The Parents' Practical Guide to Resilience for Children aged 2-10 on the Autism Spectrum by Yenn Purkis

Author:Yenn Purkis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784505745
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2017-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Activity 1 – Incremental journeys

This activity involves gradually increasing your child’s tolerance for long trips by taking incrementally longer trips. Reinforce success when they master a longer trip and focus on how well they are mastering the challenge. If they have a setback, try to work out what the issue was – sometimes your child will be able to articulate this on some level and sometimes they won’t. Do not give up on introducing long-distance travel for your child and encourage them for the next time rather than berating them for not achieving the goal. You can do both car/bus journeys as well as journeys on foot.

This means that you may start off walking to the postbox together, and then walking to the next house down, and then around the block, and so on. If you are increasing bus or car trips, it is important to remember that, although your child needs to know where they are going, you do not want to make them dependent on following ‘the one and only correct route’ to go somewhere. This means that you may go left one day and right the next and then straight on, on another day. You can have a map in the car or with you on the bus so you can help your child know where they are in relation to other people/places at all times:

We used to live in Christchurch in New Zealand, the earthquake city. It was problematic for many autistics, both adults and children after the earthquakes. If they only knew one right way to get somewhere, they physically couldn’t go that way anymore because the road didn’t exist anymore. For families, like ours, where kids had lots of meltdowns around it, it was really stressful, but for autistics who couldn’t work out what to do to get where they needed to go, it was horrendous. The experience really made me understand why we need to teach our autistic children a variety of ways to do things and get places. (Tom)

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