http://www.autisable.com/775195286/open-your-eyes-and-listen/?cuttag=true#cuttaganchor
Open Your Eyes and Listen
I'll admit, after yesterday my resolve was a bit shaken.
How could I - as a mother - continue to send my child out into a world where even the people who are supposed to understand him fall woefully short?
Then I realized...it's not just here. It's everywhere. We adults have a very skewed view of child behavior based on what generations before us have preached.
The mainstream view is this - children, regardless of whether or not they have special needs, act in certain ways just to be belligerent. Right?
How many times have you been told "He's just manipulating you"?
Adults, by and large, go on the assumption that children are primarily manipulative and conniving creatures whose needs are unreasonable, but are they?
I think we could all agree that manipulation to meet one's basic needs isn't really "manipulation" with the negative connotations we assign to it.
So, take this piece I read yesterday titled "Analysis of a Public Tantrum: How We (Both) Survived". In it, the author describes a "temper tantrum" (you'll see why I use quotes in a minute) that her 4-year old daughter threw in public.
Embarrassing, right, because it was something she had to "survive", minus the self-injury, thrashing, and aggression some of us know too well.
Here's the thing, if you look at the circumstances, it was a tantrum waiting to happen. She brought her daughter with her while she volunteered to sell tickets. Probably not the best place for a 4-year old, whose only recourse will be to entertain herself or wait.
However, sometimes these circumstances can't be helped, and we as autism parents all know that too well. Also, if you look at what her daughter was requesting during the tantrum, it was food. Companionship. Comfort items. Escape.
So, in essence, her needs weren't being met. She was hungry and needed comfort. In my opinion, those weren't unreasonable requests.
When those needs weren't met, her behavior reflected that, yet we as adults tend to look at those "temper tantrum" situations as being episodes of bad behavior and manipulation when we should look at the cause - which was her child's needs not being met - and see that this is not a case of bad behavior.
Rather, it was a case of adults not understanding that the needs of another person - a child - are both different and just as valid as those of the adults.
I'd argue that does not make a negatively viewed "temper tantrum"; that highlights a child whose needs are being ignored (whether or not that can be helped - sometimes it can't).
All behavior is communication. With few exceptions (think ODD and some other conditions), children do the best they can with what they have to work with.
No child wakes up in the morning and thinks, "I want to piss my parents off today", yet that is how we as adults view it. This is even more critical to remember when working with an autistic child. By and large, autistic children have different needs than the rest of us.
Besides the basics of food, entertainment (it is a need), and sleep - all of which may operate slightly differently than the rest of us, like with my child who doesn't seem to experience hunger enough to request food - autistic children have very different needs in terms of their own comfort.
Unlike with NT children, many of us NT parents and adults may struggle to identify the triggers that make a situation uncomfortable.
It may be a sound we don't hear, or lighting that is too bright. It may not be something we can readily identify, but that doesn't make that child's discomfort any less valid.
Yet that is exactly what adults tend to do with autistic children and adults. Our world has this stimuli, so we have to get them used to it, even if it means throwing them into the fire to do it.
So, people shove their hands in tactile substances they can't stand. They force-feed them.
They push them into situations kicking and screaming only to say that the children must be "manipulative" or "belligerent" because they can be forced to put their hands in the rice or eat the applesauce, so they must be just being "picky".
That's not how I see it at all. Instead, when we force a child to do something that runs counter to their very way of being, we are exerting power over them and saying "You don't have a choice". That's not therapeutic or helpful; that's wearing children into submission while not alleviating the original issue - their sensory differences.
And what about with communication? I can't tell you how many times I've had people say that my child screams too much and we need to curb that. Guess what...he struggles to communicate with verbal words, so that screaming is communication.
It is!
Whether or not it is convenient for someone to view it that way, my child screams because there is something about a situation that he does not like.
He's not screaming to see how close he can get to rupturing someone's eardrums; he does it because he's trying to tell you something, but he doesn't have the words to do so. The same with hitting. My son is not an aggressive person, but when pushed he goes into "fight or flight" mode. If a person keeps pushing him, he may come out swinging.
To him, it's his only defense. He's not hitting to be mean; he's hitting because he is defending himself. All behavior is communication, no matter how negative of a connotation we might try to place on it. All behavior is communication.
As parents of children who - by and large - have communication challenges in one form or another, we must advocate and educate on behalf of our children. We need to change the way the world sees what it construes as "bad behavior".
We need to show people that this is simply our child's way of communicating when he or she has no other options or means to do so. And perhaps - if the world would be so kind - perhaps people would stop yelling and punishing and shaming our children and begin to LISTEN.
Because in that behavior are a child's pleas for help. I'm uncomfortable. I'm hungry. I'm frustrated. You're not listening to me. You don't understand.
Photo: 13 year old Quinn Garren James Smith Official Autism Ambassador for the Jamaican Entity The Maia Chung Autism and Disabilities Foundation based in Jamaica.
But if we only tried to understand, what a better world it would be for our children.
