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All children, especially autistic children, need strict social behaviour codes

July 16, 2013 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) at 06:38 AM

Here's more from Temple Grandin, this time on the importance of behavior teaching for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

(pp 139-140) "Call me old-fashioned, but adults in the world of my youth, the 50's and 60's, believed in a stricter social behavior code than do adults in today's world. For a child with ASD, that was a good thing. Social skills were taught as a matter of course. Behavior rules were straightforward and strictly enforced, another positive strategy well aligned with the autism way of thinking. Consequences were uniformly imposed and expectations to behave were high. My mother and all the other mothers who lived in our neighborhood attended to children's behaviors, and placed value on teaching their children good manners and appropriate behaviors. To be a functioning member of society, these things were required, not optional, as they seem to be today. Kids today are allowed to do just about anything."

(p 286) "These shifting, changing social rules (or lack thereof) make it more difficult for most people with ASD to understand the social climate around them and learn to fit in. Many arrive at adulthood without even basic daily living capabilities - even children on the higher functioning end of the spectrum. They can't make a sandwich, write a check, or use public transportation. Functioning life skills have been neglected. What that is, only each individual family can say for sure. But in general, this lack of attention to teaching basic life skills while children are young and growing, is having increasingly negative repercussions on people with ASD. Quirky friends I had in college who would be diagnosed with Asperger's today, all got and kept decent jobs because they had been taught basic social skillls while they were growing up. They might still be quirky, still considered eccentric, or even odd by some, but they could function within society."

(p 283) "Every big corporation in a technical field has its department of the social misfits who make the place run. Even a bank has some purely technical people who handle accounting, fix ATMs, and run the computers. There is no black-and-white dividing line between computer nerds or geeks or Asperger's or high-functioning autism."

(pp 307-308) "If Albert Einstein were born today, he would be diagnosed with autism. He had no speech until age three, obsessively repeated certain sentences until the age of seven, and spent hours building houses from playing cards. His social skills remained odd through most of his life, and he was a self-described loner....A host of other brilliant historic figures such as Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Socrates, Lewis Carroll, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol are now speculated to have been on the autism spectrum."

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” He had no speech until age three, obsessively repeated certain sentences until the age of seven, and spent hours building houses from playing cards. “

Sounds like myself - who had no speech until 6, but spent hours upon hours building houses from playing cards and if not my plastic blocks. And yes repeated words not sentences, because I like the way it sounded. Believe it or not, my youngest child follow suit displaying the same type of behaviour.

Being an older Mom, I brought up my children minding their ‘P’s and ‘Q’s, social skills and I had high expectations. My youngest child born in the 1990s, I have observed its very difficult to raise a child with good social skills when the other parents are not doing the same. And in fact, it was often my child that was seen as being the rude one or much too sensitive. There was times where even my children attacked me for being much too harsh or being too much of a snob. Don’t know which is worst to deal with, but somehow my reasons never panned out for them. The reason that you will thank me one day in the distant future having good social skills.

The pass few weeks, I am in the process refining my youngest social skills because she is off to university, and living in her own apartment with two friends. My youngest is loosing her patience with me, because I have come up with all kinds of social scenarios that are very much part of living life, but she thinks its a bit too much. Scenarios such as dealing with a police officer or the clerk behind the counter at admissions. Or the more important one, how to handle the landlord so you will not be taken advantage of.

My mom never had to worried about us kids being taken advantage, but it seems this is the new worry for parents of the 21st century, where the norm is no social skills are no longer taught in the home or school. Just like my mom, who taught her children table manners and which utensil to used in the event of having dinner with the Queen, I taught my kids the same thing. It was my youngest who taught her teen friends what to do in a fancy restaurant, so they would not look out of place, in an outing and their dates. Good manners do pay off, and yet its a rare sight to see in the 21st century books of raising children.

Posted by Nancy on 07/17 at 02:09 PM

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All children, especially autistic children, need strict social behaviour codes

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