Note: This is Part II of the article; click here for Part I, where Michelle outlines the key strategies she teaches for reducing social anxiety. I think the visuals are great – they remind me of what some of my favorite Aspie bloggers refer to as “loops”!

The Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure
Visual representations are strong—and welcomed—tools in helping our students understand the interrelationships that exist in social thinking and social processing. To help our students understand the concepts outlined in this article, I developed two graphic representations of the thought processes used in working through social situations. The Spiral of Social Success summarizes these concepts:

• You will encounter some stress approaching this situation. In the past your anxiety would prompt you to bail out of this situation. Instead of starting by doubting yourself, explore what strategies you can use to help yourself deal with the uncomfortable social situation.
• Use your inner coach to remind yourself how much better you will feel once you use your strategies—that you are capable of using these strategies as well as choosing specific strategies to use.
• You feel better about yourself when you are demonstrating your abilities or social competencies.
• This encourages you to use the strategies.
• In doing so, you are training your brain that “you can do it” better than you have done it before!

Conversely, the Spiral of Social Failure illustrates what happens when our clients fail to embrace their social-learning–social-anxiety reducing strategies:

• You encounter the same stressful situation, one you previously avoided.
• Your anxiety prompts you to think of excuses for why you won’t engage in this situation today.
• Your self-defeater voice assures you that you can’t do it and that you have never been able to do it.
• You have negative emotions about your inability to get through this situation.
• You avoid putting yourself in the situation.
• You teach your brain one more time that you cannot do it! Your memory now reflects your inability and your self-defeater voice grows stronger.

The purpose of the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure was to help our students understand how best to place the strategies they were learning in the context of their own functioning.

Our students helped us adjust the spirals so the wording more clearly matched their own experiences and emphasized how they related to the content of each spiral. This visual presentation paired with lessons that taught them the key concepts outlined in the graphics—increased accountability, self-learning, letting go of excuses, and embracing change—led to some very positive results.

They discovered they could choose positive behavioral responses to anxiety-laden situations and retrain their brains to learn new ways of acting and reacting. While the situations still caused anxiety, our clients gained confidence in attempting to push through their anxiety, further reinforced by the success they could achieve within the interaction. However, this learning process takes time. It may take years to help our students, through active learning of these strategies, to get them onto the Spiral of Social Success.

Some level of anxiety is inherent in every social situation we encounter. This set of strategies does not offer a cure for the anxiety experienced by individuals with social learning challenges. However, it can help minimize some of the anxiety by helping our students better appreciate how anxiety affects us and giving our students a toolbox of options to use when anxiety arises.

Such coping strategies are beneficial—not just for individuals with social learning challenges, but for us all!

Michelle Garcia Winner is the founder of Social Thinking®. She works in her clinic in San Jose, CA, has written numerous books, and speaks internationally. Visit her website, www.socialthinking.com, for more information.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Related Posts:

• Guest Post: The Spirals of Social Success and Failure, Part I
• Guest Post: Teach Contextual Sensitivity to Children on the Spectrum
• Homework: Teaching Organizational Skills to Individuals with ASD

Note: Because this article is fairly long, I have broken it up into two parts. In Part I, Michelle outlines the key strategies she teaches for reducing social anxiety. I so appreciate her outlook on the responsibility of each individual to take ownership for what we need and want to improve in our social lives.

My goal was to find a way to help our clients decrease anxiety while increasing their social competencies. The result was a treatment strategy called the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure.

I developed this approach for high-level teens and young adults who had first developed social competencies and were now ready to explore social anxiety. We discovered this teaching strategy helped motivate them to challenge their anxiety by giving them alternative strategies to use when stressed by specific social situations. An overview of the social concepts we shared with clients, as well as the description of the spirals, follows.

Social anxiety has deep tentacles; once it disrupts our functioning it likes to keep that power in place! Once it inhabits a person, anxiety will not go away without a fight. This means as our students recognize they have increased social competencies, they have to actively work at reducing their anxiety. This involves learned strategies, as well as their own shift in perception in making a choice in the moment: are you going to default to anxiety or use your strategies?

Some of the key social learning–social anxiety reduction strategies we teach our clients include:

1. Take ownership; be personally accountable for what you need to learn. After many years of working with adolescents, I realized that while I understood they had social learning differences, as long as I prompted them to use their strategies, I was the one taking ownership of their problems. Now I realize that as I teach them these strategies, they have to work at using them, which first means they have to realize these strategies are theirs and not ours (the teachers and parents).
2. Accept that your job is to become more comfortable with social discomfort. The neurotypical teen and adult world is filled with social discomfort. Using strategies does not mean our clients won’t feel discomfort. Their job is to work at learning how to be comfortable with the fact they will be uncomfortable socially at times! The mentor’s job is to encourage the client to use the treatment strategies even when experiencing discomfort.
3. Recognize and celebrate the small steps of progress being made. We need to help our students feel intrinsically proud of themselves for their progress. Avoid using token rewards for progress as these provide extrinsic but not intrinsic motivation.
4. Use your inner coach, rather than your self-defeater voice, inside your head. You and I use an “inner coach” or “private voice” in our heads to encourage and motivate ourselves through difficulties. Our inner coach may say to us: “You can do this!” “Just do it and get it over with!” “Remember last time this wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, so just go do it!”
   Unfortunately, many of our students have a “self-defeater” voice in their heads. This voice discourages rather than encourages: “You’re bad at this.” “You’ve never been able to do this, so you won’t be able to do it now.” Individuals who have a loud self-defeater voice in their heads will default to avoiding the uncomfortable task at hand; those with an inner coach have a far better chance of pushing themselves through the uncomfortable task. We need to help our students be realistic about their strengths and challenges while reinforcing their choice to use their inner coach as much as possible.
5. Stop making excuses for avoiding social encounters. Those with strong self-defeater voices tend to find a lot of benign excuses for avoiding the task at hand. Many of our students don’t recognize that what they are saying is, in fact, an excuse for not pushing themselves through an uncomfortable moment. Instead, they automatically default to their excuses.
   Our strategy is to explore the personal excuses they make as we assign them tasks that provide opportunities to practice social competencies and use their anxiety-reducing strategies. Once students begin to notice and then take ownership of the fact they are making excuses, they further progress.
6. Your brain always learns; whether it learns positive or negative ways to cope, it is always learning! We discuss how our brains are always learning, all the time, that anytime we are awake we are learning from our experiences. If we “default” to what we are accustomed to doing, we constantly teach our brains we can only do it the way we have done it before. If students want to teach their brain a new set of skills, they have to try to do things differently.
   This idea may seem elementary, but it can be difficult for our concrete-thinking, rule-bound students to change the way they do things, especially their thinking patterns. I often ask them a direct question: “Do you want to teach your brain you can’t do something, or do you want to teach your brain you can do something?” Hopefully their answer is a “can-do” response, and we circle back to our other strategies to help them retrain their brain.

