978-1572305441

Ernest 155
but to see why the behavior occurs in the first place. In Ernest’s case, his
difficulty was following the classroom routine. He had his own agenda
and didn’t understand the necessity of following anybody else’s. He did
not have a clue as to what the teacher was thinking or trying to do with
him when she led him away from the door. Giving him a schedule that
combined his favorite activities, or that allowed him to follow his own
agenda with those expected of everybody else, would have been an easy
solution. In children with communication difficulties, having a pictorial
representation of the day’s activities can be an invaluable aid in establishing
such a routine. But such flexibility is all too often impractical in
some classroom settings. Some institutions find it hard to have different
rules for different children.
While parents quickly learn through experience and trial and error
the importance of understanding the reason for disruptive or aggressive
behavior, some professionals unfamiliar with ASD find this concept
very difficult to accept. They are afraid of giving in, of being manipulated
by a five-year-old—as if children with ASD were socially sophisticated
enough to manipulate anybody, let alone someone as cagey as an
adult.
The natural impulse of adults is, of course, to control a child’s inappropriate
behavior. But once a temper tantrum happens, there may be
little chance of stopping it. Children with ASD tend to have temper tantrums
that go on for a long time (perhaps because they cannot shift
attention away from the object of distress), they are quite intense, and
the ability to communicate or negotiate about the event (already compromised
by the disability) during the tantrum is much reduced. Once a
child with ASD in the middle of a tantrum reaches a point of no return,
the only rule is to protect the child, protect those around him or her,
and let the tantrum run its course. It is no use punishing the aggression
in a vain attempt to teach the child better next time. Trying to correct
past behavior is too difficult, probably because of the executive function
deficits described in earlier chapters. It’s much easier to teach appropriate
behavior in a proactive fashion, in a positive manner, with rewards
that are both tangible and immediate and coupled with social praise.
That way social praise, which is intrinsically less rewarding for a child
with ASD, gets paired with those tangible rewards that are highly motivating
and may, by itself, become a reward later on.
It’s important to enter the child’s mind and, in a kind of thought experiment,
experience the child with ASD’s disabilities and limitations.
In that way, the limited options available to that child, given the circum-