This Special Life

Autism Advocacy & Support

For Parents

Play With Blocks, Teach Self Regulation

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Did you know you can give your child therapy when you play with them?  You may be wondering how. Through play therapy! The great thing about play therapy is that it doesn’t feel like therapy. It’s just like normal play except with a bit more purpose.

Curious how you can teach your child by simply playing with them?  Keep reading to find out how play therapy can help you help your youngster.

What Is Play Therapy?

Play therapy is an intervention created by Dr. Stanley Greenspan that focuses on the relationship between the provider and the client, or in this case parent and child.  The thing is you don’t have to be a therapist and your kiddo doesn’t have to be a client! 

Another name used for play therapy is “floor time” because a lot of play takes place on the floor and parents get down to play at their child’s level.  You probably already do that on a daily basis.

Play therapy focuses on activities that engages children.  In other words, playing activities that your child already enjoys.  You probably do that when you play with your kid too.

Playing a favorite past-time on the floor probably sounds like regular play time.   What makes it therapeutic is that it focuses on using relationships to help children grow intellectually and emotionally.

Without the child realizing it, play sessions are lead by them.  Adults participate in play that is on the child’s developmental level and builds on their strengths.  Through this process the adults help kids expand their intellect, communication skills and emotions.

What Does Play Therapy Teach?

The goal of play therapy is to teach kids intellectual and emotional skills in 6 areas which are:

  • Self-regulation
  • Relationship building
  • Communicating with others
  • Complex communication interactions
  • Emotional ideas 
  • Emotional thinking

Play is a natural methodology for kids to learn and practice self-regulation, communication and exploring emotions so that they can reach their full potential.

What Does Play Therapy Look Like

Play-time happens in a calm space.  During play-time kids select the activity and start playing.  The adult then joins the child and follows their lead. From there, while playing, the grown-up engages in interactions with the youngster in a back and forth manner.

Let’s use building blocks as an example.  Let’s say your child starts building a tower.  You let them stack a few blocks, then you help build.  Keep interactions minimal, just follow their lead or imitate them.

Next your child crashes the tower with his hands so you follow suit.  After awhile you suggest building a taller tower, or using a ball for crashing.  As you build you slowly expand the activity by changing the type of tower, labeling colors or shapes or bringing in action figures.  All of this helps your child respond and interact with you.,  

As your child grows, you can use strategies to help build your child’s interests to encourage higher levels of interaction.  Going back to the block illustration, you can use the same play themes with other types of building toys like Lincoln Logs or Legoes.  You can try building a house instead of a tower.

Tips For Success

Play therapy is a great way to bond with your child and teach him or her valuable communication and emotional skills.  To ensure success be sure to:

  • Meet your child at his or her level
  • Assess your child to see how he or she is feeling, acting so you know how to respond
  • Let your child lead or initiate activities
  • Avoid introducing ideas too soon
  • If child gets frustrated either stop or back away
  • Keep it fun

Don’t underestimate the power of play!  You’ll be amazed at what play therapy can do for you and your child.

5 Simple Ideas To Help Your ASD Child Learn To Read

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As a parent of a child with autism, your role becomes mother, father, child development expert, therapist, advocate, and teacher all wrapped up in one. This constant feeling of having to be “on” for your child across all environments is exhausting.

It can be hard to balance making time to engage in relaxing family activities (that don’t feel like they have an agenda) with making time for meaningful learning exercises (that don’t feel inordinately difficult).

In this post, we will discuss how to embed practice opportunities for one such skill that can be difficult for children with autism to learn – reading – within the home environment. By embedding these opportunities so that they naturally occur, interacting with novel material becomes social, fun, and easy.

Create a Literacy Rich Environment

In addition to stocking up on a variety of children’s books, you can create a rich literacy environment in your home and community in other ways as well. For example, let photographs and art hung on the walls serve as vehicles for conversing around imagery and practicing visual sequencing (“it is raining in this picture, so the woman has an umbrella to keep her dry”).

