There's a saying: If you've met at least one person with Autism, then you've met at least one person with Autism.
I fear this might have already become a cliché. What this saying means is, if you met someone with Autism, so what. They're all unique. Don't presume you've got them figured out.
It's an easy thing to do. It's understandable to make assumptions. Humans like to simplify things. But it's always counterproductive.
So, what I'm saying is, reading this article might be a complete waste of time, for your particular situation. I don't presume to know your kid.
Ben is 14. TJ is 8. They both have autism. Their sister is 11, and she is neurotypical (no autism). My wife and I have been married for 17 years. I have a background in information technology and I work from home. My wife was an RN until Ben was born and then she quit, is now home-schooling the two youngest.
Ben goes to High School. He has severe autism, so he is in a special class of peers with varying levels of special needs.
TJ is being homeschooled, but also gets behavior services. His autism is a little less severe, but his behaviors are more destructive.
Ben and TJ cannot converse. But they do have vocabulary. Ben has at least 10,000 words. TJ is probably closer to 3,000.
They can both say full sentences if prompted, but my theory is that these are mostly single long words to them.
The longest sentence TJ can say is, "I can't wait to eat my food." But it often comes out more like, "I ca WAIT food." There's a story about this phrase, see Narration below.
They both have problems waiting when mommy is preparing meals. A lot of behavioral issues come to the surface during this time. So I talk to them and try to help them express their frustration.
We carry a few $5 Starbucks Cards. Our kiddos love to grab people's drinks and chug away. While we certainly don't encourage this, sometimes there just too fast for us. We've gotten into the habit of scoping out a room to see if there are any potential drink targets. We try to see the room the way our kiddos do. But we can't always anticipate the situation.
In fact, our youngest decided to take it up a notch. He concluded a long time ago that there was no chance he'd be able to actually enjoy someone else's drink, so his only goal now is to knock it out of their hands and laugh.
So that's where the Starbucks Cards come in. Believe me, almost nobody will accept the card. You're just showing that you're prepared.
We carry plastic plates to restaurants. Although, we don't go to restaurants very often, when we do, these come in handy. Often, the restaurants provide either weird baskets and paper to put their food on or breakable plates. Neither of these are very compatible.
I have a theory. The setting is unfamiliar, but these plates are. These plates reinforce the antecedent of "it's time to eat."
I believe both my boys benefit a lot from continuous narration of what's happening. It helps them because they don't ever ask what's going on, but I'm sure they want to know. Giving them a "heads-up" without requiring a prompt needs to be balanced with the notion that sooner or later, they'll pick up the vocabulary. So along with narrating, we also listen out for their interpretation of the vocabulary they're picking up.
TJ especially picks up on the phrases in context. When I'm going to close the door to a room, he'll often want to take over and tell me "close the door." He's not telling me to close the door. He's telling me that he's closing the door (whether I like it or not). When I repeat it, he closes the door and says, "thank you." I have to say "thank you" or else he'll just keep saying it until I do.
This tendency for TJ to mimic narration and require my verbalization in a certain order might be classified as a form of reverse echolalia.
Echolalia is when someone repeats what you say without understanding. Reverse echolalia is when someone says something meaningless and requires you to repeat. The difference is that TJ has context for the correct phrase, but not command of the words. He hasn't yet seemed to realize that "close the door" is a phrase that can be broken into parts. "Close the door" is a long word. The individual words aren't meaningful on their own.
The narration is a stepping stone to speech. In very young children, it's just cute babbling. As our kids got older, it seemed a little less cute and more OCD. But really, they're just doing what we do, as they see it. We expect them to repeat phrases they don't quite understand, so they have us do the same.
These are just a few ideas. Again, everybody's different. Most of the time, people hear "autism" and think "what sets them off?" In our case, our boys are usually pretty chill. For TJ, if he's expecting a snack and he doesn't get one, that'll set him off. About the only thing that sets off Ben is sudden noise. Even then, most of the time he's chill about it unless that sudden noise came from TJ, then Ben thinks he has to do something about it to shut him up.
It's always a matter of finding the antecedent to the behavior. The antecedent is a fancy word for "thing or event that existed before." We say antecedent instead of cause because the behavior's cause is muddled between the trigger and the person responding to it. So just to be clear, we're talking about the environmental cause, which we refer to as the antecedent.
Finding and controlling the antecedent isn't always possible, so we balance that with a compensating control (like the starbucks cards) until we can find the antecedent for the particular behavior.
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