Text/Waring
A post-80s Shanghainese, now living in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, has a severely autistic son and a lively and lovely daughter.
Tiptoeing around, shaking your hands up and down, squinting at the fan, chanting Martian in your mouth, repeatedly flipping switches, turning wheels, fingers constantly rubbing plasticine...
Parents of autistic children should be familiar with these behaviors, children are intoxicated there, we only feel that blood pressure soared, eager to quickly ask the rehabilitator to eliminate these behaviors, they not only affect the child's concentration, but also easy to expose the identity.
But after more than 4 years of intervening with my severely autistic son and systematically learning to apply behavioral analysis, I gained a more comprehensive understanding of the self-stimulating behavior of autistic children.
Waring with son
What should children do to self-stimulate?
The purpose of any act cannot be separated from the following four types:
1) Get what you want;
2) Gain attention;
3) Evasion;
4) Satisfy sensory stimulation.
Most self-stimulating behaviors, the purpose of which is to satisfy sensory stimulation, to put it in layman's terms, is: cool!
People are cool, and so are people with autism!
In daily life, we also often have self-stimulating behaviors, such as shaking feet, turning pens, and biting fingernails. The biggest difference between the self-stimulating behavior of autistic children and ordinary people is that once they start to self-stimulate, they are completely immersed in another world and blocked from the outside world.
I can listen to the teacher while turning the pen, and I can bite my nails while answering the exam, but when autistic children stimulate themselves, they will use all their attention and have no time to take care of the right thing.
It is this feature that seriously interferes with the child's concentration, making the child a thorn in the eyes of parents and teachers.
Some parents may have questions, "I can understand that he wants to satisfy the sensory stimulation, but why cool it in such a weird way?" ”
You can imagine --
REC
You are locked up alone in a secret room on the 5th floor with only a chair, a window, and a door. You don't have a cell phone, you don't have toys, you don't have anything to entertain. How will you spend the rest of your time?
Go around the window and look outside? Make up for another sleep? It shouldn't be a few minutes before you're bored.
After a few hours, you begin to search for clues in the room, you notice the wood grain on the only chair in the room, so you squint your eyes to track the direction of the wood grain, or count the rings like a cockfighter; you play with the buttons on your clothes, turning and turning; you keep pacing back and forth in the room, tapping the window, tapping the door, creating a little rhythm; you hum a little song, even singing louder and louder, dancing with your hands...
All the things you wouldn't normally do, things that you think are inexplicable, have become reasonable and normal in that particular situation. In fact, the weirder the way you entertain yourself, the less likely you are to have a nervous breakdown in the Chamber of Secrets.
In daily life, ordinary people have many "normal" ways to entertain and satisfy themselves, but they are born with sensory abnormalities, narrow interests, communication barriers, and limited cognitive and play abilities of autistic children in it, like entering a secret room.
A new environment, or an environment that overloads their senses, can immediately put autistic children in the secret room, and they instinctively begin to self-stimulate to reduce anxiety and channel emotions.
This is also the reason why self-stimulating behavior is especially pronounced in young children and severe children.
Another credit for making self-stimulating behaviors enduring is reinforcement. Positive reinforcement increases the chances of this behavior occurring in the future.
When the child stimulates himself, he feels refreshed, and the natural result of the act of being cool positively reinforces the self-stimulation and makes him want to do it more.
Moreover, this kind of coolness is very simple, much easier than doing 3 minutes of desktop exercises to get a lollipop.
The reinforcing effect of self-stimulation also makes other reinforcements significantly less attractive to children.
My son loves music
Self-stimulating behavior, to intervene?
Yes!
These behaviors can greatly reduce the attention of autistic children, not only interfering with their learning life, but sometimes affecting those around them.
But when intervening, we need to be more intelligent, to first observe and record what stimulus behaviors the child has, how often it occurs, and set reasonable goals.
When children have little cognition, limited language, and little ability to play, it is almost impossible and inhumane to completely eliminate self-stimulating behavior. Often you've worked so hard to extinguish one, and soon a new one will appear because he needs an outlet.
What behaviors should be dealt with first?
1 Acts of an injurious nature, such as hitting the head, hitting the wall with the head, hitting the furniture.
My son would clench his fists with both hands and knock his head. I had put my hand on his head, and I was shocked by the force of his knocking.
Many children with autism will feel dysfunctional, their control of force is biased, and some children even smash the window glass with their bare hands.
These actions should have elimination as the ultimate goal.
2 Acts that cause serious interference to others. For example, oral self-stimulation during class.
When my son is in class, he always reads it "evenly", which will affect other children's classes and make the teacher's head very large.
Dealing with this behavior requires situations, such as allowing him to play freely at the time of time, but not in class.
3 Some high-frequency self-stimulating behaviors. For example, children spend more than 30% of the day spinning wheels or staring at things.
Because the behavior occurs for too much time, it has seriously affected the child's normal learning and life, and it is repeatedly reinforced, and if it is not dealt with quickly, it will be more difficult in the future.
And some self-stimulating behaviors that are harmless, do not affect others, and are not frequent, we may as well turn a blind eye first and give children some space for self-amusement.
Son at school
Self-stimulating behavior, how to intervene?
There are many specific ways to intervene in self-stimulating behavior, and when intervening, it is often necessary to take an N-pronged approach, here I share some general-directional approaches:
NO.1
block
For self-stimulating behaviors that are harmful, they should first stop and prevent children from harming themselves, while also reducing the degree and frequency of reinforcement of behaviors.
For example, when my son knocks his head with his fist, he will knock several times in succession. The first time I may not be able to stop it, but the second time I will quickly block my hand on his head, so that he can't knock his head, and when there is no cool feeling, he stops himself. Often stopped, he would slowly know that this trick would not work, and the frequency of head knocking slowly decreased.
For example, my son often talks to himself. I would immediately interrupt him and ask him some questions that he was already proficient in answering—"What's your name?" "How old is this year?" "If he's going to answer me, he won't be able to speak Martian anymore."
NO.2
Provide reasonable alternatives
Children have self-stimulating needs, and their way of satisfying is not appropriate, so we must provide the right way.
When choosing an alternative, it is best to meet the same type of stimulus needs.
For example, if my son is very energetic and will run aimlessly around the room, I will let him jump on the trampoline and count with him as he jumps.
If your child likes to rub wet dirt, you can rub plasticine for him, or play with dried rice. If your child has visual stimulation behavior, give him an hourglass or kaleidoscope or a book he loves.
What if I can't find an alternative that provides the same type of stimulation?
You can guide your child to do other things that make him feel "cool". For example, my son likes to talk to himself before going to bed, but he can't sing. I couldn't find a similar stimulus, so I put music on him because he also liked to listen to music, and music could quiet him down.
If the child likes the stimulation of the substitute, inappropriate self-stimulation will subside more easily.
When the child does not like it, we need to continue to try, and once the guidance is successful, we must immediately reward the child and reinforce him to use these reasonable alternatives.
At the same time, we want to develop new things that are attractive to him, so I prepared a sensory box for my son to choose from, which has all kinds of strange things that can be pinched, pulled, and rotated.
NO.3
Improve cognitive, communication and gaming skills
Instead of letting the child have self-stimulating behavior in the secret room, we will kill him one by one, and the more active way is to take him out of the secret room, that is, to improve the child's cognitive and play ability and strengthen communication.
Although children do not have enough self-control, parents must also let children understand which behaviors are inappropriate and inappropriate.
When children spend most of their time occupied by daily orderly activities and can have some favorite toys to have fun, their self-stimulating behavior will automatically decrease.
Children with borderline and mild autism can get satisfaction from some games, or by getting praise for answering the teacher's questions correctly in class.
A heavy child can dig out his interests, swim, color, puzzle, copy words, and try.
It is equally important to increase communication. Many self-stimulating behaviors arise because the child enters an environment where the senses are overloaded, or what he wants to express cannot be expressed.
So in daily life, teach children to express, "I want to take a break", "It's too noisy here, I want to leave"... For a child without words, we can let him point to pictures to express.
Son in puzzles
5 minutes without oral stimulation, the son spent half a year
This is how my son's Applied Behavior Analyst (BCBA) intervened in his mouth stimulation.
target
Children have no verbal self-stimulation during teaching time, and focus on teaching content for more than 80% of the time.
method
Antecedents:
Provide a suitable rest, prepare sensory toy boxes, "first ... after...", no-cause reinforcement, visual cues, functional communication;
Consequential Law:
Interrupt reaction reboot, reduce the difficulty of desktop exercises, question selection board, reinforcement selection board, differential reinforcement, token system.
effect
As shown in the picture above, our son's 3-hour class (with a break in between) took us half a year to adjust the time to achieve the goal from 1 minute to 5 minutes.
Many parents may be disappointed in this progress, but for my severely autistic children, it is not a small progress. I was pleasantly surprised that he could concentrate on his desk exercises, listen quietly to the teacher's reading stories (his least favorite project), and basically quit verbal self-stimulation during teaching hours.
However, last year, the epidemic eased, the children changed to a new classroom environment, the mouth stimulation immediately plummeted, and we once again entered a long intervention process.
But that's our life!