Watch for Part II of this guest article tomorrow, where Michelle illustrates her spirals of social success and social failure.

Michelle Garcia Winner is the founder of Social Thinking®. She works in her clinic in San Jose, CA, has written numerous books, and speaks internationally. Visit her website, www.socialthinking.com, for more information.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Related Posts:

• Guest Post: The Spirals of Social Success and Failure, Part II
• Guest Post: Teach Contextual Sensitivity to Children on the Spectrum
• Asperger Awareness by Stephen Plowright

Note: You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code: INTERRUPTED.

Remember the scene in the movie, Rainman, where Raymond is trying to cross a street? In Raymond’s mind when the sign displays “Don’t walk,” it means only one thing: “Don’t walk.” We laugh when the sign changes from “Walk” to “Don’t walk” and Raymond stops in the middle of the intersection. Raymond does not understand that “Don’t walk” means many different things, depending on the situation or context. When you’re halfway through the crossing, it means “hurry up” instead!

Here is another example of context blindness: When the doorbell rang, the mother of a seven-year-old boy with autism asked him to open the door. He opened the back door instead of the front. His reaction was logical, but his choice of door was out of context.

Emotion recognition training is immensely popular in the field of autism. Typical materials used in this training are photographs or pictures of facial expressions of emotions. Although these materials can help children with autism learn about different emotions in a rote manner, they do not reflect emotion recognition as it happens in real life.

First, we rarely see faces out of context in real life. When we try to figure out what a person feels, we look at context as much as we do facial expression: the situation, what that person says, body language, our past experiences with similar situations, etc. In fact we don’t even need a facial expression to recognize emotions…. Studies on how people process facial expressions have shown that when we look at faces, our brains always spontaneously encode the context and that in certain instances, context plays an even bigger role in emotion recognition than the facial expression.

The second problem with traditional emotion recognition training is the underlying assumption that there is a direct relationship between an emotion and its facial expression. This assumption goes back to Darwin’s idea of universal expression of emotions in which each emotion has its own distinct facial expression. Unfortunately for people with autism, facial expressions are not that straightforward and quite often are ambiguous.

Take tears for instance. What do people feel when they have tears on their cheeks? It could mean sadness. But it could also mean happiness or pride. Or it could be an allergic reaction or the result of dicing an onion. How can a brain tell the difference? It uses context.

In recognizing emotions—the same is true for all mental states—the human brain relies on context. When people with autism find it hard to empathize, it is because their brain lacks contextual sensitivity. They are affected by context blindness, rather than mind blindness.

We can teach people with ASD a lot of rules and scripts, but for social understanding and competence to flourish, scripts and rules are insufficient. To effectively teach emotion recognition and social understanding to people with ASD, we must add context to the materials we teach. Even using a term such as “socially appropriate behavior” becomes misleading unless context is specified; behavior that is socially appropriate in one situation might be inappropriate in another context!

Social competence is not about knowing whether a certain behavior is socially appropriate or not, it is the knowledge of when that behavior is appropriate and when it is not.

Research has shown that more able people with ASD know quite a lot of social rules, but they have difficulty adapting these rules to changing contexts or making exceptions to the rules. Most social skill training programs focus on teaching generic social skills (e.g., how to start a conversation). However, having a conversation while waiting in the dentist’s waiting room or visiting someone at the hospital is quite different from the conversation you have hanging out with a group of buddies because the contexts are very different.

Instead of putting our focus on teaching social skills, we should focus on teaching social contexts such as visiting someone at the hospital or hanging out with friends. And then teach all the necessary rules, conversation, and behavior attached to a certain context. When you visit someone who is ill and in the hospital, what kind of present do you take? How long do you stay? What do you talk about? What should you say/not say?

The same logic about context applies to Social Stories™, a powerful tool to help people with autism navigate the social world. Instead of creating stories about certain social skills, we should build them around contexts and introduce sentences that start with if and when. In this manner a story can be adapted to different contexts. For instance, a social story about welcoming guests to your birthday party could contain the following contextual sentences:

• When the person who arrives is a close family member, you kiss them and say “hi.”
• When the person who arrives is not a close family member, you shake hands and say “hi.”

Social competence requires more than social skills; it demands contextual sensitivity— something difficult for people with ASD. Training programs designed to help people with ASD navigate the social world should therefore emphasize social contexts, not just focus on teaching social skills.

Peter Vermeulen, PhD, is a senior lecturer and consultant at Autisme Centraal in Gent, Belgium. He has written 15 books on autism, some of which have been translated into several languages.

Excerpt was reprinted with permission. Added emphasis is mine.

Related Posts:

• Guest Post: The Spirals of Social Success and Failure, Part I
• Guest Post: The Spirals of Social Success and Failure, Part II
• 2011 Reads: Books 41-45

What a timely opportunity it was for me to be able to read and share this article from the July/August 2007 issue of the Autism Asperger’s Digest (www.autismdigest.com).

