Visual stimming
Can somebody please make a suggestion on how to modify visual stimming so that it is more "socially appropriate". My son is constantly waving the bottom of his shirt in front of his eyes. I don't think he can stop. After hours of this behavior, it can get quite hard for me to cope with. Obviously he cannot stop this behavior but I would like to see him doing something that is more appropriate. Anything I could buy or give him that would help? I'm really trying everything here.
He just seems to really crave sensory input. He always wants his arms and back scratched. And he likes squeezes. He is always kind of hanging on my arms, pulling me down. He also is pinching me and getting frustrated more, probably due to having a hard time communicating.
I am always on "the go" with him because the visual stimming seems to reduce when out in public and he's just got so much energy...he can keep going. So we do alot of swimming because it's summer and that seems to calm him. We go walking. We go to a gymnastics class. But once we get home, it's right back to stimming. I thought exercise was supposed to alleviate stimming? But I could "exercise" him all day long and the stimming would remain at a constant rate.
Also, he seems to just absolutely LOVE juice. Can't get enough of it. Not sure that means anything but just thought I would throw it out there.
Any suggestions very much appreciated. Need some creativity here. Thank you.
Couple thoughts re your very active little guy
1. Craving stimming can result from an under activated brain region that the body is attempting to satisfy with physical stimming. Ask doctor re meds for this, great progress in this area. It's a brain chemistry thing.
2. If he is drinking so much juice, r u sure he's not on a constant sugar rush? Sometimes there are allergic reactions that increase hyperactivity, too.
Hope that helps?
I don't think you will like this answer but I would reduce and then eliminate the juice. Yes it will make him temporarity crazy but I think he'll settle down more. Juice is pure sugar, albeit natural sugar. I would very gradually water down the juice and then reduce the amount until it's nothing. Have him drink water.
I'm a bit concerned about why you want him to stop this behavior. If it serves a purpose for him, why should he stop it just because it makes others a bit uncomfortable? Plenty of things NTs do (eg talking on and on about the personal lives of random boring acquaintances of theirs) make me a bit uncomfortable, but I put up with it because it serves a purpose for them. As a minority in our society, autistics generally are expected to exert way more effort to accomodate NTs than NTs exert to accomodate us - I don't think that's fair. And teaching an autistic kid not to do harmless things because they look weird is a good way to foster low self-esteem.
Ettina,
I am not trying to get rid of the behavior. I am trying to replace it into something more functional. Are you a mother? Do you have experience raising an autistic child?
I am a stay at home mom and I have terrific mothering skills and my son is the love of my life. I spend a great deal of time with him and I think he is terrific. I would never, ever, ever, do anything to him that would harm him in any way or purposely hurt his self esteem. However, shaking your shirt or a sock in front of your eyes for hours at a time can't be great for his development. I can say this with confidence because I personally asked Temple Grandin about my son during one of her talks at a local university. She said if she was able to stim for multiple hours a day, she would not be standing on the stage talking to us today. I thought that was a very profound observation and probably very truthful.
If you have some better concrete suggestions to offer, please go ahead. I would love to hear from you. I come to this forum because I want to hear suggestions from a varied audience. However, if you come to pound on my mothering skills, you are very much picking on the wrong mother. Because there is NO ONE who is more of cheerleader for my son than ME!
By the way, I'm NT but I only have one or two girlfriends and I don't yabber on about acquaintances. If you have this problem, perhaps you should try to change the environment you are in on a daily basis.
To the others who offered suggestions, thank you! I will def try to limit the juice!
I agree with the suggestions about progressively diluting the juice. Even if it has no other effect, it will be better for his teeth. I remember reading somewhere that the reason many autistic children are always thirsty is that the constant stimming and movement means that they do need more rehydration so that's why it's crucial to replace the juice with water.
As for the rest - does he see an occupational therapist? It seems like he is sensory seeking and an OT would be able to suggest alternative ways in which he can get the sensory input he is craving. Another suggestion would be to try him in a tight vest, or have him wear a rucksack with some heavy objects in it.
There was a good website about all this stuff - I'll see if I can find it and I'll give you a link to it.
Aha! Found the good website. There's loads of information here.
http://www.sensory-processing-disorder.com/
Wow, seems like I hit a nerve. I didn't mean to upset you. I'll try to reply to your points and hopefully not say anything too offensive.
