When kids with disabilities are included in general classrooms or programs, parents often assure their typically developing children that kids with disabilities are "just like everyone else." That is: they want to have fun, be included, make friends, take part.
This, of course, is often true. A child confined to a wheelchair has the same social/communications abilities and needs as anyone else, as does a child with visual or hearing impairments. And while a child with Down syndrome may have specific limitations, he or she is generally interested in and able to engage socially.
But what about the child with autism? Is he or she really "just like everyone else" in his needs, wants and abilities? Books written for typical children suggest that this is the case - that all they need do is reach out, and the child with autism will respond with enthusiasm.
From what I've experienced so far, though, kids with autism are rarely "just like everyone else." In fact, often kids with autism want nothing more than to be left alone to play in their own way.
I've seen typically developing kids do their best to engage or play with a classmate or groupmate with autism, only to be ignored or rebuffed. If no adult is assigned the job of facilitating communication, the outcome is predictable: the typically developing child, at best, shrugs and walks away - or, more often, is offended and feels pushed aside.
Naturally, a typically developing child who's done his best to be welcoming and is pushed away (either literally, verbally, or both), will have some negative feelings about child who did the pushing. He's likely to share his experience and feelings with a friend... who will do her best to stay away from child with autism rather than risk being hurt.
Have you had the same experiences I have? How do you manage such situations? Do you facilitate every social interaction? Allow the child with autism his space? Or take some middle ground?
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My other grandchildren try to engage Eli and sometimes he participates but most of the time he doesn’t. There was a time when I could put my grandson in his room and just leave him to entertain himself, he didn’t seem to care about being with anyone else or doing anything else other than what he was interested in doing. I couldn’t stand doing that so I would go in his room with him and play. Sometimes he would just watch me play. Eventually he started playing. He then started playing with the other boys in the house. Sometimes it is as if it is normal and other times it is pure chaos. So at home its middle ground and I’m hoping that the other boys grow into knowing and loving Eli just the way he is, so far it seems that it what they are doing because they keep trying to play with him.
A very astute question…
I suppose the parent of a neurotypical child can try to train their child to accept differences and mention that the aloof child more interested in complex toys than people may grow up to be a scientist or artist.
And the parent of the autism symptom child can try to train their child that people have feelings and it is important to pretend to be normal, especially if you don’t want to be bullied.
Well, my autistic son tries to engage with typical kids in school and gets pushed away, physically and verbally. Of course part of the reason is that he doesn’t know how to talk and play as well as his peers, and therefore they don’t think he’s that much fun to play with. But there are some classmates who are very open to him and will welcome his attempts at interaction and engage in play with him.
My son isn’t even two years old yet and the doctors say that they are seeing red flags. I took him to get evaluated and one of the doctors says he just has a speech delay but to watch further developmental progress and the other says that he has autism. He plays with all the family and close friends of family but when strangers are near he will rarely engage them. Other than the fact that he doesn’t say 20 words in regular occurance I believe that he is just like any other toddler. He does everything his four year old sister does. I am lost…
In many respects my son is just like others his age even though he is low functioning. He really does like people and he does like interaction. He just has virtually no clue as to what are appropriate ways to interact. He only wants to interact in the ways that are stimulatory or meaningful to him. In that respect he is no different than you or I. We enjoy meaningful interactions around things that we enjoy or are interested in. The problem is, is that few people understand his attempts to engage them and when they attempt to engage him it is in their sphere, not his. If however, he is engrossed in a highly stimulatory object he occasionally resists interaction even from those who know how to engage him. This is the exception, though, not the rule. We sometimes actually wish that he would just go off and stim with something that is of interest to him, rather than making a constant nuisance of himself trying so hard to engage adults or children in his odd ways. They say when you have met one autistic child you have met only one child with autism. I can hardly profess to understand what others may experience with their kids but it seems like the middle ground is the only alternative. How else can our children or others learn if we never facilitate but we can’t afford to be overbearing and a constant shadow either.
All children are children. All children with autism are children first, but have a range of “autistic” symptoms second. Autistic children are not the same because the label puts them in a separate category and that is not good. We should refer to them as “children with autism” so that they can be seen as children first, just like everyone else.
Now, autistic symptoms are different experiences then what typical children experience because of the varying intensities that the core symptom groups present: moderate to profound communication problems, moderate to severe sensory integration dysfunctions, unusual play, OC behaviors and self stimulatory behavior to greater or lessor degrees.
So yes, all children are the same, but autistic children are made to feel difference and inferior, rather than special and unique.