It’s a lengthy article, but well worth the read. It has a ton of great ideas and an excellent resource list at the end.

Our daily lives are made up of an endless stream of thoughts, decisions, actions and reactions to the people and environment in which we live. The internal and external actions fit together, sometimes seamlessly sometimes not, largely dependent upon a set of invisible yet highly important skills we call Executive Functioning (EF).

These skills, which involve planning, organizing, sequencing, prioritizing, shifting attention, and time management can be well-developed in some people (think traffic controllers, wedding planners, business CEOs, etc.) and less developed in others. They are vital in all parts of life, from making coffee to running a profitable business. The skills develop naturally, without specific, formal training, and we all have them to some degree – or at least, we all assume we all have them.

Things are never quite as simple as they seem, and these EF skills are no exception. They require a multitiered hierarchy of decisions and actions, all coming together within the framework of time, knowledge and resources.

Imagine trying to navigate life when EF skills are impaired or nonexistent, as they are with individuals on the autism spectrum. For most of us, our imagination won’t stretch that far. Therefore, we assume all these kids – especially those who are “bright” – have EF skills and we act and react to our spectrum children or students as if they did.

Nowhere does this EF skill deficit cause more turmoil than in the area of homework, producing monstrous levels of anxiety and dread in students, parents and teachers alike. The myriad of details that need to be accomplished in a student’s class, school day or week can overwhelm even the healthiest student; it can shut down our ASD kids.

I am regularly asked: if tasks are so overwhelming to their EF systems, should we just avoid having students deal with them? The answer is an unequivocal emphatic “NO!” Organizational skills are life skills, not just school skills, and even though they are “mandatory prerequisites” for succeeding at school, like social skills they are rarely directly taught. Few states include explicit teaching of EF skills in their “standards of education.”

So where do we start?

First, by understanding how complex organizational systems become by the time students reach middle school. We can only be good teachers if we appreciate the demands the skills we teach place on our students.

Second, by understanding organization as a skill set, which involves static and dynamic systems.

Static organizational systems and skills are structured: same thing, same time, same place, same way. Static organizational tasks are introduced in kindergarten, first and second grade. We break down tasks and ask students to explicitly complete very defined units of information, at a certain time and place. Write your name at the top of the page, read the instructions, complete the work, when done turn the paper over and sit quietly until time is up.

Dynamic organizational systems and skills involve constant adjustments to priorities, workloads, timeframes, tasks and places. They are less teacher directed and more student-directed. By 4th grade, teachers are introducing dynamic assignments to students with moderate levels of support. Soon after that we expect students to be able to manage increasingly dynamic workloads with little extra support or direct teaching. By high school, almost all school and homework has dynamic components requiring students to use EF skills to allocate time, resources, places to work, etc.

Here’s the good news: most of us understand that to tackle a dynamic task we have to break it down into its static elements. The dynamic part of the task requires thinking; the static part of the task requires doing. A dynamic assignment such as writing an essay requires a significant portion of the task be spent thinking about the topic before the static tasks of actually writing the paper at a table, at a specified hour, etc. One of the great challenges for our spectrum students is learning to break down dynamic tasks into more concrete, static chunks of work.

Fostering organizational skills in students with ASD requires an evolutionary approach towards teaching students, one that is ideally started at an early age. Students hone organizational skills starting in preschool, when we first ask them to clean up their toys. Teachers can accurately identify organized versus disorganized students as early as kindergarten. By 4th grade teachers expect students to be proficient with EF skills.

However, the reality is that the majority of our ASD students of all ages desperately need help with homework, specifically, and EF skills in general. Help is available.

The following 10 steps illuminate specific aspects of EF skills that increase students’ static and dynamic organizational coping mechanisms. While these steps are interrelated and synergistic, avoid trying to teach them all at the same time. Each may be difficult to grasp and master for the student with ASD; allow learning to take its own pace. Keep expectations realistic, talk things through regularly, and probe for misunderstandings or miscommunication. Learning EF skills is a dynamic system of its own, with its static components. Make sure your child or student experiences success and feels competent at each stage of the process.

10 Steps to Foster Organization Skills

1. Clearly define what needs to be done
Too often, parents and schools view organization goals too simply: “the student must write the assignment in his planner.” Clearly this is not nearly enough detail for most tasks and may not even be the best starting goal for a particular student. Adults must be organized in their own thinking if they are to effectively teach students with EF deficits this skill. Go beyond giving out assignments; help the student understand how to also approach the task from an organizational standpoint.

2. Move it with motivation
Almost all students with weak organizational skills also struggle with motivation to accomplish homework tasks. Parents and teachers often don’t realize this lack of motivation can stem from feeling overwhelmed by the task demands. Students with the greatest motivational challenges are often our most intelligent students (e.g. those with high IQ scores). We often assume “smart” means “organized” and say things like “come on, I know you can do this, I know you are smart.” Yet, they may have the hardest time motivating themselves when overwhelmed because they have never had to work at learning. Learning just happened if they stayed attentive.

By adolescence, students need to appreciate that completing work – even work that seems somewhat ridiculous to them – has its rewards. It establishes them as hard working in the eyes of others, improves their grades and increases feelings of self-worth through meeting their grade level academic expectations. However, as obvious as this sounds, this level of cause-effect can still be too overwhelming to some spectrum students because it requires delayed gratification.

Many students need to start at a much more concrete level of motivation, with very small work steps combined with reward early in the task completion process. For example, if a student cannot easily work for an hour, have him work successfully on a single part of the task for just 10 minutes before he gets to pause and congratulate himself. Self motivation increases when students feel confident in understanding and accomplishing the task before them. It doesn’t matter how “well” you teach students these EF skills; if they are unmotivated, they will not implement the ideas. Work directly on helping students tackle and overcome motivation challenges.

3. Prepare the environment
Most adults familiar with helping students “get organized” understand this point. Establish a dedicated workspace for homework that includes the essential tools: pen, pencil, paper, etc. Color coding tasks, making sure the student has an organized binder, possibly access to a time-timer (www.timetimer.com) create structures that promote success during homework time.

