Asperger’s Syndrome and the Power of Choices

Unruly. Undisciplined. Untameable. Unstoppable. Unbelievable. We all have our un- word to describe our aspie at their worst moments. AS parents also know very well that we can often do little but make the situation worse by trying to actually be a parent in those times. If parenting skills are useless, what do we have left? Ah, but parenting skills are far from useless, at least in my case. What I find useful with AS in my house is the pure power of letting the kids make choices. Let me explain.

I should say up front that I’ve learned first-hand this technique is more powerful with AS children than it is with synaptically normal kids. Why that is - aspie kids thrive on structure, rigidity and order. When they deluge into chaos, this technique is an effective method to insert those qualities which the average AS kid craves. Normal kids may or may not, depending on age and developmental capacity, be able to discern decision making from any other parenting technique because it may not be something they desire.

So, how do I do it such that it’s effective? I’m sure you’re wondering. I do have some tips and advice to share. First let’s set the mindset of the parent before attempting to use this technique.

• You must, as a parent, abstract your personally-bound emotions from the situation and be an empathetic enabler.
• Maintain a level head and do not play the emotions of the child.
• Your child is not weak, and in their own mind they are doing nothing improper. You should understand that very clearly so as not to dole out punishment unjustly. Chances are that the child will not understand the intent or basis of the punishment.

Now let’s talk about the actual decision process a little bit. Here are the things that work for me:

• As with all children, tone of voice is critical - it is the most important element of the message you wish to deliver. If your voice is scornful, you will be ignored or feared, but not heard. If you are airy and hyper-gentle, your message will be heard but lost. Find a middle-ground here. I like to think of the Mister Rogers demeanor when framing my own voice. Something firm but soft, and gentle.
• Be sincere. This is especially true with kids over 5 who can deduce that they are being deceived. You must present your child with 2 truthful choices, else you will not be effective ever again with this method. AS children often do not forget when they are wronged.
• Analyze what you’d like your child to do. Break down the end state into smaller tasks if necessary and present more than one set of choices. Here’s an example: kid likes but for some reason doesn’t want to eat broccoli and is having a meltdown because it’s on the plate. First question: “would you like to eat your broccoli or would you like to sit quietly and not eat?” notice that you have an out that’s enforcable. Second question: if the kid chooses to eat, “would you like to use your fork or spoon?” or something similar.
• Reward them if they fall back in line with your regular expectations, depending on the situation

I promise you this is an effective technique. It gets me through so many chores with both of my children, but especially with AS. What techinques do you use? Have you tried the decision path method described here and had success? Had failures? I’d like to know.

The Economy of Asperger’s Syndrome

Here’s something that we do in my household with our children. My older son has AS as my loyal readers know, so this exercise is mainly for him, but this is an effective tool for all children; “synaptically normal” regular children would hopefully catch on at least as quickly as an AS child and be able to be influenced by it.

We use a full-scale economy with our two boys - by this, I mean that we have a serious collection of fake money (that we got from the Lakeshore store at Park Meadows) that our boys can earn with their good behavior. By that same token, they can certainly be issued citations and lose money for poor behavior; yes, we actually write citations out (we also got them from Lakeshore) so that we have a written record of why each child lost some of their money. The point is, our children can use their money to buy from our special prize vault.

Things in the prize vault aren’t always toys. Think of things that your children like enough that they’d be motivated to earn money for buying them. These could be toys, but they may also be things like a trip to somewhere they like, or it may be some movie they want to see or even small prizes like candy - use your imagination but don’t spend a lot of money building up vault.

What I recommend to get something like this up and running are a few things:

1. Buy your prizes in advance.
2. Let your children see what you’re buying, and let them know that those things are going in the prize vault. By no means do you let them play with, open, or otherwise get accustomed to what you’re buying - that detracts from their motivation to “earn” it.
3. Let your children help place a price on the items you’re buying. If you’re using currency-style fake money, you may choose to price items at their actual register price; but if you’re not spending much, that means they’re not earning much to get the things you’ve bought. In our house, the minimum is 4x cost for anything <$1 when the kids don’t place a higher value.
4. Keep the prize vault somewhere that children cannot get to, for obvious reasons.
5. Don’t spend a lot of money.

