Autism Every Day by Alyson Beytien

Author:Alyson Beytien
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935274704
Publisher: Future Horizons
Published: 2011-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

Teaching Change

When the boys were young, I understood their need for consistency and arranged our house and our lives accordingly. I had a visual schedule for everything: bedtime, bath time, morning routine, after-school routine, dinnertime, lunchtime, breakfast time, snack time, running errands, going to a friends’ house, etc. And the boys thrived on the structure.

I also visually organized their clothing and backpacks. I didn’t have much of a choice since boys’ clothing doesn’t come in a huge variety of colors, and when you have three boys wearing almost the same size, you don’t get many options. So I would buy jeans and t-shirts in green, blue, and red. Green was Spencer’s favorite color and the only colors left were blue or red, so I chose blue for Josh and red for Zachary. I also labeled all of their closets and drawers with pictures of the items that belonged in the drawers—”pants,” “shirts,” “underwear,” and “socks.” I outlined each picture with their corresponding color. I had clothing baskets labeled in their color and taught them to get their corresponding basket of clean clothes, then put the clothes away. I also bought their coats, their backpacks for school, hats, gloves, and anything else they needed in their color code. And they were independent in getting the items they needed because they knew which item was theirs.

I thought I was being very clever and supporting their need for consistency. I had no idea that I had created a routine that would take me years to change. Spencer would wear only green clothing for nearly 12 years. Joshua was 17 before he agreed to wear a black shirt instead of a blue shirt to school. Zachary still insists on wearing a red shirt every single day. No matter what. And Zachary went through a few years when he insisted on wearing the exact same thing that his brothers did. He would sometimes lift up Spencer’s shirt and check his underwear to see if Spencer was wearing the blue and yellow striped Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear or the white and gray banded Hanes underwear—because his had to match!

When Spencer was nine, we realized that he needed to wear glasses to see clearly. Spencer and I picked up his glasses from the optometrist, and on the drive home Spencer says, “Mom, Zachary is going to want his own pair of glasses because I have glasses.” Oh dear. He was right—Zach would insist on looking EXACTLY like Spencer. Now what do I do?

When we arrived home, Zachary took one look at Spencer and started yelling. Zach ran to Spencer and before I could intervene, he grabbed Spencer’s glasses and yanked them off his face, throwing them across the room. Spencer began to yell and cry, Zachary had to be held back from breaking the glasses, Joshua kept asking me what was wrong, and I was attempting to calm everyone down.

My solution? I took an old pair of Craig’s glasses, popped out the lenses, and gave them to Zachary. I truly thought that he would put the glasses on and hate the feeling of the plastic around his ears.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.