Tate's a Winner, at Pictionary and More

Tate recently decided he'd heard enough
from his sister and silenced her. 

A couple of weeks ago we were invited to the home of friends for dinner. They have a pond behind their home and we all planned to do some fishing after dinner. Some of us were looking very forward to the fishing. One of us was not. Tate does not like to fish. He was not excited to be going on this outing at all, but that is not unusual. As luck would have it though a storm rolled in just after we arrived and we were stuck inside for the evening, fishing out of the question. This was quite okay with Tate. He goes everywhere prepared, with his tablet and his iPod. So Tate settled into a corner on a cushioned chair for the evening, pulled up a YouTube video and put in his headphones, shutting us all out. There were seven adults, two small children, and five teens present. The little ones ran off to play and the rest of us decided to play a game. We settled on Pictionary on the Nintendo Wii. We split up into three teams and someone asked Tate if he wanted to play. I was sure he would say, “No.” I’d have bet on it. He said, “Yes.” I was shocked and a bit apprehensive. I thought the team that got Tate would have a definite handicap and they would have to be awfully patient. After all, without much “theory of mind” he would not be a lot of help guessing at what others were drawing. Drawing has never been a strength for TateTa either…. But, no one was worried about winning or losing. We were all just a bunch of friends having fun.

Can you guess what Tate drew here?
The answer is in a note at the bottom of the post.
See if you guessed correctly. 

Each time it was Tate’s turn to draw we asked him to pick from the “Junior” words while the rest of us played using the “Adult” words. One person from a different team always looked at the word Tate was to illustrate to make sure he knew what it was and then that person would excuse himself from guessing. As it turned out Tate needed very little help. Once he forgot he was not supposed to read the word out loud and had to choose again. A couple of times he gave verbal clues. I kept reminding him that no words were allowed but he got a little confused when everyone was yelling out answers and asking him, “Is it a ____?” So, wanting to please them, he would forget he was not supposed to talk and answer them in words. I thought the funniest part of the evening was when Tate was to illustrate the word, “coal.” In addition to drawing a blob that no one could identify, he said, “It’s what Santa Claus gives to kids who have been naughty.” Of course that was in violation of the rules but we all cracked up. No one really cared the rules had been violated. They understood. They understood that Tate was a kid who not too many years ago could not define words. He would have been unable to give a clue verbally at all. He could not have defined the word “coal” or much of any other word. And that night he was doing that and so much more.

When Tate was small we invested every dollar we could scrape together into therapies to teach him. We put all our eggs into one basket. We used ABA therapy and did as many hours of discrete trial as we could fit into a day. If you do not know what ABA or discrete trial is, click here.

At age three Tate did not understand that an item could actually have more than one name. For example, He called cows, “cows.” When we tried to teach him that cows are also called “animals” he had a lot of trouble reconciling that in his mind. When we finally convinced him a cow is an animal, he would no longer call it a cow. We worked on a discrete trial program for a long time called “categories.” Another program was to teach synonyms as he was having so much trouble with the idea. I tried to convince him that sticks and twigs were the same. Bugs and Insects were also the same. It was so hard for him to accept. When Tate had mastered those simple programs we moved onto much harder things. Word definition had never gone very well. It required a lot more language than Tate had mastered for a long time. Hearing Tate describe “coal” I was reminded of all the hard work and how well it has paid off.

Another highlight of the evening for me was watching Tate interact with those around him. He watched the rest of us laughing and bragging about our successes during the evening. He heard us all teasing each other, claiming the other teams must be cheating when they pulled ahead. He wanted in on the fun. Tate began to “trash talk” and was very good at it. He looked to a friend next to him who was playing on another team and said, “I wonder what it will feel like when I win?” We laughed twice as hard at that comment since it had come from Tate. As it turned out, Tate did not have to wonder long. His team did win. He’s a winner in more ways than one.