Christina – If at least one doctor says he has autism, I’d seek Early Intervention services. I don’t know where you live, but in some states you can receive Early Intervention (Speech Therapy for instance) from government agencies when the child is not developing at the right pace. Even if autism is not confirmed, the significant delay in Speech and Social Skills should be enough to make your son eligible for those services.
My experiences mirror Leila’s. Long before I even knew my child was autistic, I watched him get rebuffed by other children in the playground whenever he tried to engage with them. It’s true, his efforts to engage them were perhaps not quite as natural as the efforts of other children, but they weren’t really inappropriate either. The differences were subtle.
For example, a typically developing 2-year-old might approach another child, look them in the eye and point and say something and crouch alongside the child with the toy. The less agressive ones would wait for some sort of signal that it’s OK to reach for the toy and the bolder ones would reach for the toy while looking at the other child for their reaction. Either way a social “connection” between the two children was happening.
When my son was that age, he was nonverbal and never pointed, so he might go up to a child making unintelligible noises and without looking directly at that child hunch down beside them and then reach for the toy. If he got the toy, he generally would not run away with it, but become completely engaged with the toy right there in such a way that would be as if the other child no longer existed.
Inoticed that the reaction that my son would get from the other child was then likely to be completely different. In my example between two typically developing children, even if the interaction resulted in a “tug of war” over the toy, the child with the toy would try to deal directly with the child who had approached him or her; but with my son, he or she was more likely to just turn an run for the nearest adult to intercede. Then, it didn’t take long at all before all the children in the room would start huddling their toys in closer to themselves whenever my son even looked in their direction; thereby, stifling any chance my son had of successfully making a “corrected” approach to another child. My son then would give up and retreat to a corner of the room to engage with whatever toys were left over.
Yes, we can eventually teach normally developing children to recognized people with disabilities and then to override their instinctive reactions in order to consciously accept them; but it is almost unavoidable that the whole situation becomes less natural and spontaneous in the process. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about bullying here, just the little signs of acceptance or disproval that happen in the instants that children meet for the first time.
It went on that some of the children my son met did become tolerant and eventually became my son’s friends, or perhaps pseudo-friends is a better word. You see, the opportunity for natural, heartfelt acceptance was long since passed. They politely included him if they had to (at school functions and such), but very few ever thought to call him up to shoot the breeze or come over just to hang with him. A feeling that he has yet to experience is meeting someone that he just spontaneously “connects with.”
For other children, the rebuffs eventually evolved into out and out bullying and my son suffered terribly through his school years as a result. To expect that he doesn’t bear emotional scars from these experiences and that these feelings also influence his social behavior dehumanizes him. My son is HUMAN and in his heart IS just like any other child.
I do find it ironic that society finds it OK for the typically developing child to just “shrug and walk away” or to feel offended if pushed away, but then use the “evidence” of my child with autism doing exactly the same thing to suggest that he is not like everybody else or, worse, to use it to perpetuate the myth that people with autism do not have feelings. I agree completely with Karen. In many circumstances, children with autism are made to feel “different” and “inferior”; and I think sometimes this is because people society mistake the circumstances surrounding individual situations and then unfairly apply a different “logic” to similar reactions from children they consider “normal” and children that have been labelled “autistic.”
Mary – just wondering – would you say that your son’s interactions as you’ve described them (basically taking a toy that interested him and playing with it on his own) were intended to be social? That is, do you think his intent was to engage with another person, or simply to gain access to a toy that looked interesting?
IMO, we parents sometimes project our own social goals onto our kids with autism. I know that I’ve wanted very much to see my son “included” with a group – and it’s taken me a while to see that, very often, he really doesn’t want that at all. He’s willing to interact with other kids when asked to do so, but very rarely actively chooses to. He doesn’t find social interaction relaxing: he finds it taxing, and his “downtime” is generally alone or family time.
My question for myself and other parents is – is my son being rebuffed? Or are other kids simply respecting the boundaries that he’s set up? And if that latter, what would I want those other kids to do?
I feel that there’s only so much a child can do to engage with an autistic peer — at a certain point, if the child with autism pushes away, he’s made it clear that he just doesn’t want to be engaged.
Just my thoughts.
Lisa
Karen, you say: “All children are children. All children with autism are children first, but have a range of “autistic” symptoms second. Autistic children are not the same because the label puts them in a separate category and that is not good. We should refer to them as “children with autism” so that they can be seen as children first, just like everyone else.”
I agree, of course, that people are people – and all people deserve respect and caring. But that doesn’t mean all people are the same.