Visit your local library or bookstore, either for a playgroup or structured story time activity, or simply to browse books or play in the children’s area. These activities help to build a foundation for your child with autism where reading their environment as well as reading text becomes an intrinsically motivating experience.

Find Practice Opportunities in Daily Life

Engineers do all of the proverbial heavy lifting at the outset, before anything is actually built, by design. This way they don’t have to think about it later; everything they have included in their blueprint becomes automatic during construction and ongoing building usage.

Similarly, as a parent you can frontload literacy to begin with, making it easy to practice with your child with autism during ongoing daily living activities.

For example, purchasing magnetic letters for your fridge, foam letters for your bathtub, alphabet puzzles for the playroom, and alphabet board books for your child’s bookshelf increases ongoing opportunities to practice phonemic awareness (sounds associated with each letter), blending (“C-A-M spells Cam! That’s Mac backwards!”), and other early decoding skills such as rhyming and vowel vs. consonant awareness. 

Listen to Audio Books

Consider audiobooks as a way to embed literacy on the go or while doing other things at home, like playing with Legos or making dinner. Audiobooks can be an enriching experience even when you and your child are just listening rather than trying to follow along with the speaker word-by-word in a printed book.

Audio books also help create an early foundation for comprehension skills by exposing your child to narrative patterns across a variety of unique examples.

Let Literacy be Fun

You may be reading this and thinking “this all sounds wonderful, but my child just doesn’t like to read.” Children with autism may have a harder time accessing motivation and reinforcement within books than others, and this can start as early as during the first and second year.

They may not seek out books, or decline to finish a book being read to them. They may fixate on one particular book about a favorite subject, and insist on reading that book and only that book over and over every night at bedtime.

The important thing to keep in mind with early literacy is that it should be child-directed. By honoring your child’s requests and opinions about books early on, you will teach them that their actions matter.

The child with autism whose parent allows them to naturally close a book on page 3 rather than getting into a power struggle over making it to the end of the story may be much more likely to initiate reading all the way to page 5 or beyond on the next day.

It is OK to follow your child’s lead when it comes to literacy and reading, even if that results in unconventional outcomes. By freeing yourself and your child from excessively prescriptive ideas about what reading “should” look like, you create room to explore the wide world of literacy as it links directly to your lives, and establish a foundation for more complex reading skills to emerge later on.

Is It A Temper Tantrum Or A Meltdown?

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We get it – it’s really hard to tell if your child with autism is having a sensory meltdown or a temper tantrum. And knowing the difference is really important – you want to deal with temper tantrums differently than a sensory meltdown! 

As parents of autistic children, we want to be sensitive to our child’s specific needs. We certainly don’t want to discipline them if they’re in sensory overload. It’s serious enough that you should learn the difference.

So, in the heat of the moment, how do you know?

According to experts, temper tantrums occur when your child doesn’t get what he or she wants. Your child is firmly in control of their behavior, and trying to get YOU – the parent – to do something.

A sensory meltdown, on the other hand, occurs when your autistic child loses complete control of their behavior. It’s a psychological traffic jam of information.

Here’s some key things to look out for if you’re not sure whether your child on the spectrum is having a temper tantrum or a meltdown.

Is It A Tantrum?

  • Goal oriented – your child is making a scene to get what they want
  • Watching for reactions – your child wants to see what you’ll do now that they’re making a scene
  • Injury avoidance – your child avoids things that might hurt them
  • Ends when the goal is met – your child stops having a tantrum when they get what they want
  • In control of behavior – your child can start and stop their tantrum

Tantrums are appropriate for infants and toddlers, and help your child learn self control. They’re an attempt to manipulate you, and an attempt to “test the boundaries” of what you’ll allow. 

Is your child checking out how you respond, or does the fit increase or decrease in intensity based on what YOU do? 

Is It A Sensory Meltdown?

  • No goals – your child doesn’t ask for anything and isn’t making a scene to get their way
  • Ignores your reactions – your child isn’t interested in what you’ll do
  • Ignores harm – your child is reacting (not thinking or manipulating) and ignores potentially dangerous situations
  • Slow to end – your child doesn’t stop or only stops when they’re not in sensory overload (meaning, they don’t stop when you give in to their demand).
  • Not in control of behavior – your child goes into “survival mode” due to being over stimulated and react instinctively

Meltdowns occur with children (and adults) who struggle with flexibility and self-regulation. They occur when the individual has too much information to process and can’t process it in a regulated way.  

