978-1572305441

Ernest 151
chain of events that leads to further problems: exclusion from community
activities, increased stress in family members, and fewer opportunities
for therapeutic interventions than would normally occur.
As more and more children with ASD are placed in mainstream educational
settings, more and more pressure is placed on teachers to deal
with aggression in the classroom. But teachers want to be teachers, not
therapists. They rightly feel they should be educating children, not running
a treatment center. With so many children with autism being diagnosed
and going to public schools, it seems as if there are few knowledgeable
consultants to help out. Teachers in the classroom are left on
their own and have to rely on parents to provide guidance and direction,
yet parents often feel that teachers and the schools should know
how to deal with this type of problem. They are, after all, the “experts.”
It’s especially difficult when the aggression occurs at school but not
at home or vice versa, for then there is opportunity for blaming and recrimination.
It’s challenging enough to deal with aggression without
also feeling that one is to blame for it. In Ernest’s case, his behavior was
much worse at school than at home. The teachers said this was because
they put more demands on him to behave “properly” and his parents
should do the same at home. That way there would be more “consistency”
(a favorite word for consultants who know little about children
with ASD). Now Ernest’s parents felt guilty as well as ashamed and humiliated.
Sometimes the opposite is true: Some children with ASD engage in
more disruptive behavior at home than at school. This may be a response
to severe sibling conflict, when parents cannot intervene in, or
resolve, the typical sibling’s resentment of the fact that the child with
ASD is treated differently. (Without going into depth here, suffice it to
say that when the typical sibling feels cheated by the extra attention or
apparent leniency extended to the child with ASD, the solution is to
make sure that the typical sibling understands why the rules are different
and that he or she gets “special time” with a parent alone, doing
something fun.) Much more confusing, however, are those situations
where the school is so structured and regimented that the child with
ASD behaves appropriately in that setting but comes home so frustrated
and stressed that there is little capacity for coping with the normal
stresses and strains of family life. At age seventeen, Jane was completely
obsessed with Barbie dolls. When she came home from school, all she
wanted to do was to dress her dolls in the same set of Barbie clothes
over and over again. If she ran out of clothes, she would become so up-