IMO, there are distinctions among us – and simply changing the way that adults refer to a diagnosis (”a child with blindness” v “a blind child,” etc.) isn’t going to change the reality behind the words. A child who can’t see will never be able to play catch – and behaving as if they can will probably result in someone getting a black eye!
The purpose of my blog was to ask whether parents feel that kids with autism really do have different social goals, needs, and ways of interacting. If they do (and I personally think they USUALLY but NOT ALWAYS do), does it make sense to teach other kids that “children with autism are just like everyone else?”
Much of the time it is hard indeed for a parent or therapist to build a socially interactive relationship with a child on the autism spectrum. Does it really seem fair to expect that typical peers will be able to do so without an awful lot of help, support and coaching? And, since they have no vested interest in engaging with an autistic peer, is it fair to expect them to knock themselves out to build a relationship?
We rarely expect adults to engage with people outside their comfort zone unless there’s a special reason for them to do so. Yes, some adults choose to volunteer or otherwise spend time with the disabled. But it’s by no means an expectation. Why do we expect this of kids?
Lisa
Hi Lisa,
To answer your question – Yes, I believe he was trying to be social and just didn’t know how to go about getting people to react socially to him. How did I develop this idea? Well, my son is very high functioning, verbal, and now he is able to tell me as much. He asks me questions about how to go about getting positive social responses from other people almost every day. It’s still not “natural” and “fluid” for him, but is a bit of “logic” problem for him. He keeps trying to reason out “If one does exactly “A” every time, then why doesn’t one get exactly “B” back every time – and people just don’t work that reliably. He has trouble anticipating the reactions of others; and yes, he finds adapting to that part of his disability taxing – wouldn’t you?
Of course, anything I say about him at two you might ascribe to my having blinders on; but I do think there were also signs that my son was trying to be social early on:
(1) He would sometimes have an emotional response to the reaction of the other child (e.g. a “hurt” look would come over his eyes and he would hang his head). This would not have happened if he was ONLY interested in the toy.
(2) He would also frequently quickly abandon one toy and go off to try for a different toy that another child was playing with. I recall that it often felt like I was chasing a cyclone through the play room.
(3) He would sometimes completely ignore some of his highly preferred toys until after another child first became interested in them.
These last two behaviors combined together do suggest that he was attaching some additional significance to toys being played with by other children rather than just the toys themselves.
A “normal” confirmation of “intent to be social” is generally looking into someone’s eyes (along with perhaps a smile). When someone doesn’t do this or actively looks away, we usually believe it shows an intent to avoid or not to socialize. However, my son has trouble looking directly at someone’s eyes. Why?
He now tells me he can hear me better if he doesn’t look (a common sensory processing issue for people with autism). Wanting to hear a person better is not a signal that he does not want to socialize; but people usual interpret his looking away from them as just that. Not hearing a person clearly is also often interpreted as being a signal of being inattentive (For example, people who develop hearing problems often report changes in how their friends respond to them and treat them.) So, isn’t my son between a bit of a rock and a hard place in this respect?
While, I do agree with you that people with autism have different “needs and ways of interacting,” but I think their “social goals” are pretty much the same as any human being. I don’t expect young children to just know how to react positively to people with autism, but I do expect that a foundation of a humane society is that people without disabilities are expected to learn how to meet people with disabilities more than halfway. I think it is a serious downfall of society today that, more and more, we are just expecting normal adults and children to NOT “engage with people outside their comfort zone.”
(continued from last post).
… and that the definition of “people outside one’s comfort zone” increasingly includes people with disabilities.
Hey, Mary. I absolutely agree with you in principal, and of course if your son says he’s seeking social reciprocity I’m sure he is!! As I say, not everyone with autism has the same personality: what my kid does or wants isn’t indicative of anything about what your kid does or wants.
It’s true that our society does place limits on interaction with people outside our “comfort zone,” and I’ve seen it in action in so many ways. While we’re (mostly) polite and civil to one another, it’s very very tough to cross social boundaries to build friendships.
I used, for example, to live in a very ethnically and economically diverse community. There were no overt tensions: people were generally polite and pleasant. But after nicely saying hello and passing the time of day, each group would go off into its own little world. A friend called it a social “filing cabinet.”
In the larger world, IMO, we are taught to be civil and pleasant to folks with developmental and other challenges. By and large, both kids and adults are reasonably good at this.
But in an ideal world, we don’t just want people to be civil to our kids. We want party invitations… close personal relationships… romance… in short, we want our kids to belong to a community and experience the full range of human relationships.
