breaking the rules

Flexibility is not easy for a kid with autism. Tate wants rules written in stone. You do not bend them, tweak them, change them, or rewrite them. SO… last night when I chose to follow a couple of cars into town, THROUGH the “road closed” barriers, I paid. It would have been easier to go the extra two miles, using the detour, in the end. I explained over and over (as Tate protested) that the road crew had gone home for the night and the road was still in perfect condition to use. If he had better language skills I know Tate’s argument would have been “You cannot have it both ways Mom. You finally have me convinced that detour signs are not evil, and roads closing are okay. You teach me these things and then you amend it all?” See a previous post about our detour into town by clicking on this link: Under Construction 

Tate is rarely without a hat.

Tate lives in a black-and-white, rule bound world. This is typical of autism. There is no gray allowed. The few gray areas Tate can tolerate have been taught and reinforced over and over so they are also a sort of black-and-white rule. “You cannot wear your hat in the church building” was a black-and-white rule. Gray came when he did not have to take his hat off if we stopped at the church building to work or clean, and it was not a time of worship. He “wrote” a new rule he could put in his black-and-white mind then, and the gray area then became a black-and-white rule he could follow too. This way of thinking affects everything for Tate. It is why he has such a hard time learning that some words have two different meanings. Last night, someone said “I want to train for a half marathon.” Tate couldn’t identify the word “train” in that sentence, nor does he know what a marathon is. He made a comment about “a train,” thinking he was adding to the conversation. A train runs on rails and is not something you can do, in his mind. I defined the word as a verb for him, but I am not sure he ever really understood. It took several explanations before Tate understood the word “chilly” could be used as a word describing the temperature, but it is also a food. And now people can even tell him to “chill out” when asking him to calm down!

Think about what a kid like Tate goes through in a typical day. Can you imagine how hard it must be to sit in a room full of peers that seem to understand all kinds of things that you do not? Can you imagine the confusion when an adult is lecturing on a topic that you do not understand and they keep using words that have double meanings? We pass a test and we pass the salt. We haul out the trash and we walk down the hall. We keep the beat in music and we grow vegetables called beets. We would never beat a pet but it is a good thing to beat everyone else in a race. All these things are learned fairly easily by a child with a typically developing mind. They are like sponges. Autism robs a person of this flexibility and “absorbency.” Even if Tate were able to decipher all of the words and his brain had all of them defined correctly, we would still have to slow way down and let him process things at a slower pace. Tate’s processing is so slow that he gets lost in all the language if people talk very fast. I think that is why he “gives up” and just seems to stop listening sometimes. He is living in a world of language that does not make a lot of sense, and surrounded by adults that keep changing the rules on him. 

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when a rock is not a stone

I am currently looking for ideas and teaching materials to help me teach Tate figurative language: idioms, synonyms, antonyms, metaphors, and analogies. I am hitting this hard right now as I have just come from a conference about social communication and it has made me more determined than ever to help Tate with the nuts and bolts of everyday language.  Sometimes I target a specific area or lesson and work on it harder than anything else.  I always work on language but I am specifically going to work hard on figurative language over the summer.

Children with autism have to be taught things systematically.  They do not absorb things from their environment, as do typically developing children.   We have to teach Tate that one word can mean multiple things, different words can stand for the same thing and different words can have opposite meanings.  I've actually been working on these things for years. 

One of the first discrete trial programs we did with Tate in early intervention was teaching "categories."  He had to be taught language very systematically.  We had pictures of animals and pictures of clothing, as well as other categories.  He had to sort these things into the correct piles, thus teaching him that pants and shirts were both items of clothing, and dogs, squirrels and cows were all called animals.  This was a hard concept for him.  He didn't mind matching cows to cows or dogs to dogs, no matter what the breed or color.  That made sense to him.  But when we tried to get him to put the dogs and cows and rodents all into the same pile, he balked.  He finally gave in and did what we asked but he then changed his word for "cow" to "animal" because if a cow wasn't just a cow then it was an animal.  It could not be both.  In his mind, each animal had its own category and he couldn't see the bigger  picture.  We have run into this over and over throughout the years.  We've had discrete trial programs that taught him that an insect could also be called a bug and a stick was also called a twig.  He memorizes these things and retains them eventually with repetitive teaching.  

Rocky

We no longer do discrete trial at a table and the teaching methods are not as rigid as they were when he was a preschooler.  Now we do a lot of our teaching incidentally, throughout the day.  Example:  a few days ago I used the word stone and could tell he drew a blank.  I said "a stone is like a rock.  You can use either word when you are talking about a rock."  His reply was "Rocky is not a stone."  People who  know Tate will know exactly what that meant.  Tate has a rock; a pet rock, named Rocky.  He has had Rocky for about 3 years I think.  I have no real memory of where Rocky came from but one day... there was Rocky.  He is about the size of a baseball and he is a member of the family.  He sits on the shelf at the head of  Tate's bed. We go for periods of time without hearing anything about Rocky but we also have days that he is right here with us, watching and participating in our activities.  I personally think that Rocky has autism.  He is awfully quiet.  haha  Tate always seems to know what Rocky is thinking though.  One morning, a year or two ago, Tate announced at the breakfast table that it was Rocky's birthday.  Rocky expected a cake that evening for dinner.  Of course, I could not disappoint the guy.  We had cake and Tate blew out the candles.  Tate had also expected Rocky to get a new dvd for his birthday but I had no idea so there were no gifts.  Luckily, Tate and Rocky were forgiving.  

Last week, one of Tate's siblings went into his room and Tate was sitting on the bed with an umbrella open and he and Rocky were huddled under it.  Tate was pretending.  Pretending is always celebrated as Tate's imagination is very limited.  Tonight, as Shawn was putting Tate to bed, Tate was holding Rocky.  Shawn told Tate that we hadn't been seeing much of Rocky lately.  Tate's reply?  "Rocky does not like being called a stone."  Apparently, I have hurt Rocky's feelings by trying to teach a synonym for the word "rock" a few days ago.  ha!  I love my boy.

Rocky's birthday: 
Rocky is the one on the table. 
Tate is the one in the chair.