How do you discipline a child who is autistic?

I hope you mean discipline = teach and not punishment. With an autistic child, you must exercise a tremendous amount of patience, and supervision. Each child is a unique situation, but for the most part, restraining from the activity you wish to avoid is the best way. This is usually by taking him to a different location.

Other, more drastic means are holding them until they behave, even while they may be kicking and screaming, or putting them in a restrictive area, such as using a fence in one corner of the room.

I suggest you join in some of the support sites that you can find on the net. You can eliminate the bad ones by the amount of spam entries they have – they are not monitored, and will not be useful.

@YARNLADY By “discipline” I mean discipline. E.G. get him to use the toilet… get him to come to you when he’s far away.. get him to eat different foods.. etc

Trial and error (same for parenting any child). Buttloads of patience and observation will go a long way. Every kid is different, autistic or not. Just keep trying new methods, for example using more positive reinforcement when they do well and less negative reinforcement when they do wrong. See what they respond to. You could read every parenting book on the planet (even parenting for special needs kids) but none of those books are about YOUR little bundle of joy. Leading by example seems like a good strategy, too (as far as eating new foods is concerned). Kids just repeat what they see and hear.

Ha ha oh how i love this question. I have a 10 yr old autistic son. So when he is naughty and believe me he loves to be, discipline has been really hard to put into action. I have now a very simple solution….a reward chart and a prize at the end of each week. he gets a sticker and lots and lots of “well done’s” and “you clever boy” (a bit like a toddler would) and stickers, which he picks himself. Then at the end of the week on “treat Friday” he gets his treat, again usually a cheap little something that he can fiddle with (he likes fiddle things and pressing buttons repeatedly)

I know it’s lame and you have probably heard about sticker charts until they come out of your ear’s, but they do work and keeps the child motivated into being good. Hope this helps a little.

My daughter used to work with an autistic boy. The family hired her to help him with various learning activities and so on. She accidentally discovered that he loved to feed ducks. Considering that autistic kids do very well with animals, perhaps you could use feeding ducks as an enriching reward for your son.

She got so she saved all our old bread for duck feeding day. Sometimes we had a loaf or two of bread in the freezer waiting for the time when she went back to work there.

@digitalimpression Something sounds funny about your use of the word, “discipline.” By discipline, people usually mean self-control. But when you use it, it sounds like you mean “do what I say.” They are not at all the same thing, and I doubt if autistic kids are much less cooperative than non-autistic kids when it comes to “do what I say.”

My son is not autistic, and he won’t eat any food he thinks he doesn’t like. He also almost never comes when I ask him. He’s too involved in some show or another, so it’s always, “Just a minute.” He could “Just a minute” me to my grave if I let him. He does use the toilet, but I don’t know what age you are talking about. My son didn’t really finally and completely use the toilet until the summer before he started kindergarten and he had to or else he couldn’t go to school. But my son is doing well enough.

I trust that you do not hit, spank, or yell at him. Those things may be effective at coercing cooperation, but they will never teach discipline. @YARNLADY is absolutely correct when she says that discipline is teaching. Your son needs to learn to organize himself so he can do what he needs to do. One of the things he probably needs to do is take into account your wishes.

Kids often think they are the center of the universe. It is our job to teach them that they live within a web of relationships and that if they do not please others, others will see little reason to please them. Parents must model this by pleasing others, and then they must reinforce the lesson with an explanation of what is going on. We cooperate. The person who is not cooperative gets left out—not because anyone dislikes them, but because it is too hard to be in a relationship with them.

I have no idea how much autistic kids can understand. Or what kind of attention or focus span they have. I suspect you must be very patient and do things over and over and over.

I wish you luck!

Rewards & lots of them.

I put together picture charts for each section of the day with each sequence he needs to follow. He cn earn a reward dollar for each section of the day.

His dollars can be spent on TV shows, movies, game time, computer time, family trips to the zoo/museum (we have memberships to various places).

As for foods, we have “House Rules”. You must eat healthy foods before junk foods. Healthy food needs to be finished before asking for chips or any other food.

Sorry I had to walk away for a morning meltdown
@digitalimpression, do you have your house rules somewhere where your son can see them?

Obviously you have to learn how to pick your battles. For us, we find daily rewards, praise and positivity go much further than any other type of “discipline”.

Our son loves time by himself. We use “time outs” which are really calm down time for just before a meltdown….we can usually prevent them.

Daily exercise for a minimum of 20mins cuts down on night time acting out, and it helps refocus his energy. He’s allowed to cash in his reward dollars after physical exercise, which cuts out a battle there.

We allow zero power struggles. If that means we need to leave the room to figure out the solution in a quiet place, that’s what we do.

@BeccaBoo I’ve just recently put that into action and it has worked well for the other two kids. We’ll see how it goes for my oldest. It’s good to know there are others out there who know what its like!

