978-1572305441

152 A MIND APART
set that she would yell and scream and throw things against the wall.
The more difficulty she had at school, the more she insisted on playing
with the dolls at home. If the school eased off on academic demands
and gave her more free time, she was easier to handle at home. But she
was never a behavior problem at school! Her disruptiveness showed
only at home, in direct response to the academic demands at school.
Through careful titration of the school environment and measuring of
the response at home, we could develop this hypothesis and test it out
systematically. When we switched Jane’s program to a nonacademic one
that involved more life skills, her rages at home subsided at last.
There are no easy answers to the problem of disruptive behavior,
however, and sometimes extraordinary measures like medication, physical
restraint, or mild reprimands are in fact required. But one tactic that
should be avoided altogether is a power struggle between the child and
an adult (parent or teacher). Some adults, in the face of aggression,
place more limits on the child, withhold rewards, hand out minor punishments,
become impatient and critical. The child senses this, and the
aggressive behavior worsens in response. Thus a chain of events is set
up resulting in escalating behavioral difficulties; then more limits
placed on the child by the adult, which in turn leads to more aggressive
behavior. Challenging behavior must never be experienced as a “challenge”
that requires more control. Nobody wins a power struggle, especially
when it involves a child with ASD, who has little sense that if he
gave in a little, the adult might as well. The child with ASD may not understand,
or be able to process quickly, that his behavior has an influence
on an adult. He may just see an adult who is impatient and critical
for no good reason. Aggressive behavior increases in response in large
part because children with ASD cannot communicate effectively in
words or do not understand intuitively why the other person will not
allow them to do something. Dealing with the behavior after the fact
often doesn’t work; withdrawal of social attention does not have the
same motivational value as it does for typical children. Children with
ASD, in contrast to typical children, are never difficult because they
“want attention”—such desires are generally not in their emotional
vocabulary, precisely because their world revolves around a different
axis, one that does not value social interaction above all else.
When aggression escalates out of control, suspension from school
or a child care setting is often the end result of this struggle between
child and teacher. But suspension should be used only when personal
safety of the child with ASD or the other children is a real concern and