4. Chunk and time it
Assignments that sound coherent and structured to teachers can still overwhelm a student with EF challenges. For example: “write a report focusing on the economy, culture, weather and climate of a specific country.” Clear enough, you think? Maybe to us, but not to them. Make sure the student understands how to “chunk” an assignment (break it down into smaller pieces) and how the individual parts create the larger whole. For example, not all students will know their report needs four sections, essentially “miniessays” worked on separately and then joined together.

Furthermore, once they “chunk” the project students also need to predict how long each chunk will take to complete. The majority of our students with poor organizational skill have a resounding inability to predict how long projects will take across time. In fact, they tend to be weak in all aspects of interpreting and predicting time. Consider this: Is there anything you do without first predicting how long it will take? We “time map” everything, gauging how the task will or will not fit into what we’re doing now, an hour from now, later in the day or later in the week.

Homework functions in much the same way. Students are more willing to tackle homework when they can reliably predict how long they will have to work on the task. For example, a student will usually calmly do math if it should only take 5-10 minutes. However, for those spectrum students who can’t predict time, the nebulous nature of the activity incites anxiety such that they may cry 45 minutes over doing a 10-minute math assignment. When the student does not – or cannot – consider time prediction as part of his organizational skill set, he is likely to waste a lot of time rather than use time to his advantage.

5. Use visual structures
As the school years progress, homework shifts from mostly static tasks doled out by one teacher to mostly dynamic tasks assigned by many different individuals. We expect students to self-organize and know how to juggle the many pieces of learning that make up each class, grade and level of education. Yet, this valuable skill is never directly taught!

Visual long-term mapping charts, such as a Gantt Chart, (www.ganttchart.com) can help students plan and monitor multiple activities. These bar type graphs allow a student to visually track multiple projects across time, determine when they are due and how much time is available to work on each.

For example, a history paper may be assigned in February and due in late March; a line would run from early February to late March to indicate the time allocated to the project. A math project assigned in early March is also due in late March; another line would represent this project. Visually the student can see that two big projects are due at about the same time, and both are worth significant grade points. This then helps the student understand why he should not wait until the last minute to start one or both assignments. Gantt charts are frequently used in business, but have yet to make it into student software for school/homework planning. However, they are easy to create and use at home or in the classroom. For students with ASD, they are invaluable tools for organization.

Visual structures can represent entire projects and then also be used for individual chunks, creating the visual organizational framework students with EF deficits need. Once assignments are understood as needing to be worked on across time, we can encourage students to chunks tasks to be worked on during specific weeks, then make related lists of things to do on specific days.

6. Prioritize and plan daily
Learning to prioritize is a valuable skill and helps the student get things done. Keep in mind that many of us make daily lists but don’t always complete all tasks on our list, and that priority is largely based on the value we place on the assignment. Within the school setting, “value” is often dictated by the teacher. Priority is a factor of the task’s value overall, its deadline and the time to complete it. However, just because a task is due does not mean a student needs to make a decision to complete it, especially if it is a low priority or low value task to the student or the teacher.

For example, during her sophomore year in high school my daughter was looking at her math grades online. I looked over her shoulder and saw she had mostly A’s and B’s but noticed she had two F’s. I exclaimed, “Robyn, you have two F’s”, to which she replied, “Mom, they were each worth one point. They were hardly worth doing.” Robyn realized that in light of the many assignments she had to juggle for all her classes, projects with the least point value were not worth doing; she’d rather save her time and effort for the larger, more important projects.

With a prioritized plan in hand, many students will still struggle with actually working on the tasks. Even students with high intelligence may have difficulty getting themselves to work on projects not of their liking. Their baseline attention span may be no more than 7-10 minutes. (Test one of your student’s baseline attention span by observing how long he can attend to mundane projects without self-distracting. You may be surprised by how short it is!)

Help students succeed with their daily schedule by teaching them to take frequent small breaks at the end of their baseline attention span. For example, a graduate student in theology found he could only push himself through 10-minute work cycles before feeling overwhelmed or internally distracted. He used a visual time-timer and gave himself a short stretch break every 10 minutes. Once he completed a number of these short work cycles he gave himself a larger reward.

The key to using self-reward is to make sure the small reward isn’t likely to be distracting or absorbing (computer games, TV, reading a book). Instead make these small breaks quick and refreshing, just to refocus attention: sensory based activities (stretching or movement), a small snack, a quick trip to the bathroom or pencil sharpener.

7. Hunt and gather
Simply put: students need to plan time into their schedule to locate different resources to complete a task. For example, research at the library might be a “chunk” they plan for on their homework list (don’t forget travel time!).

8. Consider perspective
Homework is more effectively completed when students start by considering the teacher’s perspective before diving into the assignment. An assignment done well is one that meets the teacher’s expectations and follows the teacher’s instructions. A high school student went to great lengths to develop a computer program for his computer programming class. His teacher came to me exasperated, explaining that while well done, the project was totally unrelated to the class assignment.

Parent perspectives enter into the homework plan also. Many parents expect children to finish homework before watching TV. Even though children may have accomplished a great deal of homework (in their mind “enough”), trouble can still erupt because it wasn’t “finished” in the parent’s mind.

Perspective taking can be quite overwhelming to many students with social learning and organizational problems. A strategy called “social behavior mapping” (Winner, 2007) can help students understand how expectations, actions and reactions affect not only how we are viewed by others, but how their responses ultimately impact the way we view ourselves.

9. Communicate and then communicate some more
Homework assignments often result in students needing help from others. Knowing when and how to ask for help can be challenging for students with social learning and organizational weaknesses. Avoid assuming students – especially “bright” students – should intuitively know how to ask for help, clarification or even how to collaborate with others on assignments. These skills are not nearly as simple as they seem and may need to be explicitly taught by the special education teacher or speech language pathologist at your school.