@wundayatta “I doubt if autistic kids are much less cooperative than non-autistic kids” Couldn’t be more wrong. And by discipline I (again) mean something like the discipline of learning to play the piano, or the fact that learning yoga is a discipline.. I have learned the discipline of patience over the past ten years (at least with kids)..

“Kids think they are the center of the universe” How right you are! I learned early that you can’t treat kids as if they are the center of the universe.. instead they are an addition to an already pre-existing universe in that of the parents.

“I have no idea how much autistic kids can understand” It depends on the kid of course. E.G. My son hears great. He hears a train in the distance, birds outside, the tv, his brothers fighting, and my voice. Unfortunately its as if he hears them all at the same volume. Most people know what to filter out and what to pay attention to.. but he is still learning. It is the same with tastes, smells… any sense. He might love the taste of a food, but if it isn’t the right texture he won’t eat it.

Thanks for your input and thanks for the good luck. =)

@SpatzieLover Hmm.. that’s two votes for a chart of some kind… sounds like this idea has some serious merit! =) House rules? No, we don’t have them posted. What are some of the rules if you don’t mind me asking?

Our rules change as needed. Our son first posted “Do not hit the dogs with your blanket” in the form of a drawn picture at age 2. We have followed his direction ;0)

He made a picture he could see from “his” chair, from bed, and in the kitchen.

Next he put scribbles on paper that “read” Do not throw or you go to time out!

We do have picture charts with the House Food Rule: You must eat healthy foods first!

He knows that rule so we don’t have it anywhere else in the home. It’s fully assimilated at this point ;) If he’s given a meal with more than one fruit or veggie selection he’ll ask “Which am I supposed to eat first?”. Usually I’ll say “you pick” but some days that’s too broad of a thought for him, so I’ll pick for him.

Before leaving the home he’s given fair warning of our schedule. It’s up to him to figure out what he wants to bring. He knows I’ll bring his lunch box with snacks, a bag with activities-etc. If we get in the car and have left the driveway we are not going back. It’s a rule!

Besides those listed above, our current house rules are:
*Please speak to the person you want to talk to in the room they are in.
*Ask nicely. Parents decide.
*Exercise first. No movies or TV without moving your body.

Again, these could change tomorrow, if something happens and we have a new issue to work on, I’ll put the other rules on the back burner and fully address the most urgent skill During this time of year, S.A.D. hits hard and fast…we are blessed with sun this week :)
***********************************************************
My son hears great. He hears a train in the distance, birds outside, the tv, his brothers fighting, and my voice. Unfortunately its as if he hears them all at the same volume. Most people know what to filter out and what to pay attention to.. but he is still learning. It is the same with tastes, smells… any sense. He might love the taste of a food, but if it isn’t the right texture he won’t eat it.

My son is the same @digitalimpression.

For food issues:
We juice at home and buy juices. We expect that each meal will begin with a fruit or veg. Since he cannot do textures well, we do not expect him to “eat” what we eat yet. We do ask him to try. He’s a good boy and wants to please, so most of the time he will.

I find food-chaining to be the wisest way to get him to attempt new foods. If he picks something out at the grocery store, the rule is he must try it. That’s helped him try a few things that we never would’ve thought of giving him.

Autistic children are very bright, they can easily understand and remember things. You just have to be firm when you give rules. When we talk to my nephew who is autistic, we ask him to look at our eyes and then ask if he understood what we said. Then we will demonstrate how to do the things we ask him to do. For example, when we asked him to return back to the shelf the books he read, we showed him how to return the book and let him do it. We check on him for a couple of times until he is able to follow that instruction. It takes a lot of patience and love to discipline autistic children.

@digitalimpression With respect to cooperation and discipline, I take your word for it, but I wish I could see it for myself to understand truly what you mean.

My son is in his seventh year of piano, and he still needs me to sit with him every day if he is going to practice. He seems to willfully forget any progress he has made in reading notes from one day to the next. He just doesn’t want to read. He wants everything to flow in via brain waves.

He is very good at memorizing, so that is what he prefers to do. He loves piano and he loves playing pieces, but his discipline for learning is nearly nonexistent. I’ve tried leaving him on his own, but it just doesn’t work. Overall, he has trouble with “executive functioning,” so piano isn’t the only thing.

How is it with your son and piano?

@wundayatta My son will pound on the keys repeatedly because they have lights inside them or he will set off the demo song on the keyboard and flap his hands like a cat who stepped on a cactus. =)

@digitalimpression How old is he?

@wundayatta I’ve been trying to learn how for a decade now and I seem to be no nearer from the details

@wundayatta Just turned 11. I don’t count the first year because we didn’t know anything was wrong. We slowly started to realize he wasn’t developing things along the normal “baby timeline”. We took him in to get diagnosed and they found nothing. Then a doctor, almost as an afterthought, suggested that we get him screened for fragile x syndrome. Turns out that that’s what it was. I only use the term autistic because a lot of the symptoms are the same and its just easier than having to explain what fragile x syndrome is every time I have a question.