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| Sun, 07-10-2005 - 11:31pm |
My 4.5 year old recently saw one of those big blow-up waterslides in a Walmart ad. He said several times he wished he could have one. Shortly after, my MIL's neighbor invited him over to play on theirs. We got there and he willlingly climbed up. We had to help a bit due to his motor skill issues/hypotonia. He got to the top, and was suddenly terrified. And every time one of us tried to help, tell him which way to go down, it made it worse. Then he made it down, had a big meltdown, and said he did not want to do it any more. A few minutes later he was asking to get on it again, but then we had a repeat of the whole meltdown thing. I was not forcing him to get on the slide, but he kept freaking out on it!
Yesterday I took him to the indoor pool for the first time, ever. Right off he asked to go down the kiddie water slide. He was a little anxious, then did it just fine. I waited a the bottom to catch him. He did the slide several more times, happily. Then we played in other areas of the pool. Again, he asked to go down. He got up there, and started getting upset. I had trouble hearing due to splashing and other people in there. He said he was afraid, and had to be coaxed down the slide. How could he suddenly be afraid of something he had just done 30 minutes before and liked? After that he said he did not like me and was mad, that I had made a funny face at him. I have no idea what that was all about.
Any of you know what went on? I was kind of disappointed, because we'd had such a good time till then. On a positive note, he did not completely melt down like the time before.
Amanda

Amanda,
Oh yes, I've seen this before many times in Cassian. There are a number of reasons this can happen.
1) ASD kids like/need repetition, and they thrive on scripts, especially at earlier ages. So when an ASD child expresses fear or some other emotion about an experience, they incorporate the emotive outburst into their script. The script must then be reenacted again and again with the same emotional outburst and other possibly irrelevant details. When Cassian has done this, I have observed that over time, the emotional part of his script becomes less and less strong, as he starts simply going through the motions.
2) Another possibility is that ASD children have difficulty perceiving the gestalt or whole picture of a given situation. They focus on a few specifics, some of which may be irrelevant to understanding the situation. Thus, a child can like going down a slide at one point, but for that ASD child, the next time up on top of the slide may seem quite different to him/her, and it feels like a totally new experience. This characteristic of learning is a classic part of autism, and it is what often slows down kids with ASD's when they have to learn in vivo. They don't have consistent experiences from one trip down the slide to the next and and so do not learn quickly to manage this sort of experience. Combine this with extreme neophobia (fear of the new), and you get a kid who has knee-jerk reactions to just about everything, even things that we think they have done over and over again.j
3) A third, related, possibility is that episodic memory (memories about things that happen to you) are poorly encoded for people with ASD's. They may not remember an episode well, or they may remember what happened but fail to connect affect (emotion) to it. This hampers them when making decisions about what to do in a similar situation (e.g., Do you want to go down the slide again?). Combine this with the fact that they fail to see similarities between situations much of the time because they focus on the wrong details and cannot see an accurate gestalt image, and you get a kid who makes pretty illogical decisions, even after a series of experiences that should have helped him/her learn.
We struggle with these issues all the time, and I have a few ways that I address the problem. I write social stories that help Cassian make the right connections between events in an episodic memory. Taking a series of pictures of the event or writing steps to show what happened are also good ways to help kids with ASD's encode episodic memories better. You can even make up hypothetical stories that give a choice of endings. For example, you might draw a picture of a child going down a water slide, then the next picture is of the child getting upset at the top of the slide. At this point in the story, the child could decide to come down the ladder and try the slide again with an adult holding him. The other line of reasoning would have the child looking happy at the top of the slide and his decision would be to go down. This may help connect affect to decision-making.
We also use dramatic play a lot. I would play with dolls/puppets and have the characters express the same fears about a slide. Dramatic play settings are much safer for the child, and they allow kids to work out problems that they would be too emotional to make sense of if the situation was real. Dramatic play may also simplify the setting enough so that a child with an ASD will have a better chance of focusing on relevant details. You can talk about relevant details too in play, which can help your child recognize important commonalities.
Of course, we also read books about emotional situations. I highly recommend the Dealing with Feelings series by Elizabeth Crary. These books give several alternative endings, and the child can choose different decision paths each time to see what happens. There is an "I'm Scared" book, but we haven't read it, so I cannot comment on that one.
I hope this helps a little. From here, you need to be a good detective with your own child, as obviously there can be issues specific to him that could have affected the situation.
Suzi
Suzi,
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. I think his was a combination of each slide experience being perceived differently for him, and remembering from his last waterslide experience. Even though I have dealt with his delays for his whole life, seeing it from the autism perspective is still fairly new to me. We just got the diagnosis in February.
MIL's poor neighbor had no clue why Aaron was so upset. She knew a little bit of his issues, but not enough to explain why he freaked out on her slide. She kept saying, "I'm sorry. This was supposed to be fun." At one point she offered help to Aaron, and he screamed "no!" to her. I told him when he calmed down, he was going to tell her he was sorry for shouting at her. And he did a little while later. She was being nice and saying, "It's ok." I told her he had to apologize, since I have to teach him he can't talk to grown-ups like that.
I feel like I still haven't figured out the line between providing appropriate discipline, and being sensitive to his issues.
Anyway, thanks for the info. This is a great place to talk with people who know exactly what I am talking about!
Amanda, mom to Aaron, 4, and Madeline, 20 months