The key to this system being effective is to enforce it. What we have done is made a very short list (our children are very young) of tasks for which money will be lost. My recommendation is 1 list item per year of age, so that the list is easily remembered. This is where your parenting skills are tested — when it’s time to subtract money, don’t be rash, upset, scornful, or mean; all you must do is notify them that they’re losing money and then show them that you are taking it out of their storage bin. Once your kids begin to realize that they can’t buy the things they want, they begin to understand the value of their behavior.

Granted, AS children don’t deal well with failure; they don’t deal well with negation and they don’t often understand what about their behavior warranted the demerits. That’s where the list of bad actions is critical; that’s where the tone of your voice is critical; that’s where you need to show that you love your children but that you also have to be fair. Sure, there might be some whimpering and some pent-up anger the first few times; in fact, there is likely to be some with any AS child regardless of the failure’s severity. Stay the course; this system is working wonderfully.

My favorite book for AS parenting tips is still Brenda Boyd’s Parenting a Child with Asperger Syndrome; in this book there is a pretty detailed list of things that one family put in their prize vault - it includes a range of toys, sweets, and special visits/trips like what I described.

What’s in our prize vault? Here’s my current list. As a side note, we are set up to let our boys earn about $1/day if there are no setbacks; more if they are especially good/helpful. For times when they are well above and beyond their years (I mean 3 and 4), we give them a blindfolded, free pick from the bucket-o-stuff.

toys
8x hotwheels cars @ $5
2x tonka trucks @$15
3x Thomas train cars @$10
4x activity books @$5
1x (grand prize) hot wheels play city @$50

candy
12x charms blow-pops @ $1
dove milk chocolates @ $0.50
m&m fun packs @$0.50
ice cream drumsticks@$2

other
1x trip to chuck-e-cheese’s @$25
1x trip to cici’s @$20
1x family movie night (at the theater) @$20
1x mystery prize (it’s a coloring book) @ $10
2x lunch at papa’s office @$10

Asperger’s Syndrome Meets the Holidays

What a great time to help work out some of the intracacies of your asperger child’s social eccentricity; or, if you’re like me, what a great time to see them at their worst as to set a barometer for my son.

This Thanksgiving, my family and I have traveled to visit my mom’s half of our family in rural Georgia - such a twilight zone foreign land from the hustle and bustle of Denver where we live. Just this morning I stood on the deck of my mom’s house and watched a 12-point buck root through a pile of corn feed that they put out for them. Anyway, that’s off the subject.

Your asperger child needs routine, and by that token they inherently fear change. Imagine (or recall) the horrors for your AS child when they are in a completely new place, meeting people whom they don’t know and, worse yet, having to play with other kids whose personalities and playstyles they haven’t had a chance to analyze yet. This is us this season, and we are managing just fine. Here’s a little bit of how we prepared.

What most AS parents will learn is that pictures are truly your best friend. We have pictures of all our family members, so we prepped our son for a visit with them by showing him their pictures and talking to him about them; we make sure to tell him their name and how old they are (these are his little quirks) and we try to tell him something about the person in the picture that he can recall when he sees them in person, just so that he won’t be terrified when they reach out to hug him or something. People in rural Georgia hug a lot; it’s just what they do, more than they shake hands.

Another thing that we do is that we try to bring one or two things from home so that he can stay in his element when times are really bad. The key to this technique is that you can’t tell the kid you’re bringing object A, else they’ll of course be asking for it and their ability to reach out is limited because they’re pigeonholing their energy into object A, which they know very well. Only when it’s absolutely the only way to provide consolation or to right the ship is when the child needs to be given access to object A. It may be hard to hide from them if it’s large, so keep it small. This works for us in a pinch and really helps him to calm down and/or get himself in check to continue participating in the family activities.

What we really want to avoid is scolding or excessive discipline - remember that the child doesn’t believe that s/he is doing anything wrong when their behavior starts to do downhill or when their eccentricities begin to show. If you’re going to give them some discipline, your child appreciates it being in a very calm, firm tone of voice and also don’t do it at the top of your lungs. I’ve learned that there’s an inverse proportion between your voice volume and the actual effectiveness it has on the child.

What’s better than having your child experience their extended family and soak up all those interactions with people who care about him?