IMO, with so many of us searching for and not finding community without having the social/communications challenges of autism, that’s a tough goal to reach. Not impossible, though – and with the right settings and good luck, we can meet any goal.
But I don’t know that friendship or love are something we can teach or legislate. Politeness and civility, yes. But friendship and love not so much.
Lisa
To Christina – I understand your feeling lost. But you don’t have to be lost, even if the doctors are right or wrong look into an early intervention program in your area. Most states have an early intervention program for children under three that can help you with the answers you seek and can help your child with the important building blocks needed at this time of learning and growing. Hang in there . . . good for you for doing your research. Keep digging.
I don’t need to even read the article to answer. As a teacher and a parent–I see it–yes today’s children are damaged. I predict we will have a shortage of young people that can be inlisted in the military services very soon. They have too many learning disabilities. You think Autism is the only damage done? Look again!
Hi Lisa,
I agree that spontaneous friendship is something that we can’t really legislate, but it doesn’t prevent me from wishing that my son would have experienced it just once while he was growing up. I admit there is a tinge of envy involved. Seeing other young boys involved in real buddy-buddy groups in the school yard while watching my own boy circle the edges completely alone always stung a little. i still hope that someday he will meet a soul mate. I know of some people with autism who have met such a person and are happier for it.
You mention how the social file cabinet works in making it harder for people to get beyond the perfunctory greeting stage. I agree. I also think the stress put on the power of “social networking” for economic, job success, and other related purposes may also be fundamentally changing not only how young people are selecting prospective friends and excluding others but also what they are expecting from their friendships. A sense of community in the old-fashioned sense is indeed getting harder and harder for any of us to find and i sometimes feel like a social dinosaur for even “missing” it. Even though my son is socially interested and continually asks me how to socialize better, I also find I’m getting less and less confident about the advice I give him. Autism aside, times have changed and what worked for me socially seems to be less and less likely to work well for him.
Mary – one thing we have done in search of that elusive “community”both for ourselves and for our son is move out of the suburbs and into a mid-sized town (about 40,000 people) in an area where there’s lots of conservation land, beaches, etc. We also started homeschooling Tom.
The reality is that he either doesn’t want or doesn’t have a clue how to build “friendships” in the typical sense. But through these means and a few others, he now has personal relationships with all sorts of people who know and like him.
That is: the local librarian, a group of homeschooled kids with whom he attends tiny, relatively informal classes (they range in age, not all “same age peers”), the guy who runs the local bowling alley, etc. That means, even if he’s not an official “friend,” he’s at least friendly with people he’ll see and interact with for a very long time (and not just for a single school year!).
He also comes with us to musical events, helps out at the local theater when we’re working on a show… and, again, people know him and engage with him, even if they’re not close buddies. He plays clarinet – and again, isn’t friends with band members, but is friendly and generally accepted.
Right now my feeling is that he’s doing his best with the friendship thing – even just saying “hello” can be stressful at times, but he’s now actually conversing. Perhaps at some point he’ll find another person with whom to truly share his finally-growing interests in things like marine life, birds, legos… but my guess is that the friends he makes won’t turn out to be mostly “same age peers.”
Lisa
Hi Lisa,
We were also more successful when we began focusing more on building casual friendliness than we were by trying to build close friendships for our son. We didn’t home school, and I think that resulted in a more traumatic school experience for my son than if we had home schooled. Music was also something that helped my son gain some level of acceptance with his peers. He still spends more time with older people than with same age peers, but I know he still harbors a strong desire to find a niche within his peer group. As a result, he projects an aura of being unsatisfied with the friends he has, and that, unfortunately, hampers those relationships.
I did have a bit of a sleepless night thinking about this whole thread and I think I’ve come to a different way of understanding your references to differences in “social goals” between children with autism and there peers. I’ve tend to define “social goals” in terms of a simple basic desire to connect on any level with another human being (B/W, i.e. intending to be social vs. being intentionally antisocial). I don’t believe people with autism, particularly when they are very young, are intentionally antisocial, although we often acribe that attitude on them based on our visual judgment of their behavior. However, like anyone else, they can respond to negative social experiences by becoming antisocial (as my son did withdraw for a time). He also became somewhat depressed during this period of his life. Autism does not provide an immunity against these sorts of feelings.
However, the term can also perhaps be used to describe how a person expects to recognize things like social reciprocity when it comes along. To continue with my previous example using eye contact, I can see that if my son finds it difficult to give eye contact, he may not be specifically seeking eye contact from the other child as a confirmation of their social reciprocity either. Perhaps in this respect, we do agree about social goals after all.
