Autism

A Unique Sensory, Emotional, and Social Development

An Example of Going into an Autistic’s World to Bring Him to Ours

    One of the boy's bedroom walls was covered with shelves from the ceiling to the height of a desk, and from side wall to side wall. On each shelf there were toy horses, lined up next to each other from end to end. There were white, brown, black, pinto; big, medium, and small plastic horses. The boy would spend hours sitting on the side of his bed, throwing more horses at the rows of horses, bringing the rows of horses down, one by one. Then, he would stand up, arrange the horses into neat rows, and start throwing other horses at them again. He could spend hours doing this. I came into the room and observed this for about forty minutes. The boy performed the ritual of throwing horse at horse without stop. After forty minutes, I called him by name. He threw a horse at my face, laughed, and continued. I wasn't sure I could help him. He seemed to live completely in a world of his own. I knew I would have to enter his world to rescue him.

    So, quickly, I said "you are doing it wrong."

    The boy stopped, looked at me attentively.

    I said "To do it well, two people have to take turns. First you throw it, then I do. Would you like that?"

    He handed me a horse. I threw it. We took turns. After about 20 minutes, I asked him if he would like to do it better.

    The boy said "si" (yes) Then I told him to throw the brown horses first, then the white ones, then the black ones, and then the pinto horses. To improve it even more, we changed the criterion to small, medium, and big. The session was over after about one hour taking turns throwing the horses at the other horses on the shelves. Now, I knew I could help this boy. I had entered his world, and he accepted my rules in his world. By providing him with rules and changing them, I could expand his world with elements from our world.

    Even though this boy only spoke a few monosyllabic words, he understood language well. So, the best way to bring him to our world was by bringing language to his world. Consequently, the horse throwing sessions had a small addition to the game. First we said "Hi!" to the horse; then, we threw it. Then, we would say "Hello!" before throwing it. Then, we would say, “Hi, how are you?" and throw it.

    The boy liked to go to the beach and look for sponges that he would compulsively smell. So, since that was his favorite thing to do, I added sponge finding into the game. Before we would throw a horse, we would have it walk to the (imaginary) beach and find a sponge. Then we would add complexity to the goodbye. We would say, "OK, you got your sponge, so bye!" Then, we came up with more complex situations. Two horses would meet while looking for sponges. They would ask each other if they had seen any sponges. Eventually, we did not throw the horses at the other horses. Instead, the horses started having adventures and conversations. Then, the boy and I would have the adventures and conversations, the horses were just in our hands. Afterwards, we didn't need horses any more. We would have imaginary adventures.

    Each game was repeated many times. At the beginning, I would tell the boy what to say. Then he would memorize it. Next, I would tell him something else to say. He would memorize that. After he had learned about four things to say, I would never let him say the same thing twice. So, if the first time he said "How are you?", the second time he would have to say "What's up?" The third time he would say "How is every thing?", and the next time, "How are you doing?" This way, he would not learn robotically.

Variation teaches us decision making. It is essential to integrating to the world.

Without variation, we just teach autistic children to imitate, not to integrate.