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Does Your Child With Autism Exercrise Control?

By Jimmy Woodall

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 17Dec2009 Word count: 545 Viewed: 176 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

There is a lot of trouble with autistic children managing to achieving self control. This includes in appropriate outbursts, and also potentially dangerous habits, like for instance being aggressive towards friends, or at times harming themselves by banging their heads off walls.

In order to stop this and other dangerous behaviors a technique a lot of parents and educators use to stop these autistic tendencies is by using self-management.

By giving the autistic child control over him or herself is many times the key to keeping control over violent actions and can be a positive step for other behaviors to be learned as well.

The reason that self-management works is the fact that the child is not any longer fully controlled by others. Therefore by teaching the self-management at specific times each day maybe while the child is at school or therapy, many times the child will exercise the self-control many times during the day, then he may start to practice the self-control throughout the day.

The major step is to start a program in which the child monitors his or her own behavior and activities. We try and begin with small amounts of time then continue to monitor the child from a passive standpoint.

After which every 10 to 15 minutes you can remind the child that he is the one now in control and needs to monitor his behavior and keep aware of good and bad behaviors.

When the child is in control, this form of monitoring becomes a type of self-monitoring, however the self control becomes a form of self-evaluation when the child is in control, by using this the child may think more about his behavior in the past and present.

You should set good goals with the child for an example an afternoon without aggression towards others, a whole day at the school without any injury to self.

Then we ask the child how he is doing every fifteen minutes in order to remind him of the goal and is it being met? If the answer is no, then maybe the child is not ready for self management, or maybe the goals have been set to unattainable levels.

Is best you set the goals to where they are easy to attain at first and then stiffen them some as you go along. When you get a child to where he is experiencing success at self monitoring then you can reinforce the positive attitude more towards the experience.

Do not forget a very important part of self management is the rewards system, you should have your child come up with his or her own reward according to the interest.

You should choose simple rewards in the beginning. Such as maybe smiley faces for every goal met and then sad faces for every goal not met, and then work it up to a larger goal, such as a special activity or new toy when a certain amount of smiley faces have been attained.

By backing the good behavior up with rewards, and let the child determine instead of an adult, he or she will be more likely to carry this on even when not participating in the program. If your autistic child is mature enough, this could be a good treatment program to try.

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