Blog Post 1: How parents can participate in developing social and independent living skills
1) Parents/caregivers should focus on building community. This seems like the proverbial “no-brainer,” but this is often disregarded due to focusing on various form of intervention. For those families who devoted significant time to intervention, which involved intensive contact with an adult, often missed opportunities for building a strong social community.
2) Teens/adults with social-developmental challenges need support and guidance to create peer relationships. Parents/caregivers should help identify appropriate peers, develop recreational plans that will be satisfying to a peer, and facilitate communication. The use of texting and social media sites are effective for teens and can help facilitate social interaction and planning of recreational outings. The key to creating community is leaving the house -- which means leaving the safety zone of isolating and static activities. One of the most difficult challenges for parents/caregivers is promoting peer relationships that involve community based outings.
3) Parents/caregivers should engage in consistent physical activity with their teen/adult. One of the most effective ways to decrease static behavior and the resulting sedentary life style, is to promote vigorous physical activity. By getting out of the house and taking a hike, run, bike ride, or a martial arts class, provides experiences that eliminate access to static activities and increase exposure to recreational experiences that enhance both physical and emotional well-being. The teen/adult with social-developmental challenges needs exercise in order to improve their attention, physical well-being, and sense of confidence and esteem in their bodies. By getting out of the house – whether riding bikes, swimming, body surfing, hiking, or engaging in a round of paintball -- enhances everyone's overall quality of life.
4) Parents/caregivers need to engage teens/adults in managing the household: washing dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, laundry, gardening, cooking, organizing/sorting household objects or garage items, house painting, repairing a fence, washing the car, animal care, etc. When a parent/caregiver engages their teen (or adult) in managing the household, it is important to guide and teach – rather than seek compliance with rules. Managing a household can involve following a list of “to do’s” – or it can involve creating different methods and strategies. Parents/caregivers should therefore opt to create a “thinking opportunity” no matter the household task.
5) Parents/caregivers need to decrease static activities and restrict access to recreational activities that produce states of pleasure in conjunction with self-isolation. Teens/adults with social-developmental challenges often seek out repetitive, static, and self-stimulatory activities that produce high degrees of pleasure that serves to isolate them from family and community. As stated above, this form of self-isolation is most often achieved through a relationship to technology. The overwhelming majority of teens/adults in my groups have significant problems with regulating their relationship to technology. They are compulsive, preoccupied, and rigid in the way they use technology. Although media literacy skills are developed through technology, autistic spectrum teens/adults typically do not use technology, particularly computers, to generate meaningful skills. Writing blogs, creating websites, posting photography and video, creating artwork and animation, participating in political movements, and rating products and films, are active forms of content production and do develop skills that translate into the 21st century workplace. Sitting in front of a computer, memorizing film facts, watching YouTube videos, creating an avatar for a role playing game, do not build meaningful skills for use in later employment and only serves to deepen the static thought and static communication.
6) Parents/caregivers need to decrease their overall use of verbal communication. First and foremost, parents/caregivers should reduce prompting for information, direction giving, quizzing, and asking questions that require a “correct” response. Most parents/caregivers of have been acculturated/trained to believe quiet or silence is an enemy to be fought at every possible front. Certainly, it is understandable for parents/caregivers of children with delayed verbal communication to be concerned and sensitive about the production of vocabulary. However, by the time a child becomes an adolescent, the emphasis on prompted and scripted communication has disastrous results. The years of quizzing, questioning, and prompting contribute to mindless and purposeless communication.. It is only through silence that the autistic mind can begin to think about communication. Constant chatter precludes thoughtful and purposeful communication.
7) Parents/caregivers should not allow teens or adults to engage in monologues, lectures, or repetitive phrasing or statements. If a parent is not interested in a topic, whether it is a detailed description of a film or a piece of trivia from American history, they should set a limit. Arguing about whether the monologue or lecture is meaningful will only lead to additional arguing about the monologue. The parent/caregiver needs to set a clear limit that states that they are not interested in the topic and will not listen. Although this may be a confrontational approach, it is imperative for parents/caregivers not to participate in or indulge uni-directional and controlling communication. Parents/caregivers need to say: “I will communicate with you. I will not be controlled by you.”
8) Parents/caregivers need to increase the quality of their communication with their teen/young adult. By reducing the overall quantity of communication, parents/caregivers can better focus on communicating their experience of the world. Parents/caregivers need to shift to a mode of communication that is motivated by a desire to express subjective ideas, feelings, preferences, and needs. The expectation in communication should transition from information giving and direction giving to making a connection in which a mutual understanding is created about what is meaningful to each person.
9) Parents/caregivers need to increase their use of nonverbal communication in every day interactions. The reasons for the absence of the development of nonverbal communication is complex, however, part of the problem is they live in a world where everyone is constantly talking and demanding that they produce vocabulary. There is no reason for the teen/adult with social-developmental challenges to look at a parent/caregiver for the purpose of understanding nonverbal communication if everyone in the environment is communicating with words. Parents/caregivers should define specific periods of time in which they will only utilize nonverbal channels of communication: facial expressions, hand gestures, prosody (inflection and tone), and body position.
10)Parents/caregivers need to engage in open-ended or process-oriented activities. Most parents/caregivers, if asked to select an activity to engage in with their teen/adult, will choose an activity they believe will increase a skill. Riding bikes without a destination or taking a walk without a specific endpoint are examples of process-oriented activities. Parents/caregivers should follow a simple rule of thumb: engage in activities where the activity itself is the end point – no teaching, instructing, prompting. Life is short – enjoy yourself and your children!
11)Parents/caregivers should strive to be emotionally authentic and emotionally present. Parents/caregivers who have been trained to think in terms of “increasing knowledge,” “changing behavior” and “achieving compliance” can become emotionally disconnected and static. Parents/caregivers can regain their emotional connection with their teen/ adult by allowing themselves to be a real, three dimensional, human being with preferences, opinions, needs and wants. Being emotionally authentic and present requires the autistic spectrum teen/adult to process emotional content which decreases scripted and robotic thinking and responses.
12)Parents/caregivers need to learn to set effective limits. An effective limit is created when a parent creates a boundary and enforces the boundary without engaging in repetitive threats, argument, or explanations. What is most important is for parents/caregivers to feel empowered to set limits and to be able to weather protests, arguments, or tantrums. Parents/caregivers need to be able to stand on their two feet and allow their teen/adult to experience uncomfortable feelings - so they will learn to be flexible and capable of adaptation. At the end of the day, the autistic spectrum teen cannot become a flexible young adult unless flexibility is part of their daily life and without limits teens will never engage in flexible thinking and behavior.