Mary – sorry about sleeplessness!
Tom, too, had some negative social interactions at public school… a few with typical peers, and just as many with kids on the autism spectrum who couldn’t quite stop themselves from perseveratively calling him the same names over and over again…
Relative to the typical peers, though, while a few did tease him, quite a few tried to engage him and were rebuffed. I think the reason he pushed (and still often pushes) people away was from anxiety: he really didn’t know what they were going to want from him, so it was easier to just have them go away.
On the other hand, since he was tiny he’s wanted to engage with adults – but to do so he used to bring up books he knew well, so that he could recite them to the adult of choice. That way, he could get social interaction without going “off script.” At 13, he’s finally able to converse, but only with adults who are willing to do a little extra work to connect with him.
When I talk about social goals, you’re right: I’m not saying “people with autism have no desire to interact with others,” but rather “people with autism often prefer fewer relationships (and more casual relationships) than many neurotypical people.” While many neurotypicals are happiest in big, noisy groups or intense personal relationships, folks with autism may find such relationships overwhelming. I also think most people with autism tend to be introverts, by which I mean that they EXPEND energy to socialize and RECHARGE when they are alone.
The problem is that parents, who may like and gain energy from hanging out with lots of buddies, worry that their kids with autism are feeling left out or lonely when, in fact, they’re really quite comfortable with their level of social interaction. I know I was an introverted kid, and my mom was a social butterfly; she COULD NOT believe that I would rather read than have a “play date,” and so she forced the play dates down my throat… a negative memory to this day!
Anyway, back to the blog: it seems to me that, often, kids with autism are not happiest when actively engaged in social interaction. It’s hard work for many reasons: the verbal and nonverbal cues are tougher to read; the speed of interaction may be too fast; etc. So to tell other kids “all Joey wants is to be included in your games” may simply be false. Joey may find the games incomprehensible, the social cues unreadable, and the social demands overwhelming. In fact, Joey may really just want to show off his collection of Pokemon cards – which would allow him to control the speed and content of the interaction.
Sorry for blathering on… interesting topic!
Lisa
I am abssolutly fascinated with this thread. I am Assistant Theatre Director and Newsletter Editor for a little non-profit called My Place To Be.
Most of the children who participate in our programs have autism. We offer acting classes which have helped our kids learn what it means to be expressive. (I say “our”, but I do not have children of my own.) I have worked with the kids since August 2008. The regulars have improved greatly in their social interaction skills. Their usual responses are persistent, but despite limitations or differences between all the kids, we adults can see how hard they try to “fit in”.
One of the most interesting things we have worked on is showing isolated emotions strictly with our bodies. We have also attempted to include the use of home-made masks (although some child are not thrilled with them).
Something that our kids are beginning to understand is opposites. Our Theatre Director will stomp into the room, lift her arms like a monster, scrunch her face, and growl, “I’m SO happy to see you today!!” In more simplified terms, she explains how her body showed the opposite of what she was saying. It’s the dissonance that throws our kids off and they tend to laugh and say “you’re acting crazy”.
We can all learn to be more attentive to what our bodies, voices, and words are ACTUALLY saying. I have become more aware of when something I say can be taken literally or the wrong way. I’ll make sure though, when I do say something that is conflicting that I take the time to immediately explain why the kids may find it strange.
Not all have the time to back up and set the stage for a learning experience right away.
I’m new to the community of autism. I look forward to learning more about everyone in this unique family.
One more comment before I go: for the parent who appears to not have found resources just yet, google, search and read. You’ll spend a lot of time, but you’ll end up becoming a fountain of information for a parent experiencing situations like you.
Thank you to all the professional information found here. You parents are wonderful. I may seem a li’l overboard with my cheeriness, but I find autism fascinating and I like to learn more.
Take care all,
Elyn
Our 3yo son, Finnegan has just been diagnosed with Asperger’s and Social Integration Dysfunction. My frustrations lie in his inability to initiate any sort of play. Everything with Finne is SO literal. Do we force him to socialise? I see his enthusiasm at watching other children play but it seems as if he is watching them through a window. Rarely does he join in, nor does he seem to want to. We recently signed him up for a soccer camp where he spent 30mins of the 45mins screaming to go home. When we finally did leave he spent the rest of the day talking about it as if he had had the best day of his life and asked to go back?? Do I keep forcing him to social? Is this harming him? Is this more for me than him? Any thoughts?