Tip: as students age into middle school and beyond, most are turning to their peer group rather than their teacher for help. This fosters peer support networks desperately needed for success in college and later life.

10. Completion and Reward
Having a clearly defined “end” to a task is important for the concrete thinking minds of students with ASD. Be sure the child knows what “finished” means, both at school and at home. For instance, a homework assignment is not truly “done” until it is turned in to the teacher at school. While homework turn-in boxes (static) are commonly found in elementary school, they all but vanish during middle and high school years when even the act of turning in homework becomes dynamic.

Make sure your students know where to turn in homework. Also, parents should save big celebrations for completed projects until the assignments are actually turned in. Some students may need reminder systems set up to make sure work is turned in on time. Visual notes, PDA messages or watch timers can be used to help.

At home, “finished” homework yields its own rewards when students can engage in more personally pleasing activities, such as a computer game, watching TV, reading for pleasure, etc. Even our favorite activities have a finite time frame attached to them before it is time to go to bed. Many of these organizational strategies can be used to help a student learn to shut down a favorite activity and get his brain ready for bed.

“Planning takes time!” This is a message we need to constantly reinforce with our spectrum students.

“Teaching organizational skills takes time, across months and even years!” This is a message we need to reinforce to parents and teachers. Whether students are using organizational skills for homework, doing chores, preparing for a weekend activity or something as simple as getting a snack, as children grow and develop, tasks become increasingly complex and dynamic with each passing year. Teachers and parents need to work together, while children are still in elementary school, to identify and teach any or all of the 10 steps mentioned in this article that are problematic for the spectrum child. In doing so, we give children the tools not just to handle homework, but to be successful in all areas of life.

Michelle Garcia Winner is internationally recognized as an innovative clinician, enthusiastic workshop presenter and prolific author in the field of social thinking and social cognitive functioning. Visit www.socialthinking.com for additional information.

References
Allen, D. (2001). Getting Things Done. The art of stress free productivity. Penguin Books: New York. (recommended by an adult with AS)
Dawson, P. and Guare. R. (2004). Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Practical Guide to Assessment and Intervention. The Guilford Press: New York.
Giles-Brown, C. (1993). Practical Time, Language and Living Series. Imaginart. www.proedinc.com
Hyerle, D. (1996). Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development: Virginia.
Myles, B. & Adreon, D. (2001). Asperger Syndrome and Adolescence: Practical Solutions for School Success. AAPC: Kansas. www.asperger.net
Soper, M. (1993). Crash Course for Study Skills. Linguisystems: Illinois. www.linguisystems.com (highly recommended for building a curriculum!)
Winner, M. (2005). “Strategies for Organization:Preparing for Homework and the Real World.” The Gray Center: Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.socialthinking.com
Winner, M. (2007). Social Behavior Mapping. Think Social Publishing, Inc.: San Jose, California.

Related Posts:

• Guest Post: The Spirals of Social Success and Failure, Part II
• Guest Post: The Spirals of Social Success and Failure, Part I
• Guest Post: Teach Contextual Sensitivity to Children on the Spectrum

This month’s topic is on helping special needs kids to calm down and/or refocus after a meltdown or stressful event and asks, “What works for your child?”

For this question, I thought I would go straight to the source. I interviewed Michael until he said it was too boring to talk about anymore and got a few ideas of what he finds the most helpful. So here goes:

• A hug or a squeeze – “nice and tight” is best.
• Snuggling on the couch or his bed. (I sometimes turn his music on as well, but he said that is for bedtime, not for calming down.)
• Tickling or doing something funny to make him laugh. He said this makes him happy, which helps him calm down.
• Having Mommy explain what is going on so he won’t be confused. (Many times his meltdowns are triggered by misunderstandings or not stopping to realize that something can easily be fixed.)

He also said the first step is to stop him when he is whining. And he’s right, it’s so much easier to head off a meltdown than to actually recover from one.

Note: This post was written for the S-O-S Best of the Best, Edition 10: Calming Techniques for Stress and the Special Needs Child, which will be published on September 15th.

I apologize for the short post this month. We got a ton of rain after the hurricane went through and ended up with almost two feet of water in our basement. We have spent several days sorting and tossing stuff, as well as doing a major cleaning.

Related Posts:

• Therapy and Special Needs Kids: A Marathon Or a Sprint?
• Safe Crisis Plan
• Autism & Reading Comprehension by Joseph Porter

When I learned that the topic for this month’s Best of the Best was sleep issues & bedtime routines, I was flooded with memories: sitting next to my son’s toddler bed holding his hand for most of the night, being awakened by a preschooler at the side of my bed for the tenth time in an hour, and even arguing with my husband over the best way to help our son fall asleep on his own.

The topic of sleep and bedtime routines is a big one in our culture, with hotly debated positions from a variety of parenting experts (whether real or self-styled). I have no interest in promoting any particular agenda, but I would like to share a few of the personal lessons I have learned along the way.

1. Look for any Physical Issues First

We hear this from behaviorists all the time. How many anecdotes have you heard about kids whose parents or teachers thought they were doing something out of defiance or as a stim and were later found to have a sinus infection or chronic constipation?

For our son, a large part of the problem disappeared when we addressed his physical issues. I’ve written about these in more detail previously, but the first big breakthrough came when we took Michael off of dairy and he stopped waking up with gas pains every night (Solving Our Sleep Problems, Part I). The second was when we started giving him melatonin at bedtime and he was able to fall asleep in about 20 minutes rather than taking 45-90 minutes (Solving Our Sleep Problems, Part II).

Obviously, identifying and treating physical issues should be done in conjunction with your child’s physician. Also, resolving these didn’t eliminate the need for a good bedtime routine, but it seemed to allow the routine to be more helpful.

2. Throw Out the Parenting Books

You don’t have to actually throw them away (although there was one particular book that I threw in the garbage rather than let it fall into the hands of any other vulnerable parent). But it is important to know that you can use the tools and strategies gleaned from these books without having to subscribe to the author’s entire philosophy.

