Black and White

Children on the spectrum are very black and white in their thinking.  Most often these children have inflexible thinking patterns.  Sometimes they can't move beyond what they have firmly decided in their minds.   We have to teach them that not everything is so black and white.  Their rigid thinking often times gets them frustrated.  Sometimes they might act out in inappropriate ways.  

An example of this thinking, or taking something very "literal" was my comment to Michael the day Chris took Ally and I out for dinner.  I said, "Michael, mommy, daddy and Mei Mei (the name the twins call Ally) are going out to dinner tonight.  Miss Tracy is going to babysit you.  Michael automatically put on a big frown face and starting to have a fit.  What was the problem you might ask yourself?  Well, we quickly found out that he was, "NOT A BABY!"  Then we knew that he took the word "babysitter" to actually mean that.  A person who watches a baby. 

This also produced another train of thought in Michael's autistic brain.  He said he didn't like babysitters because they are mean and they lock you in the closet.  Where in the world did that thinking come from?  Well, we quickly learned that Timmy Turner's babysitter (Fairly Odd Godparents cartoon from Cartoon network) is this evil, vicious girl who tortures Timmy whenever his parents go away.  Michael literally thought that having a babysitter would be the worst thing in the world.  Nevermind that Tracy has lived in our house for the last 9 months, and that he knows her almost like a family member.  What happens on TV must be true!

Now I know that many children the age of 7 are still sorting out reality and fantasy.  This is just a developmental stage of most children.  Yet his comments weren't just the typical developmental phase of an average child, it is this developmental phase compounded with an autistic brain.  I must clarify that his brain is a smart and wonderful thing.  It normally thinks "outside of the box", his thinking is different, but it is a good kind of different.   It is also restricted into thinking in a very  literal way.  We get conflicting reports from the school, that Michael needs to "think outside the box".  He does think "outside of the box".  His solutions to problems are out of the ordinary.  He doesn't conform to thinking like the "norm".  What they need to say is that he needs to work on his inflexible thinking.  He needs to work on his language, both expressively and receptively.  He needs to move past his black and white thinking and develop some of those "gray" areas. 

When dealing with Michael, I have to really pull out all of my training as a teacher for the Deaf and hard of hearing.  Figurative language is tough for them.  You have to explain a lot of things that you and I take for granted.  I always wondered back in the late 80s why they kept putting autistic children into our preschool Deaf and hard of hearing class, now I know why.  It is the strange idiosyncracies of of our language that can get some autistic children confused. They need to be taught this things explicitly.