Of motivation, initiations and all that good stuff.

Post Reply New Topic

I briefly commented ASD kids' motivations in a thread yesterday, and continued thinking about it today. I also recall a thread from several months ago when I believe "InThisTogether" talked about how motivation is different from (task) initiation.

My son is a strong sensory seeker. He is not motivated to do anything but pursue sensory experiences. He visual stims / vocal stims / tightens / is constantly "on the go", all day long and rejects / fights attempts to be redirected even briefly to participate in a learning or even a non-sensory intensive play activity like a game of tag. I sometimes wonder if he has ADHD - he is constantly jumping and climbing, and it's really hard to redirect him from these activities. His neurologist has started bringing up possible medication for the ADHD but hasn't pushed it yet. I am resistant to medicate him without actually trying to see if anything else will help him. He has so many challenges that it's hard to say if it's the autism or the apraxia or the possible ADHD / SPD. Regardless of what labels he gets slapped with, the bottom line is that he is missing out on learning and progressing solely because he is obsessed with the need to constantly move and to constantly seek sensory experiences, to the point of excluding all else.

A lot of people - many of them fellow parents of non-verbal kids with autism and / or SPD - tell me that this gets better with age. That as their nervous systems mature, the need for so much sensory experience either drops or, in some very rare cases, completely disappears (other stims may take the place of these, of course). They assure me that, as their kids have gotten older, they are learning more and presenting as capable and confident.

My main concern is not with how my son will "present himself" in the future or how he presents himself now. My concern is how to trigger an internal motivation / task initiation for things that are less sensory and more learning in nature. NT kids have sensory needs, too, but what motivates and gets them going is that innate need for social approval - which my son does not care for. He mostly ignores other people - especially kids - and there have been times when other children have pointed him out to each other in the park and laughed at him. The only one harbouring "hurt feelings" when this happens is ME. My son doesn't care - he just continues doing whatever it is he is doing until he's had his fill and moves on to his next sensory experience.

Now that he is 6, and a really big boy (in terms of physical growth), he is already starting to stand out in a crowd with his constant movement / climbing / visual and vocal stimming. When he was 2 or 3, his antics and squealing seemed "cute" / "sweet", but people are now beginning to raise their eyebrows and starting to ask questions (both of me and of him - of course, he neither talks nor would he care to respond even if he did) !

Not sure where I am going with this ramble, but I really need some advise from other people on how to compete with his sensory needs to start motivating him to learn. Is this even possible ? We are more than happy to do a sensory diet with him, and we aren't looking to have him be seated at a desk for hours at a stretch (that's not going to happen), but I really want to redirect at least some of his sensory seeking stims into fruitful activities.

If he would sit me for 5 minutes at a time and learned to do ONE THING, that is a VICTORY in my book !

Help !

My first question is do you have him on a sensory diet? My second question is does he see an OT that is specially trained in SPD? My sister is an OT and she said that a "regular" OT should not be prescribing sensory diets and/or working with sensory integration. It is not that they will hurt anything, per se, but more that sensory integration is a specialty within itself and you don't really learn enough in school to make you a successful practitioner without advanced training or mentoring. FWIW, she does not have this--she works with people with TBI--so it is not like she is tooting her own horn. Her friend, however, works in a specialty clinic. Through her friend, she has learned how very little she knows about sensory integration.

From my experience, SPD and ADHD are really hard to tease out. My son has both. He does not have autism, but does have NLD and presents like a "mild" Aspie. Has a lot of Aspie-like traits, only milder than what a diagnosable Aspie would look like. At 6, I would have characterized his SPD as moderate-severe and his ADHD as severe (he was not diagnosed until he was 7). Please note I am only sharing my personal opinion based on my experience with my son, but I share it in case it helps you. I did go the medication route. It worked wonders for him. It eliminated his hyperactivity and greatly diminished his impulsivity and intrusiveness. It was not easy to get the right dose, but once we found it, it made a huge difference and I was able to see that his hyperactivity was ADHD related. His SPD issues remained untouched. He still had gravitational insecurity, gross motor deficits, etc, but the "energizer-maniacal-movement" stopped. Once this stopped, he was able to focus and learn some of the social skills he had been lacking to that point. He actually noticed, for example, that other kids moved away from him. He never noticed that before, so he just kept on pushing and pushing and pushing, never realizing that he was making people uncomfortable or mad.

The other thing that I think helped him was being in Tae-Kwon Do. I will warn you that I have heard very mixed reviews about this. I have heard parents who's kids were in schools where the Master appeared to think that he could discipline the hyperactivity out of the kid. I was very lucky to find a place where the Master was very in-tune with my son. He intuitively understood, for example, that when my son stopped standing still when he was supposed to be at attention, that he was not doing it on purpose. He would quietly walk over to him and put his hands on his shoulders. He also used a lot of hand-over-hand teaching because my son cannot mimic other people's movements (he still can't to this day). His muscles need to feel it or he cannot understand what to do. TKD helped him even before he was on meds. They teach things like deep breathing and other techniques that seemed to calm him. The repetitive recitation of the tenets of tae kwon do, practicing the poomsae, discussion of the connection between the mind and the body...all of this helped.

It is hard for me to know if my son would have matured out of it or not. He is no longer on medication and does not struggle with hyperactivity. I don't know if it is because he grew out of it, or if it is because the 4 years he was on meds changed something.

This post is disjointed and I am sorry for that, but the last thing I want to say is that it will be very difficult for you to find something to motivate him if his hyperactivity is neurologically driven. I don't know if it is an issue of motivation or initiation. I would start with trying to get him regulated from sensory standpoint and see if you can make any gains then. If not, research the heck out of medications to see if is something you are willing to try. There are side-effects and some of them are potentially longterm. But when I decided to medicate my son, the "side effects" of his current condition were more debilitating than the side-effects of the meds and I could not see anyway in which there would not be longterm consequences related to his unmedicated state. I was firmly against meds at first, but I finally got to the point that it became clear to me that it would be very unwise for me to put my ideology above my child's well-being. So I gave it a try. That may not be the path you need, and it may not be the path you choose, but if you do and you need someone who understands, I will be here for you.