I wish that I had learned how to trust my intuition and connection with my son much earlier than I did instead of feeling like I a failure for not meeting some societal expectation.

3. Respect the Importance of the Routine

One other thing I learned over the years was not to take away any part of the routine as a punishment for bad behavior. Even if we decided to cut playtime short and put him to bed early because he was behaving badly or seemed overly cranky and tired, we learned that attempting to skip any part of the routine would just make things worse and usually result in a bad night’s sleep for everyone.

Our current routine includes several parts:

• changing into pajamas
• having melatonin, a small snack and a glass of water
• brushing teeth and making a trip to the potty
• hearing bedtime stories read by either Mommy or Daddy, or sometimes making up stories about a little boy named Michael who goes on adventures
• listening to soft music and cuddling with a stuffed animal while falling asleep

If I am home, I will usually cuddle with him for a few minutes once we turn on the music and turn off the lights. When he was younger, I had to stay until he fell asleep, then we would negotiate how many songs I would stay for, and now he is usually satisfied with three or four minutes.

To me, this is another example of autism turning conventional wisdom on its head. Some people may see this as giving in to a power struggle, but after several horrendous nights, I realized that ensuring a good night’s sleep was far more important than trying to use the bedtime routine as leverage for good behavior. Children with autism crave routines and stability, and the end of a long day is not the best time to work on teaching flexibility and accepting change.

It all comes down to identifying your goal and then focusing on the best way to achieve it. And I think that lesson can be applied to whatever situation you find yourself in.

Note: This post was written for the Best of the Best, Edition 8: Sleep Issues & Bedtime and Special Needs Kids. Please check it out to read viewpoints from other bloggers on this topic.

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Reprinted with permission from a featured article that appears in the just-released July/August issue of Autism Asperger’s Digest magazine. Learn more, www.AutismDigest.com.

Your first child. What an exciting, wonderful, and anxious time it is! When you found out you were pregnant, you probably read stacks of baby books, and read even more as your baby grew into a toddler. When you discovered your child was on the autism spectrum, you undoubtedly searched out any and every book you could find that would help you understand your child better.

Along the way you may – or may not – have read about sensory processing disorder (SPD) or sensory processing problems in spectrum kids. Recent studies report that approximately 5-10% of all children experience sensory symptoms significant enough to affect their everyday life functions. Within the ASD population that number can be as high as 95%! (Tomchek, 2007)

Sensory issues may have resonated with you to some degree; you grasped what sensory sensitivities might feel like to your child. But, noticing them – before your child is in sensory overload – well, perhaps you’re a little lost there. No worries! I’m here to help you become a more sensory savvy parent! Jackie Olson (a mom) and I co-wrote Sensory Parenting: From Newborns to Toddlers (Sensory World, 2010) to reach out to new and pregnant moms with information about our sensory systems and how they work. For many new parents, this is foreign territory!

So, let’s assume you know the basics: there’s not five senses (touch, taste, hearing, smell, sight) but seven (add in vestibular and proprioception) and some experts say there are lots more! Our kids can be hypo (under) sensitive or hyper (over) sensitive in any area. And, that sensitivity level can vary sense to sense and day to day, or even hour to hour depending on the conditions at hand!

You understand this is biology at work within your child: it’s not something he can control at will. And, that sensory issues cause very real problems in your child’s life that interfere tremendously with her ability to be calm, focused, attentive, and happy.

But – how do you know when your child is in sensory overload? Are there early warning signs, behaviors to look for that tell you something is amiss? Yes there are, and as a parent you have to play detective to figure out your child’s specific sensory sensitivities and recognize the red flags. Your goal is to help your child avoid sensory overload (it’s no fun!) or offer strategies to calm down afterwards.

I believe almost everyone has some sort of sensory issue. Maybe you buy tag-less t-shirts because the tag drives you crazy, or you prefer a certain type of comfortable clothing (I prefer anything cozy, like a large sweatshirt and warm socks). It’s really irritating when strangers keep bumping into you in a crowded subway, and you never go to loud concerts because they hurt your ears. Rides at Disneyland that go up and down or round and round? Forget it; you’d be nauseous in under a minute! All that is sensory based.

And so is the flip side. You love deep pressure massage; it’s so calming to your system. You go to the gym to release the frustrations of the day. You relax in a warm bath, scented with your favorite aromatherapy products – ah, how good they make you feel! And there’s nothing better than the smooth, creamy texture of good ice cream. That’s all sensory-based, too!

I’ve met scores of parents who start to realize their own sensory issues when they begin to educate themselves about their children’s sensory challenges. When they feel, first hand, what it’s like, they start better understanding what their child may be experiencing on a daily basis when the world is too loud, too bright, too fast – too intense!

Everyday sensory sensitivities become a problem when we are so affected by them we can no longer function as we should.

This is what happens with our kids, and they express this through their behavior – the only way they know how to tell us! And yet, many parents attribute behavior problems to “something else” and don’t realize how much of an impact sensory issues have. They put their children in uncomfortable situations every day: the grocery store, the mall, the playground, loud birthday parties, restaurants, and the like – and they expect the kids to “behave.” More often than not these situations are way too overwhelming and a meltdown or shut down results.

As a sensory savvy parent you learn to look for the signs of sensory overload. Every child is different and you’ll need to learn to read your own child’s warning signs. That said, let me give you some things to look for. If your child covers her ears, she is more than likely trying to shut out disturbing auditory sounds. If he blinks a lot, averts his eyes, or his eyes water frequently, he could be bothered by too-bright lights (to him!) or the sun. If she pushes away certain foods, and you notice a pattern (they’re all soft or all crunchy) it’s probably a tactile issue.