Note: In the picture above, Tate was drawing a king. We all knew as soon as we saw the crown. I was very impressed. Tate's sister snapped a photo of the television screen as she was also quite impressed at how well he was doing. 

If you enjoyed this post you might like to read another. Executive Function and Al Capone

Tate's iPad, Both a Blessing and a Curse

My son Tate is 13 years old. Tate has autism. When Tate was about nine years old my husband brought home our first ipad and our life was forever changed, in some ways for the better and in other ways…. not so much. That first ipad was something the whole family enjoyed and used. It is a mystery to me that Tate knew how to use it from day one. There was no learning curve or need to give him any instruction. I, the grown up, had no idea how to do anything with it, including turning it on. Yet Tate could take pictures and videos, get online, draw pictures, watch movies, and all kinds of amazing things from the beginning. Time with the ipad was coveted and the kids fought for their turn. About the same time we got our first ipad, those wonderful tablets began showing up in our children’s classrooms so Tate had the opportunity to use an ipad there occasionally. It was used both as a teaching tool and as a reward very successfully. Tate had been struggling to master two-digit addition for quite some time and he was making no progress. The day Tate’s paraprofessional pulled up a chalkboard on the ipad, and they wrote with their fingers on the ipad instead of using pencil and paper, was the day Tate caught on to double digit addition and regrouping. Math lessons were suddenly very interesting to Tate and he became motivated to learn. There were some great apps available for the ipad too. There were math games, spelling and vocabulary games, and even social skills lessons available. I loved that he was learning so much on the iPad!

Tate's ipad

So naturally, we bought Tate his own ipad. More time with the iPad could only result in more learning, right? After all, it is the going thing in the autism community now. Kids with autism need an ipad. The big drawback for us was how attached Tate got to it. If you know much about autism then you know that kids with autism often become attached to favorite objects or they can become obsessed with certain items or activities. Tate had to have his ipad under his arm at all times. He needed it right next to him every minute of the day; and at night… he slept with it. He lost sleep because he never wanted to turn it off. Taking it away from him meant he’d lose even more sleep due to anxiety and then be anxious and angry the next day too. Then there was the charger. Tate became obsessed with the charger. If the ipad charge fell much below one hundred percent then Tate insisted it was “low on battery” and needed to be plugged in. The charger and the iPad controlled Tate's anxiety and Tate's anxiety controls our home much of the time. 

And then... something even more detrimental ensued. Tate learned there were other kinds of games. You know, really fun games, the non-educational kind. Once Tate discovered those games, the educational games were no longer appreciated. And next came you-tube videos and the educational value of the ipad hit rock bottom.

But there is more. About a year after we got Tate his own iPad, I got a phone call from my credit card company. This experience is something we now refer to as the iTunes fiasco. You know those games that Tate had fallen in love with? The non-educational ones? I carefully monitored them, making sure they contained no foul language, were not violent, appropriate for his level of understanding, and above all else FREE for downloading. If I approved the game then I’d let him type in the iTunes password and download a new game quite often. Tate could not easily memorize his spelling words but he remembered that password, the placing of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and all. It never occurred to me that my sweet and innocent ten-year old son would turn to a life of crime: identity theft. (Ha!) The customer service representative from Visa reported that they had seen some “unusual activity” on my account and they wanted to review some charges with me over the phone. Someone (guess who) had tried to purchase a game for $53.64 and Visa had denied it. In going over my credit card charges with me though, we discovered they had allowed dozens of smaller charges to be accumulated. Those charges added up to over $100.00. Tate has some savvy computer skills but is completely clueless in many areas. He does not understand the value of money. In Tate’s mind a one dollar bill or a one hundred dollar bill just mean he can buy a package of m&ms. And if you want money you just pull up to a bank and ask for it in the drive thru. So explaining credit cards to Tate would be like trying to explain how electricity works to someone like me…. You could try but it is not going to be possible. It was an expensive lesson but one I needed to learn I suppose. I had a talk with Tate about the password on iTunes. I explained that he could not use it without permission and all of those sorts of things. I thought he understood. He really seemed to understand and I think he did. Maybe. Sort of. He did not buy any additional games. He knew he did not have permission unless he asked and I okayed it. But did you know that some free games offer purchases within the game for things like adding more time to a mission or buying more accessories for your little avatars to use? Well, I did not and I certainly had not forbidden him from buying more time in a game or cute little decorations. He had no idea the money he was spending was not part of the game anyway. And although I felt like I was monitoring his games and spending an appropriate amount of time checking up on him and his iPad use, I did not really have a clue how things worked within those games. I had no idea that some games limit time and if you want to purchase more time then you can buy it: One. Dollar. At. A. Time. Tate did this over a three-day period: One. Thousand. Times. And I had no idea he was not just spending pretend money from the game to purchase things. 