I'm not a parent. I am autistic, and I work with autistic kids.
I'm not saying purposely. I know from personal experience how easy it is for the adult to do something with one intent, and the kid see it as something totally different. For example my mother (a wonderful woman, by the way) used to get into long fights with me over my refusal to eat certain foods. During those fights, I felt like she thought I was a terrible, selfish person who deserved to starve if I wasn't willing to eat stuff that made me gag. She felt like I was saying the food she tried so hard to make wasn't good enough, and in extension I was saying she wasn't a good enough mother. Miscommunications can happen. It doesn't mean you're a bad parent, but it can have a bad effect on the child nonetheless.
Temple Grandin is one person. I have a lot of respect for her, but one of the things I don't like about her is her tendency to assume that what applies to her, applies to all autistics. I stim near-continuously (twirling my hair) and I'm high functioning. Stimming isn't some sort of toxic thing that should be discouraged as much as possible - the only time it's problematic is when it distracts the kid from doing a task. I've known some kids who if they were allowed to stim freely, they'd stim nonstop and do nothing else, I've known kids who stim when they have free time and stop stimming when you ask them to do something, and I've known kids who stim during tasks without any negative effect on performance. (I've also known kids with different stims falling into different categories.) In the latter two groups, stimming probably shouldn't be reduced. In the first group, it shouldn't be (and probably can't be) totally eliminated, just discouraged when it causes problems.
Again, I was not saying anything bad about you as a mother. No mother is completely perfect. My own mother is one of the best parents I've ever seen, and there are some things she did that she shouldn't have (like the food fights described above).
I wish we didn't have the kind of culture that pretends parents are either perfect or terrible. It makes it very hard on fallible-but-good parents, who make up the vast majority of parents. And it seems like parents of disabled kids get even harsher criticism, despite the fact that their job is harder.
Pretty much every NT I've met spends large chunks of time talking about various acquaintances, including plenty of people I really like. (My two best friends, NTs with cerebral palsy, did this every time I was hanging out with both of them - and I still enjoyed those times even though those conversations weren't my favorite.) I have no idea if you personally do this, but if you do, you don't have to get defensive about it because I don't consider it a bad thing. I just don't find it as engaging as most NTs seem to. (I react the exact same way to an autistic person talking to me about an interest I don't happen to share with them, something several people I like have also done.)
Marcia - thanks so much for the website. It is very good.
Ettina, I'm not interested in having a philosophical conversation with you on the purpose of stimming. I'm looking for concrete suggestions on ways to focus his attention on learning activities. Stimming interferes alot with his daily life and ability to learn and with the lives of our family. It makes it difficult to obtain childcare for him when I want to do things like work (to make money, to support my family), or go to school (to acquire skills to get a good job, to then support my family). You sound like a very well-meaning young person who does not have the responsibility of raising kids. Working with autistic kids is very admirable, but you get to go home after working with those kids. You are not with them 24-7. For me, I have to work around my son's schedule, with limited resources from the State and from my family. It sounds like you are far more high-functioning than my son and I think that's great for you!
I'm sorry your mother made you eat things that make you gag. My son also has a food sensitivity and I don't make him eat if he does not want to eat.
I'll use your example so you can see the bigger picture from a mother's perspective:
Wasting meals or making multiple meals for a picky eater = wasting money. How do I get money? By getting a job. How do I get a job? By being able to access childcare for my son. Can't put son in childcare? Can't get a job! See how it works???? There is a bigger picture here.
What you are right about is that my job as a parent of an autistic child is much harder....and you know what, I do a great job being his parent. I do such a good job, that the State deems my husband and I as being "too competent" and so we do not get the additional resources my son deserves! That's right...I'm too competent. Because I do my job well, my son gets very limited support from the State.
Temple Grandin is also higher functioning and not a parent. And you're (I'm assuming) not autistic.
And I haven't mentioned anything about my functioning level. How do you know I'm higher functioning? There are nonverbal assistive communication users on this forum, you know.
How does it interfere with childcare? It's not like it makes him more difficult to look after. Or is it that the only childcare providers you've found freak out at anything autistic-looking? In which case, how could they handle all his other traits? If you're assuming I'm higher functioning than him, he's probably got some traits a lot more troublesome than stimming. You're not going to be able to eliminate all of them.