As sensory overload approaches, kids can have different reactions. She may begin to get quiet or disengage if before she was talking to you. You may notice he’s starting to verbally stim or fidget or whine, or grind his teeth. All of these things can be signs of sensory stress. Other signs you might notice:

• singing or talking really loudly to drown out other uncomfortable sounds
• crying or screaming because something touching her doesn’t feel right or hurts
• pulling away from you because he’s scared or anxious to go where you want him to. He may remember last time, when someone dropped a jar of pickles on the floor and the smell was so bad.

You may be wondering: is it all sensory related or is some of it just plain “behavior”? Good question! The difference between sensory and behavior is an article in itself, but you can look for cues from your child and the environment to know what’s what.

Is he throwing a tantrum because you told him he cannot have ice cream for breakfast? That’s behavior. Or is it because you washed his favorite shirt with a new detergent and now it smells terrible? That’s sensory. Is she shutting down because you’re asking her to write her spelling words (behavior)? Or is it because you’re frying fish for dinner in the kitchen, the smell makes her gag, and she can’t focus on the task (sensory)?

If it’s sensory, remember your child can’t control this – so you need to be proactive, stop and think about what’s going on and what might be causing the behavior. If it’s a sensory issue, it’s your job to step in and help your child. That means you change your behavior and adapt the environment to alleviate your child’s sensory issue at hand and help her regain sensory equilibrium.

Sometimes sensory issues are obvious; at other times they’re not. I work with a child who has impaired hearing. When an adult puts his hearing aid in, he gets upset and grinds his teeth. He is not used to hearing so many sounds and all of a sudden the world is probably like a rock concert to him.

I work with another child who begins to physically shake when a peer approaches her to talk. She walks up on her toes and begins to grimace. She will eventually engage and we encourage her to interact, but do so with plenty of breaks so it doesn’t become too overwhelming. One parent I know couldn’t figure out why her son wouldn’t stay in his bed at night. She eventually discovered their cat had deposited a “gift” right under the middle of his bed while they were away on vacation. Her son’s sensitive smell detected the lingering odor when she could not.

Being a sensory savvy parent is one part curiosity, one part sleuth skills, and one part perspective. Be open to seeing the world through your child’s senses and at first, adapting the environment to make it more conducive to your child’s needs. Over time, and with the help of a good OT, you can set up a sensory plan that will help your child learn to self-regulate and deal with the sensory issues. And finally, forgive yourself for those moments we all experience.

Here’s a common one: you’re getting three kids ready for school in the morning and you’re running late for work. Your child with ASD/SPD begins to melt down because in the rush you put on the socks that have little tiny strings inside that drive him crazy. Now one child is screaming, another is telling you she forgot to do her homework the night before and the teacher will be mad, and the third child is telling you to pick him up from soccer practice after school! You notice your own meltdown meter skyrocketing! It’s okay, you are not alone – it happens to all of us.

Stop, take a deep breath, and play detective to find out why your spectrum child is upset. Retrace your steps and once you figure out it’s the socks, go find the seamless ones, switch them out, and then everyone can calm down. Just toss one of those little chocolate Dove bars into your purse for the ride to work… you know, the kind that make you sigh with a sense of pleasure? Now you understand what it means to be a sensory savvy parent!

BIO
Britt Collins is a pediatric occupational therapist who lives in Salem, Oregon. She has an award-winning OT DVD series (otdvds.com) and a newly released book, Sensory Parenting. For more information visit sensoryparenting.com.

Recommended Reading
Growing an In-Sync Child: Simple, Fun Activities to Help Every Child Develop, Learn, and Grow. Carol Kranowitz, MA, and Joye Newman, MA

Parenting a Child with Sensory Processing Disorder: A Family Guide to Understanding & Supporting Your Sensory-Sensitive Child. Christopher R. Auer, MA, with Susan Blumberg, PhD

Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child with Sensory Integration Issues. Lindsey Biel, OTR/L and Nancy Peske

Sensational Kids: Hope and Help for Children with Sensory Processing Disorder. Lucy Jane Miller, PhD, OTR/L and Doris Fuller

Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to do if You are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World. Sharon Heller

Copyright © 2011 Autism Asperger’s Digest. All Rights Reserved.

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• Book Review: Sensitive Sam
• Book Review: Building Sensory Friendly Classrooms

What a great book this is for anyone wanting new and fun ideas for activities that will engage their child’s (or student’s) senses!

Author Bonnie Arnwine is the mother of a son with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). In Starting Sensory Therapy, she presents sensory activities for children that require minimal time, money, and cleanup. Most of the “ingredients” are items you’ll already have on hand, like flour, string, soap, Kool-Aid, paper plates, and yogurt cups. Once kids tire of an activity, an “Extend It!” section shows you how to use the same ingredients in new and different ways!

The book opens with a concise description of the various types of sensory processing disorder (SPD), along with some information on getting an evaluation and starting therapy. From there, it jumps right into the activities, breaking them down into a number of different categories under these main chapter headings:

• Tactile Activities
• Gross-Motor Activities
• Visual Activities
• Auditory Activities
• Activities with Smell
• Oral-Motor Activities
• Fine-Motor Activities

The activities appear designed to appeal to a range of ages and developmental levels, and of course can be adapted however you choose. I can definitely see my son enjoying a Q-tip War (blowing them out of straws) or a Snowball Fight (with crumpled up paper). He would probably be less enthusiastic about the activities that involve touchy squishy or messy things, but we could easily do those with him wearing plastic gloves or with the items inside a plastic bag.

I think this book would be extremely helpful not only for parents or therapists working with a child who has SPD, but also for those looking for fun sensory activities for any young children. For more information or to order a copy for yourself, visit Amazon.com.

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The Child with Autism at Home & in the Community is a wonderfully handy compilation of tips covering a wide variety of issues that can crop up when you have a child with an autism spectrum disorder. It is organized by topic, and the tips are listed in bullet form, making this an extremely easy book to use as a quick reference when you are faced with a particular situation.