Unlike tantrums, your child doesn’t care what you do – they flip into survival mode and want to get away from all the stimulation. The meltdowns don’t end quickly, and they stop when a trusted adult helps them calm down or they exhaust themselves. While you can soothe a temper tantrum, you can’t soothe a meltdown. 

While each child with autism is an individual, some general warning signs of meltdowns include spacing out or stimming prior to the meltdown.

5 Tips For a Safe & Fun Sensory Play Area

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Sensory games are perfect for children on the spectrum. They can prevent meltdowns, keep your child engaged with their world, and more. 

Setting up a fun play area in your home is simple. You can use a spare corner in their bedroom, or have a whole room devoted to sensory play.

In this article, we’ll share some tips for quickly creating a fun and safe sensory play area for your family to enjoy,

Keep It Easy

With sensory games, you want your child on the spectrum to stay focused and avoid overstimulation. So keep the play area neat, without too many other toys in the area. You want their focus only on the sensory activity. Similarly, if you have a variety of activities planned, just do one game at a time.

Let Them Explore 

You want your little ones to explore the world and discover an engaging activity for themselves. This fosters independence. So keep it safe, but let your child explore the sensory activity at their own pace. You should still engage with your child, but let them decide how they’ll play with the activity. 

If your child on the spectrum doesn’t like certain textures, it’s okay if they avoid part of the activity. Just let them have fun on their own terms, and enjoy engaging with their environment.

Avoid Food-Related Activities

While candy can make a good reward, with sensory games, you don’t want food play to be the focus. You don’t want your child associating food with play time. Choose activities that involve shaving cream, paint, or other toys instead of food. Particularly if your child has friends over – you don’t know if those children have food allergies!

Buy Sensory Game Toys At The Dollar Store or Amazon

You don’t have to spend a lot to create a fun play area. There’s many items you can get for just a $1, such as shaving cream, many kinds of paint, or foam stacking blocks. You can also have them sent directly to your home from Amazon. As sensory games become more common, you can find more and more ideas online.

Make Clean Up Easy

To make play time fun for both your child AND you, structure your activities so clean up is easy. Keep wipes and paper towels handy, and try to keep play limited to a certain area (such as a table). Be sure to fully clean up one activity before moving onto the next one.

If your child tends to be messy, choose activities that are easy to clean up, such as blocks, peg boards, fabric scraps, etc.

6 Pet Chickens Perfect For Kids On The Spectrum

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Yes, there are pet chicken breeds that you’d mistake for a Muppet, and your kids will love them. You might ask, why raise such an odd pet? Well, you’ll see below exactly why your family will love these birds!

Silkies

silkie chicken with autistic girl

Silkies are very popular because of their soft plumage and easy-going temperaments. They make great pets – they’re calm, like being held, and are small enough for children to carry.

You can read more about silkies here and see how great their temperament is below:

Frizzles

frizzle chicken hen

Frizzles are a sweet type of chicken that will love to sit with you! With their funny feathers and “Muppet” like appearance, children love looking at them and petting their soft feathers. 

Mille Fleurs

A funny bird with a funny name! This colorful yet calm bantam chicken is affectionate and likes human company. They weigh about 4 pounds, and look like clowns! They’re easy for children to hold.

Polish Bantams

polish chicken

Polish bantams, like most bantams, love being held. They’re small – weighing only a couple pounds. Children especially love the fluffy crest of feathers that crown their head. 

Sultans

white sultan chicken

Sultans are a friendly breed with LOTS of fluffy feathers. They were originally bred as ornaments for the Sultan’s palaces during the Ottoman Empire, but have made their way into homes worldwide because they enjoy being around “their humans!”

Appenzeller Spitzhauben

These colorful chickens look like they have mohawks – which children LOVE. They’re friendly, and love getting treats!