understood or accepted
Understanding what is going on in someone’s head is hard. Also when they are children without additional communication needs or adults but even harder if they are non-verbal or having difficulties communicating their exact emotions.
It can be interesting and great to look for or find answers to better understand someone else. But sadly it can be really challenging to find correct answers.
Keeping the emotional bankaccount high enough can also help a lot in making them feel accepted or understood.
To be able to find the answers, you need to be able to look at things in a nonjudgemental way. Also is it important to always remember that everyone is different. So it doesn’t mean one person does something for the same reason as someone else. For example, you have two children. One jumps around, the other also jumps around. But the first one jumps around because he wants something that he is not getting. The other one jumps around because he is super happy.
For some children a shower might feel like an attack as the shower jets may feel like daggers, but some children might just really relax from a good shower. It can even change for one child one day to another, depending on for example their nervous system overwhelm and sensitivity.
But why do they do this…
Why doesn’t he like this?
Does he actually not like this?
These endless questions that you might have, some will never have an answer like why does your child like to look at things in tunnel vision through a small hole they make with their fingers? You can look for answers for these things, and some answers might help you understand them, some might open a whole other rabbit hole where you can easily get lost or overwhelmed in, or you can try and sincerely mimic things to see what they do for you, why you would like this, you might find answers like ‘oh only looking at this through tunnel vision does help focusing as you can only see this’. Just by copying some behavior can often make the child feel understood or at least accepted by you showing interest in why they do it. They could feel less lonely and more connected to you.
This also is a way in to learning as you copy things they do. Through this connection they can take an interest in copying what you do… and want to do things together. (always start really small at first with things you know they can just about do to make it fun and interesting and take turns in copying each other)
Let me tell you another story:
I had made a little game with one boy in nursery. I called it the knocking game.
He was behind a wooden wall from me, I looked on one side of the wall where he was, then I knocked on the wood all the way to the other side of the end of the wall. There I said ‘Hi’ to him again. He would be like “oh there you are” and follow me.
After a while he followed the sound of me knocking and right before I was at the end he would pop his head around the corner and made a sound that was really close to my ‘Hi’. He loved this game and often ran to ‘hide’ behind the wooden wall to get me to play that game with him again. Later he learned the connection between the words ‘knocking game’ and the game itself. I could say it and he would ran or skip or dance towards the wooden wall to play it.
Always an interesting thought…
If everyone in the world would be blind… the world would be totally different and if you were the one who was seeing this bright sunlight and needed sunglasses for this, and you would get crazy from awful color combination people would wear, or you would get sad and down from the non-colorful things in the world because why should there be color? you would be considered the person with a disability.
Being different does not mean being wrong.
Being different does not mean there is something wrong with you.*
Being different means the world is not build in the way you can function best.
So sometimes their world needs a bit of help.
Someone may have a different way of thinking from yours and that does not make their way wrong.
Accepting something even if it is not logical or explainable for you, and accepting it without resentment can help the child feel loved and accepted for who they are. Once you start accepting and make them feel loved, they could surprise you and show some beautiful things about themselves they tried to hide for a long time as they were not sure if it was okay. They could for example suddenly start making singing sounds as they feel accepted.
Often children will learn that making sounds make people look strange/negative at them. So they hide this. If they feel accepted they get less shy or scared so they often start to make sounds again. These sounds are really important as they could help them form words in the future. A simple yes or no can be a big thing if they ever end up with people that cannot understand other ways of communication.
A confronting story about the importance of being able to communicate yes and no.
I worked in a care facility with an elderly man that had autism and was non-verbal. He was well loved and cared for. But he was only able to say no by pushing things away. Like when I would make him a cup of tea. If he did not want it he would push it away, if he wanted it he just took it out of my hands and drank it. He had been like this his whole life. Caregivers had handed him sometimes one tea after the other not realizing caregivers on the previous shifts had already given him a lot of cups already. He probably learned to just drink it. There might have also been moments of scarcity in his live that caregivers made him a cup of tea and he refused it and he didn’t get another warm cup until that one was empty.
He now had developed a drinking too much problem. He would not want to eat as his stomach was full. This were some things that slipped through the holes in the loving care he got. If he could have learned to communicate yes and no to the simple question if he wanted tea this would not have been a problem.
This is one of the reasons why it is important to improve and encourage their ways of communicating at least yes and no.
Some of the things children with autism do can be uncomfortable or can make other people around feel ashamed or even scared of. These things are sometimes not easy to change, and often not understood why. There are a couple of things that can be done to prevent or change these things.
One of the things is to react sincerely/honestly to things(maybe important to say… except probably for laughing if it is funny but inappropriate). If a child hits you, don’t act like it does not hurt if it does, - if you do and then you try to talk about it later to explain that it was not nice or that it was actually painful, that could make it complicated for them as your face or your way of acting before told them that it was not a big deal/it was nothing, but now you say it was.
This is really confusing. It can sometimes help if you show them the little bruise, as it makes a connection between the two of you and helps them understand cause-effect.
Another thing is to set boundaries and consequences to their understanding (don’t underestimate their understanding! With this point it might be better to overestimate them just a little bit).
And like with most children it is a good idea to show and reinforce good behaviours with attention.
“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mold him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world." Dit vond ik een mooi stukje van het boek Education and the Significance of Life dat ik even wou delen.