5 Essential Reasons for Teaching Flexible Thinking to Autistic Children
Autistic children tend to be inflexible thinkers. It comes with the territory! Perhaps your child always wants the same food, toys, clothes, or TV programs? Maybe your child resists even small changes to daily routine? Your son or daughter may find it hard to wait or you may have noticed that they follow their own agenda rather than tune in to you.
As a result of these challenges, most parents quite rightly try to help by having good routines in place. Perhaps you stick to the same things to avoid meltdowns? And it’s true, without these familiar things, your child may well get anxious and show challenging behaviour.
Whilst it’s important for us to accommodate these needs, it’s also important to build flexible thinking. This doesn’t mean stopping your child from enjoying their interests but it does mean gradually equipping them with coping skills. Flexible thinking is needed in so many areas of life and it’s also a skill that we continue to need as adults. Here are 5 reasons to consider:
- Friendships and Relationships
To play effectively with other children, your child needs to be able to adapt. He / she may go onto the playground with an idea in mind – perhaps playing pirates. But what if the other children don’t want to play pirates? Then it is necessary for your child to think flexibility and consider changing the plan. Without that ability, the interaction could go very wrong. And if repeated over and over again, it will have an impact on the friendship.
- Classroom Learning
To be able to learn from a teacher (which is how a lot of early learning curriculum is delivered), a child needs to be able to shift his / her thinking onto the teacher rather than what he / she is currently doing. And beyond that, the child has to listen to what the teacher is saying and integrate that with current knowledge. This takes flexible thinking.
- Conversation
Conversations are like a game of chess. I make a move and then you make a move. My next move is dependent on how you moved. So flexible thinking is needed just to manage a single conversation. Without it, the result is a monologue or avoidance which is the pattern adopted by so many autistic people.
- Choices and Decisions
To make a choice, you need to be able to weigh up the benefits of one option over another. This needs flexible thinking. It is not surprising therefore that many autistic children have difficulty here – I’ve seen children select an item when offered a choice but then express frustration because it’s not what they really want.
- Predicting Consequences
Our brains are constantly attempting to predict what is coming next. It is one of the ways we self-monitor and also keep ourselves safe. But predicting consequences needs flexible thinking. What happens if a child climbs up onto something high and can’t predict the possibility of falling off? He / she will most likely be happy to do things which raise the parent’s anxiety levels but not their own.
So, to sum up, flexible thinking is a skill that underpins many other skills in life. Autistic children need support in the form of routines and access to their preferred toys, books, TV programs etc. but they also need to be equipped with flexible thinking skills so that they can manage the demands of everyday life.
Look out for next week’s blog where I will be further unpacking this theme …
To your parenting journey!
Linda Philips
MSc. Human Communication
