Punishing a child with autism comes with special complications. Understanding the social disability and linear aspects of the thinking of someone with ASD can make the punishment process kinder, more effective, and even transferable.
In This Article:
Reaction to Suspension
Focusing On Motivation
Better Outcomes
Reaction to Suspension
When a child is violent in school, the zero-tolerance punishment is suspension. This makes sense for neurotypical children who are social and emotional; they recognize the social significance of being “punished” by suspension and they are intrinsically motivated to stay connected with their peers, so being separated stings.
By contrast, the ASD child’s social disability prevents the same type of socially motivated thinking. Their thinking is concrete and focused on immediate results – it’s “linear” in nature, drawing a more direct correlation between the violence and the outcome. Social isolation is probably a relief to a child with a social disability, not a punishment. The lesson they may learn is that “If I hit someone, I get to stay home and play video games.”
Focusing On Motivation
Using LAM principles, an effective approach to “punishing” a child with ASD is to find what does motivate the child, and work from there. If playing video games is their extrinsic motivator, limit video time during the suspension, and then reward their non-violent behavior with video time. In time, the new behaviors become the norm and the need to “reward” with video time typically resolves on its own.
This tends to go against many therapists’ and parents’ beliefs about what “should” work and is often dismissed as bribery. Conventional therapies’ desire to “make” the child think about the punishment from a neurotypical/social perspective, or to care about the consequences, won’t work. The recognition of how the thinking of an ASD child develops linearly is key to why LAM is so powerful and successful, where other therapies have failed.
Better Outcomes
When an ASD child’s linear thinking is understood using LAM principles, the child is able to reach the parents’ goal of appropriate, non-violent behavior with their peers while receiving other valuable benefits. Not only will the child be able to learn from their punishment but their anger and frustration naturally subside as they feel understood and not coerced, and most importantly, they begin to develop skills that they can independently transfer to future situations.