Z absolutely LOVES animals. They would be one of his so-called “special interests” that he can’t get enough of and at times can’t stop talking about. He informed me recently that he “no longer likes dinosaurs, I only like animals now”. Isn’t that the truth!
But I have found that if he is regulated, then his love of animals is a beautiful thing. If he’s dysregulated, his incessant talking about them honestly makes me feel like I might need a long swim in a very deep ocean. It’s difficult for parents of typical children to imagine what this is like. I’m sure if someone told me a year ago that talking about farm and African animals would make me want to run screaming to a dark dark cave multiple times a day I would have thought they were an awfully cruel parent. But I’ve done the (google) research – there are MANY, many parents of kids on the spectrum for which this is an issue.
I have indeed realized that MORE LANGUAGE IS NOT ACTUALLY WHAT I’M AFTER. I write it in bold because I know how important it can feel to want your child to be able to communicate with language…but I really believe that’s not actually what I’m after. At least not anymore. More about that later.
So to regulate Z, every day that I can I sit with him on the floor and just “be with him”. I then form the framework of my plan. Not the outcome of the plan, the framework for the plan. Very different. So for example, with playing farm I wanted him to experience what its like to be in another person’s role since this is tricky for him. So my framework was simply for me to embody a role (I was a farmer) and then see what he would do. I then planned to simply keep taking role actions and each time see what he would do. So simple!
It worked beautifully, he decided to be the farmers wife! I regulated our interaction by repeatedly initiating a new action that I believed he would have the knowledge to act on, and then waiting to see what he would do. This is just very natural interactive play that typical parents don’t even realize is happening, but for us parents with kids on the spectrum takes some serious know how.
We planted a garden (you can see it on the brown rug in the background above) – it took him a while to join in but I just kept repeating the pattern of taking blocks out and “planting” them in the rug, and pretending to cover them up with soil. Once he got it (with no prompting from me), he joined in.
We took the animals to the fare and he gave them ribbons (we just went to the fair recently so this was fresh in his mind) and we put the animals to sleep. We played this for close to an hour and it was really, really, lovely. All our interactions are not necessarily this smooth, but I’m getting so much better at helping them to be so and its a really spectacular feeling.
This was Z’s photo that he took of a cow in our farm.
Z is for Zen 