You may want to look for a childcare provider who has experience with autism. See if you can find a list of respite providers in your area. My parents had a lot of trouble finding me babysitters (not because I stimmed, though, instead I had meltdowns whenever adults refused to explain the reasons behind their commands). At one point they talked to social services and a social worker started providing childcare for me. (And she, having dealt with actual delinquents, recognized that I really wasn't that badly behaved. She said a couple of my bullying classmates gave her a lot more concern than I did.)
No, your trigger is stimming, not refusing food.
And I suspect you missed the point. I picked out the one thing my Mom did wrong. She was a wonderful parent. She quite literally kept me from killing myself. I went through one school with abusive teachers and a bit of bullying, and two schools with severe bullying, and in each school I got more and more depressed and anxious. The one thing that kept me going was that every day when I got home, I was with people who liked my quirks and didn't want me to change to fit society.
Other kids at school picked on everything that made me different, my teachers pushed for an ADD diagnosis so they could give me Ritalin as an 'instant cure pill' (never mind that it doesn't work that way even for kids who actually have ADD), I was told I'd go to Hell for my misbehavior, but my parents found me a joy to be with. They gave me hope - the fact that they didn't act the way my teachers and classmates did convinced me that I could find my place, where people would accept me.
My Mom is also a passionate feminist, and that gave me hope too because if hard work and sacrifice could get women their rights, my fighting could help get me my rights. Long before I knew I was autistic, I knew I was the target of discrimination, because I could tell their treatment of me was unfair. She was a Mother Bear type, fighting with the school on my behalf.
And when my parents realized school was not working for me, and I was getting frighteningly close to killing myself, they pulled me out and homeschooled me. Everyone else told them they were making a big mistake, that I'd never get a good education that way, but they'd rather I be happy than well-educated. My learning style and high anxiety made me pretty much untestable, so they were flying blind the whole time, not knowing if I was falling behind or pulling ahead. And they basically reinvented unschooling because it was the only kind of homeschooling that worked for me - I'm very good at learning but almost impossible to teach!
They never let worrying about other people's opinions keep them from doing what I needed, even if it was totally different from what other kids needed. And this was when I was undiagnosed, and they knew nothing at all about autism.
I took the SAT to enter university, and got a very high score. Now I'm training to become a psychologist, and finding that university is everything I hoped it'd be. It's the place I always knew I'd find someday - the place where I belong. But if I'd had ordinary conformist parents, I doubt I would've gotten grade 12. In fact, I'd probably be either hospitalized or in prison right now. Either I'd have attempted suicide, or attacked the wrong person during a meltdown and gotten charged with assault. (I started being homeschooled at 12 - I doubt people would've been as forgiving of a 16 year old who acted the way I did. And I'd have been worse, because every year I went to school my problems got worse.)
And even though they're better than almost every parent of an autistic kid I've ever met, they still made mistakes. That's my point - no parent is perfect. So you don't have to get defensive because someone suggests that you're not perfect.
You said you were high functioning, I didn't say that.
Look, you sound like a nice girl....however, you still don't have any concrete ideas. I sympathize with your experience and believe you've probably learned alot from it. It's time now to not respond to me anymore. Save your energy and time for your studies.
I have a graduate degree in Psychology and I can tell you....you cannot tell people in a session to "not be defensive" and that they "missed the point". You're really going to have to listen to their story and makes suggestions on how they can better themselves. That is why I go on this board...to get suggestions from people on how to better my son's world.
When you're in graduate school, you're going to encounter many different types of people and will be put in sticky situations in order to learn more about yourself, your discriminations, and your style. It's not easy. I encourage you to be more open to other people's experiences - even if you don't agree with them.
And by the way, I like the fan idea! Next time I'm out, I'll pick up a clip on fan. It's over 100 degrees here today!
What about this?
Hi Murrie
I meant something that he could wave in front of his face in place of his shirt, like this.
http://www.boutique-hospitalityjapan.co ... shuaka.jpg
Doesn't have to be that fancy of course. I am in Japan, though so I am not sure if this kind of thing would be available where you live. Maybe you could make one out of cardboard or something like that.
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