...he would climb up there and stay. Finally we bought two baby gates and barred the entrance to the kitchen. People who came over were dumbfounded by the odd look. Who is trying to get in the kitchen? Who are you trying to keep out?
Anyhow, I was reading this blog and all kinds of people wrote in with different answers. One lady actually installed a climbing wall- in her house- and claimed it worked wonders. This is an idea we have actually considered! But the answer that stood out the most to me was from a man who kept yet another blog about autism. His name is Rich Schull and this is what he wrote:
"This is going to be a very odd and strange answer but , as I meet people from all over the autism spectrum including some in their 80s and 90s from my blog, they simply laugh and say gee we were never allowed to do such nonsense and after a few whacks you figured that out. These whacks were never child abuse and I could see where some could see them as that in this day and age but in reality they gave Autism some tough standards to live up to."
I have mixed feelings about this comment. On the one hand, it seems to imply that autistic behaviors are simply a lack of discipline on the part of the caregiver, and that all one needs to do is be tougher, stricter, and have more expectations, and these problems will go away. On the other hand, I find it interesting that yes, there is a whole group of people with spectrum disorders that has never been studied or interviewed. In the eighties, seventies, sixties, decades back forever, autism and other spectrum disorders were almost unheard of. What did autistic children do, back then, what did their teachers do, their parents? What was the stigma associated with it? My own father, I am 99 percent certain, had a spectrum disorder. He was born in 1949, and there were literally NO resources for something that no one ever diagnosed anyway. It would be interesting to seek these people out, to find out what challenges they faced and what the growing up experience was like for them.
As far as discipline goes...do we have a tendency, as parents of autistic children, to throw our hands up in air and say, Well, he's going to just do that anyway, I'm tired of fighting it...or He's disabled, he simply can't help it (which is sometimes true!) I don't think that just because a child has a disability, our expectations of what the child is capable of should fly out the window. With my own son, it is a long, hard road of repetition. You set boundaries, you make it known to him what is allowed or not allowed. That doesn't mean that's the end of it. You're dealing with a child whose understanding of consequence is nil, whose idea of emotion is extremely limited, whose capacity for empathy is buried under a mountain of stimuli. So you tell him. You show him. Again. And again. And yet again. One day, he gets it. What you can't do, is give up, because it involves more than just simply saying no and smacking him on the bum. It's patience, it's endurance, it's knowing that this time, when he misbehaved, when he broke that window or made that mess or picked on his sister, this time is not the last time, and it won't be the last time...not for a long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment