The emotional problems of autistic children have always been a major problem that plagues parents, and sudden tantrums, crying, falling things, and shouting have caused parents a lot of headaches. From the perspective of children's psychological development, the behavior of tantrums shows to a certain extent that children have a certain sense of self, they begin to have their own ideas or opinions on certain things or things, have certain needs, and hope that others can meet these needs. However, if autistic children lose their temper frequently, use their temper to achieve a certain purpose, and use their temper to satisfy their requirements, it will bring trouble to the people around them.
When dealing with children's emotional problems, we must first find out why children are emotional, and prescribe the right medicine for the reasons for children's emotional problems.
General emotional problems
Everyone has more or less emotional problems, the reason can be as simple as not eating a delicious meal at noon or not being able to find a favorite toy, there are many details that can affect the child's mood, even the parents who get along day and night can not all be aware of it.
After understanding that children are easily emotional about certain things, parents feel the tipping point of children's emotions when they encounter the same situation, and quickly divert their children's attention before the child's emotional outburst. At the same time, it is also necessary to guide the child to vent this emotion, find the cause of his emotions, find similar functional behaviors, and replace the current behavior.
Evade the task
A lot of a child's crying stems from avoiding doing things, such as getting up, going to class, and eating. In order to let the child quiet down quickly, parents often succumb to this kind of crying, so as to do things for their children or simply give up doing something. This may stop the child's crying in the current situation, but it is invisibly reinforcing the child's behavior of using crying to blackmail the parent.
Therefore, parents need to measure whether what they are required to do is normal, whether it is within the scope of the child's self-ability, if it is too difficult for the child, it is necessary to reduce the difficulty of what needs to be done, and pay attention to guiding the child to express his or her requirements correctly.
Needs are not being met
Children with autism have limited verbal expression ability and low ability to delay gratification, and if parents cannot understand the child's intentions in time, the child will express his needs through crying.
In this case, we have to teach the child the correct way to ask for it and meet these needs of the child.
However, when children put forward unreasonable needs and do not meet the emotions, they can be through the following methods: set rules; skillfully use tokens, timely encouragement; dare to ignore, and calmly deal with them under the premise of ensuring that children do not make dangerous behaviors.
Seek attention
It is relatively common for children to attract the attention of others through crying behavior, and it is more common to use crying, laughing, and various naughty ways to create big moves to attract the attention of others. Many parents do not take this seriously, because when their children make mistakes, they will be severely criticized by their parents. But when children do well and expect to be encouraged or affirmed by their parents, they are sometimes ignored, so children will cry and get attention.
This requires parents to assign tasks to their children before they need to deal with things, so that children have something to do, and give more attention and positive feedback when the children are quiet, on the other hand, they must stop the child's incorrect method of seeking attention in time.
Disturbed by environmental changes
Autistic children often stubbornly adhere to some routines of life, when the environment he is in changes, it will feel uneasy, so we must try to maintain the child's familiar environment, do not easily change the placement of children's living items, and when we have to change the environment, we need to inform the child in advance to make children psychologically prepared.
Expression of unknown cause
In the process of getting along with children, we may not be able to clearly understand the reason for each emotional agitation of the child, if we can not find the reason for the child's behavior, then we can classify it as self-stimulation. Some of the child's crying or laughing behaviors may also be a form of self-stimulation.
When facing such a situation, we must first distinguish whether the child's self-stimulation behavior has affected his life and whether such behavior can be controlled by us. If these self-stimulation of children, we can stop at any time, will not have a major impact on life, such self-stimulation does not have to improve. However, if we can't be stopped at any time, we need to find alternative behaviors to meet the needs of our children.
Source: Department of Child Rehabilitation Wang Xiao
Photo editor: Zhao Wanjiao, Planning and Outreach Office
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Jiaxin, Planning and Outreach Office