Disciplining Autistic Children
October 1, 2008
I wanted to talk about properly disciplining autistic children. Special care needs to be involved in this process since autism limits a child’s ability to really understand why this is happening. Autism is simply communication and relating issue. If you’re providing the wrong type of discipline, you can often make the problem a lot worse than it has to be. Aggressive behavior from these children often comes from getting the wrong type of discipline and they end up acting out because of it. There is no consensus on what is proper for disciplining, but for simplicity sake, it should occur very close to the event that led to it. If they don’t understand why it is happening, they’ll never learn. This is why I’m going to tell you how disciplining autistic children should be done.
It is important that there is consistency with discipline. This means both parents and educators need to be on same page when it comes to this. They will never learn if they only get disciplined half the time. Repetition is by far the best way for an autistic child to learn things. Boundaries are very important to all children and if don’t consistently enforce those boundaries; you can expect that they won’t respect them.
Spanking shouldn’t be an option for disciplining autistic children. It seems like everyone has his or her take on this for any child, but I think it is a little different for autistic behavior. Autism happens to also be a spectrum disorder, meaning they have a hard time with their sense and properly determining them. Sometimes things feel different to them, than what it would feel for the average person. Spanking might not just be a little pain, it could be a nightmare of torture (in their brain). It might go to the point where they have psychological breakdown and I don’t think that is worth the risk.
It is important to have a different scale of punishments when it comes to disciplining autistic children. You have to have a range of severity to deal with the actual severity of the problem. You wouldn’t provide the same punishment to a child that took a cookie out of the cookie jar versus playing on the road. When it comes from the child’s perspective, they have to understand the difference between good and bad behavior, but also the severity that can come from some bad behavior.
I think it is pretty important to try different things. You might find out that the first few methods you use don’t really work. They just don’t seem to sink in and you always have to be willing to change. I look at discipline as an evolutionary process. You wouldn’t punish a child the same way all the time. As they get older, you have to change things up. It’s the same thing with an autistic child. You need to change things to get the best results.
There are many training therapies discussed in the latest book based on leading research that was just released. Please see Autism: Everything A Parent And Caregiver Should Know About The Disorder.
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