Kathy Labosh, a mom of two boys with autism, has joined with LaNita Miller, a special educator, to provide this helpful guide. Kathy illustrates her goal for this book in the Preface:

I compare my life’s journey with autism to a hike up the Appalachian Trail. My ability to complete the journey with joy and satisfaction depends upon my ability to take care of myself physically, to prepare mentally for the hard stretches, to use the right tools to make the trek easier, and to have a good support system in place. But more than anything else, what I have needed is a trail to follow and a map to help me when I get lost.

The book is divided into two sections, the first on the home and the second on the community. The chapters in the home section are the various rooms in a house, such as The Child’s Bedroom (sleep!), The Corner (discipline) and the The Front Door (manners). The community section is organized by different places you may be going, such as The Playground, The Grocery Store and Family Gatherings.

I was able to read through the entire book in an hour and found myself nodding along several times and even laughing out loud on occasions. You don’t have to read the whole thing in one sitting to benefit from the information, however. It is arranged in such a way that you can find ideas on a specific topic quickly and easily.

This would be a great book for parents or other caregivers of a child who has been recently diagnosed, as well as a very practical resource for therapeutic support staff or anyone else working with a child in home or community settings.

For more information or to order a copy for yourself, visit Future Horizons.

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According to the National Autism Association, drowning is the #1 cause of injury-related deaths in children with an autism spectrum disorder. In 2005, 14 children with ASD died from drowning, when these children wandered off and were attracted to the water. Children with ASD do not fear “death” the way we do. At early ages, they do not understand the finality of death nor are they afraid of those things that could cause death, like water.

We know:
- Kids drown without a sound.
- It takes approximately one inch of water to drown in – a frightening statistic.
- 90% of drowning deaths occur while the child is being supervised.

Therefore, it is critical that, right from the very beginning when our kids are young, we teach them water safety and how to swim. Learning this lesson too late can be tragic and heartbreaking.

Teaching Water Safety and Swimming

Sensory Issues

A significant proportion of kids with an ASD have sensory issues, which complicates how we teach them to swim. The old-fashioned way our parents did it (throw you in and see what happens) just doesn’t float. (Yup, that’s what my father did, and I’m lucky I made it!)

Kids with an ASD may need to ease into the pool and get used to the water before they are able to enjoy the experience enough for concrete lessons to start. Others may love the pressure they get from the water and just jump right in, not cognizant of drowning as a danger. It’s important we make the experience enjoyable from the start. From there you can teach them what they need to do once in the water.

Teach Swimming

The same teaching strategies that make kids with an ASD successful in the classroom will also make the child a successful swimmer.

Minimal Distractions
Make every attempt to minimize distraction while the child is in the water. If there are a lot of people in the pool turn the child around, so she can’t see what is going on at the other end of the pool. Also, pool areas echo, so be prepared if the child has any vocal “stims” and try to redirect the child back to the swimming. Or schedule lessons on off times, when less people are present, or, if needed, do private lessons.

Use of Visuals
Use pictures to show the child the steps involved in swimming. Combing the visual with your explanation will give him multiple ways of understanding the sequence of steps and your expectations. Laminate the pictures and bring them in the pool. You may also want to show the child a video of swimming prior to getting in the pool. Video modeling is a great way to teach new skills. If you can’t find a pre-packaged teaching video, create one of your own using a neurotypical sibling or friend as the “actor.”

Consistency
Whatever approach you decide to use (there are tons of examples on the web) make sure you use it consistently every time. Spectrum children learn through repetition, and lots of it!

Task Analyze
Break down the steps to swimming and teach each one until the child can do the skill with little or no guidance. Do not overwhelm the child with too much information all at one time. Just putting his face in the water may be a huge accomplishment in and of itself!

Teach Water Safety

Swimming and water safety are not synonymous. They are different skills and should be addressed differently. All children, whether or not they ever want to put their little toe in the water, should be taught water safety skills. And the #1 rule is this: unless an adult is present, the child should never go into any body of water, be it a kiddie or adult pool, a fountain, a stream, a pond or lake, or the ocean. They need to be taught this very specifically and concretely.

The more able child: Many children on the autism spectrum are highly rule driven (sometimes to a fault). In this instance it is a great thing! Make specific rules around water.
- You do not go near water without an adult with you. You may even make it more specific, adding distance to the water, how near the adult should be (i.e., an arm’s length away, in visual sight, holding your hand, etc.) and/or citing specific people, like Mommy/Daddy/Grandpa).

After the rule is established, practice it. Don’t assume the rule on paper makes complete sense to the child in a real life situation. Take the child around water and see what happens. You want to know if there are loopholes in your thinking and make necessary adjustments in your teaching. Each time the child follows the rule, heap on the praise and reinforcement.

The less able child: We still use rules for the less able child, but we may break them down more concretely and use more visuals to teach them. For instance, the rule might be something like this: “You do not go into the water without a familiar adult holding your hand.” Have the child take your hand, walk to the pool and jump in with you. Every other time the child is around a stream, pool of any sort, lake or ocean, have her take your hand, walk to the water and go in together. Again, reinforce the child when he follows the rule and does what is expected.

Water is an awesome sensory experience for children with an ASD. It can foster language, social skills, and fine/gross motor development. It can also be a place where tragedy can strike at any moment. Remember, enjoy the water, but also respect it. Teach your child what to do around water and how to be safe. Then go out and have a wonderful summer!

Find more information about swim instruction at one of these websites:
American Red Cross. www.redcross.org
NCPAD Swimming Resource. www.ncpad.org/videos/fact_sheet.php?sheet=315&view=all
Swim Lessons.com. www.swimlessons.com
YMCA. www.ymca.net/programs

BIO
A Board Certified Behavior Analyst, Jim has been working in the field of autism for 20+ years helping children, teens and adults with ASD. An author and requested national speaker, Jim runs JB Autism Consulting Services, working with schools to find success in designing programs for students with autism/Asperger’s. Learn more at www.jbautismconsulting.com.

Copyright © Autism Asperger’s Digest. All Rights Reserved. www.AutismDigest.com

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