Did you know there is a three-day delay sometimes between making an iTunes charge and you getting an email alert? Did you know that it sometimes takes three days for a charge to appear on your credit card?  By the time I got the call and all the alerts started pinging me. I was over twelve hundred dollars in debt to Visa for iTunes charges. My credit card company told me that I would be responsible for every single dollar and they would make no exception. I thought I was stuck. I called iTunes. It is hard to find but there is a phone number for iTunes. I explained my dilemma to the nice young man on the other end of the line and he ran off to find a supervisor. It seems I was not the first mother from the autism community they had ever heard from. They backed every single charge off my credit card but it had to be done one transaction at a time while I was on the phone line. Keep in mind most of those charges were for $1.00. It was a very long phone call and a very long evening. Before we hung up the phone, that nice young man walked me through rigging Tate’s ipad so he could no longer make “in app” purchases. This was a very good thing because the young man’s supervisor had warned me that they would not forgive charges like this a second time. In the future we would be responsible for those. For even doing this for us once, I would have hugged that guy right through the phone if I could have.

You think that is the happy ending to the story? Think again. We changed our iTunes password to make sure that there would not be an issue again. Not knowing the password stressed Tate for six months. SIX MONTHS! And stressed is not a strong enough word. It did not just upset him a little bit. It ruled his days and nights for six months. Six whole months. He talked about it constantly. He complained about it. He asked about it. He tried to guess it. He asked other people to ask me for it. He tried to trick me into giving it to him. He prayed about it in our bedtime prayers. He begged me for it. He lost sleep over it. No amount of explaining, talking, or even consoling Tate helped. It took about six months before he could come to terms with the fact that he would no longer know the password for iTunes.

Yes, he even uses it upside down

So, this is why I see Tate's iPad as both a blessing and a curse. We can’t live without it at this point. Oh we could survive but that six month spell of anxiety over the password would look like a walk in the park compared to losing the iPad. I recently suggested to Tate that he will someday need a new iPad because all his memory is used up on this one. He cannot find anything at all he wants to delete to free up some memory either. His battery is shot, probably from being plugged in sixteen hours a day while he obsesses about keeping the charge up. When I made the suggestion that we think about a new iPad, Tate went into panic mode. He does NOT want a new iPad even if it means he could have two. Honestly, if I could roll back the clock I’m not sure if we would have gotten Tate his own iPad. There are huge benefits, yes, but there are so many drawbacks. Before the messages start pouring in giving me all kinds of advice about how to limit Tate’s time with the iPad, I seriously doubt you have any ideas we have not tried. We’ve been there and done that. This ain’t our first rodeo. (Insert any other cliché you want to add here.) We have taken things away from Tate before. Read about his Blue’s Clues notebook phase: Unusual Attachments Of course if the battle (scratch that- I mean war) were worth fighting then we would fight it and not back down. Remember I did not cave on the new iTunes’ password. But at this time we are not choosing to make any changes. And if you have a young child with autism who has a history of becoming attached to things... learn from my mistakes. haha