Stop spinning!

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How do you deal with people who find your child's stimming annoying and something purely to be extinguished?

Alternatively, how do you direct it toward something less dangerous/disruptive until the child is in a safe place? While I don't have a problem with him spinning, he has hurt himself doing it in a cluttered environment.

with all respect to them,its their issue if they cant cope with his spinning,tell them he has different sensory needs and needs to spin to normalise his body and mind; non autistic people have self regulating sensory systems and do not need any extra sensory feedback.

as for the other issue, its not the cheapest but woud buying him some sensory integration products to help whilst he is in those environments?
can personaly recommend weighted and pressure based products,such as the southpaw bear hug vest or weighted waist coats as an alternative,as like spinning these also target the vestibular and proprioceptive senses.

I have never actually had anyone say anything to me. I have gotten glares and that look, if you know what I mean, and of course regular stares.

Most of the time, I ignore it. I have gotten accustomed to doing so. My son doesn't notice what other people are doing, so I am the one being made uncomfortable, not him, anyway.

If it is one person and they are staring as opposed to anything else,, I have found if you make slight eye contact, they will realize they are staring and that this is rude, and they will turn away. Caveat: If the person is confrontational in nature, this can backfire. Once I had a person glare back, so I backed off, as I did not want a "thing."

If my son is doing something that can be potentially unsafe, like spinning in the supermarket with a lot of cart traffic, or near the jars and such, and is not paying attention, (and he is not paying attention, when he does this) I do correct him, and remind him to look where he is going.

Onlookers seem to appreciate this, though it is not why I do it. I will also correct him when he is too loud for a given venue (library, or something) b/c that is disruptive and I need to remind him when to modulate his speech. I don't do it based on onlookers, but based on what has to be taught. Usually, there is overlap, but not always.

Edited to add: If what he is doing is just odd to other people, overly disruptive, or potentially dangerous, I just let him be, and everyone who doesn't like it, can just deal with it. At some point I will have to start addressing expected vs. unexpected behavior, again, but that is not going to help him with stims, unless we are able to redirect them. I tend to be very cautious with that as I don't want him replacing his relatively benign stims with stims that might not be so benign.

Depending upon who they are and how important they were and the space that I was in at the moment, (I say was/were because neither kid stims in public anymore), I would either 1) try to educate. With my daughter, I made an autism awareness card. It really did seem to help. Once people realized she was doing it because she had a disability, they often backed off. The card included language along the lines of, if you are curious and have questions, my mom would be happy to answer them, but don't stare, it's rude and it makes me feel bad. (I don't think it made her feel bad because I don't think she was aware, I just wanted to heighten their awareness of the inappropriateness of their staring behavior and the thought of making a disabled kid feel bad seems to do the trick) 2) ignore them. I don't care what some people think, and sometimes I was too busy to worry about someone else's ignorance. And if I am to be completely honest,sometimes I had a hard time dealing with my son's sensory seeking behavior, so I had to worry about keeping myself in check and didn't have the bandwidth to deal with anything else.

Honestly, I think most people are, under it all, curious. They don't understand. It is disconcerting and uncomfortable because it violates expectations, and once you help them see the purpose and reason, it becomes understandable and they are not as uncomfortable.

And other people are jerks. They have no desire to understand. No desire to accommodate. No desire to overcome their ignorance. No desire to employ empathy or compassion. We need to teach our children that these people exist. We cannot change them. But their ignorance is a reflection back on them, not something that we, or our kids, should feel bad about. Heck, I teach my kids that these people usually deserve pity more than anything else. They are likely like this in many areas of their lives, and I cannot imagine that they are happy people. It has to be a heavy burden to carry around, all that judgement of other people. Can't leave much room for the beautiful things in life and likely pushes positive people away.

I rearranged the house when my son was younger so that it would be his safe place for all his stimming needs. I found it made a HUGE difference in his ability to learn to foresee and mitigate his own meltdowns; absolutely worth the effort - and the loss of having a "beautiful" home.

But I have always taught him to suppress his stims in public, the most obvious ones, at least. The little stuff like chewing he just needs to do sometimes, and people rarely notice.

I learned not to make a big issue of it; half the time he isn't even aware of his own stims. Simply pointing out to him what he was doing was usually enough for him to connect the dots back to, "we don't do that here." I used a lot of quiet signaling and his teachers did the same. Shoot, I still do that, lol, over things like his posture when he is eating in a restaurant. He appreciates it. He doesn't want to come off as bad mannered or annoying, he just isn't usually self-aware.

It is good to have conversations about all this at home, ie what your goals are, why you think it is in his best interest, and how you might get his attention to alert him to behavior inappropriate for the location. He needs to understand and buy into the goal if you are going to be successful. Tap into logic that works for him.

Or, when you simply can't find anything logical, go back to what another poster said: maybe the problem really isn't his, but everyone else's Raising an ASD child will definitely get you re-thinking all the social constructs of our world, lol!

Finally, remember that what can and should be tolerated is a moving target. Don't ask your child to do things he is not ready for, but also don't fail to ask him to learn behavior control that he IS ready for.

Analagous to "How do you deal with people who find your child's being black annoying and something purely to be extinguished? "

It's the NT who doesn't get it that's the problem.

As a parent of an Aspie, you will constantly be labelled The Bad Parent and That Family. You HAVE to resist it. You must NEVER get tired of standing up to that. You will have to stand up to teachers. You will have to stand up to doctors. Maybe even the police. Take heart! You will find ways to tactfully and gently educate the clueless.


Trust that you are not alone (there are thousands of us who get it) and it is they that have the problem.

Analagous to "How do you deal with people who find your child's being black annoying and something purely to be extinguished? "

It's the NT who doesn't get it that's the problem.

As a parent of an Aspie, you will constantly be labelled The Bad Parent and That Family. You HAVE to resist it. You must NEVER get tired of standing up to that. You will have to stand up to teachers. You will have to stand up to doctors. Maybe even the police. Take heart! You will find ways to tactfully and gently educate the clueless.


Trust that you are not alone (there are thousands of us who get it) and it is they that have the problem.

I know a few parents who carry autism information cards around with them to give to people who give them mean looks in public. You don't have to say anything, just let them read the card and possibly have that judgment turn to shame.
http://www.squidoo.com/free-printable-a ... tion-cards

Maybe it is me being infected by some of the other threads, but I am not sure how much sympathy one can realistically expect out there. That, and in my opinion, my son's neurology is no one's business. But that is just me. I would not give out cards. I think it would make my son feel like I was apologizing for his existence, or something.

I know how I would like to deal with it, but it involves some painful Hapkido joint locks.

But I'm a nice guy and probably wouldn't do that in real life.

I think these are great for highly disruptive behaviors that the ASD person has no control over, like screaming melt-downs in public. But for silliness like spinning, I'm staying in the "teach your child time and place if you can, and ignore the strangers if you cannot" box.