With so many academic, social, and behavioral therapies and interventions available for children with autism and other disabilities, it can be dizzying to keep up with them all. So focusing on just a couple of tried and true areas can make a big difference while enhancing all the hours spent on tutoring and therapy. The end of a calendar year between semesters is a good time to reevaluate strategies to take inventory of how to improve academic and therapeutic programs for children with disabilities.
Helping kids understand emotions and talking positively in front of them are two simple but critical steps parents and teachers can take that can yield long-term benefits.
Emotion coaching often gets lost in the shuffle among more tangible, data-driven drills, which is strange because kids with autism can be notoriously bad at identifying, understanding, and regulating emotions. Understanding emotions is crucial to learning. Children should understand that it is normal to feel upset and that there are strategies they can use to calm down. They also need to understand the concept of empathy, or theory of mind.
The author and psychologist John Gottman says in “Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child” that emotional intelligence is a predictor of a child’s success later in life. We’ve all met highly intelligent people who cannot deal successfully with other people. Connected to this idea is the need to teach kids to say “please” and “thank you” meaningfully rather than ignoring manners because other things are seen as “more important.”
Another intangible concept that can have a major impact on the confidence and success of students is how positively or negatively they are viewed. Negative statements can become self-fulfilling prophecies, so that any successes are seen as aberrations. Instead, avoid limit-setting and accentuate the child’s accomplishments. In such an environment, failures will more likely become outliers.
Too often, parents, teachers, therapists, and other caretakers talk about children with autism or other disabilities in front of them as if they are not there. “Johnny has a lot of problems learning math, and I’m afraid he will never be able to catch up. He’s better in reading, but in math he’s hopeless. He can’t do this and he can’t do that.” How will a child be affected if he or she hears some variation of that daily or even once a week for 20 years?
Many kids with autism possess keen hearing and excellent recall of past events, so they may be taking in and remembering everything that you are saying. We now understand that a lot of kids comprehend more than it appears that they do. Use that to their advantage by constantly encouraging the child. Don’t have meetings about the child in front of him either because then he will get the impression that there is something wrong with him that needs to be fixed.
Older children and adults with autism who have improved their communication skills say they did not like being talked about as if they were not there.
Focus on raising expectations and building kids’ confidence, and helping them understand and deal with emotions. It will become the foundation that will make all the work that more effective.
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