Five Parenting Tips to Survive the Holidays

Holiday season is upon us, again. It feels that time flies, right?

A couple of years ago we posted a blog on the topic of helping your special needs child during the holidays:  

http://totaleducationsolutions.blogspot.com/2011/12/holidays-and-autism.html  

For families with a member who has special needs, the holidays can present unique challenges: lack of predictable and familiar routines, overstimulation, being away from home, and the caregiver himself being stressed, to name a few.    

Let’s review our top tips on how to navigate these troubled waters.

1. Keeping routines in place is the best ways to avoid holiday havoc: sleep/meals times, play/outing activities, etc.

2. When changes in routines are foreseeable, prepare your kids in advance. The use of visual aids, such as pictures, timers, schedule boards, can be very helpful when dealing with children with special needs.

3.   Avoid long trips whenever possible. Airports, planes and long car rides can be very stressful.

4.   At family gatherings prepare a quiet space for your child to retreat to when stimulus gets too intense and he/she needs a break.

5.   Don’t force your child to do anything unless it involves a safety concern or an emergency. Motivation by offering a preferred item/activity in exchange for doing something is always a better solution.

As I said in my previous blog, it’s important for you to relax and stay as calm as possible. Your child absorbs your mood and your stress can rub off. Have fun. You are your child’s barometer and if you are stressed out, he/she will be too.

 

Daniel Adatto, BCBA.
cadatto@tesidea.com 

It should be more than reacting

“Billy, stop”; “Billy, quiet mouth”; “Billy, no hitting”; “Billy, sit down”; “Billy, stand in line”; Billy, quiet hands.”
Although this reacting mode (intervening after the behavior to stop it) is part of our repertoire of tools as behavior intervention professionals, it shouldn’t be the only part, or even the larger. As “experts” on behavior management, our larger repertoire of strategies should be teaching appropriate, functional equivalent (serving the same purpose as the challenging behaviors) behavior repertoires. We should be behavior teachers.
Behaviors have a communicative function. The individual is conveying needs and wants. For example, when the student engages in dysfunctional self-stimulatory behaviors (tapping, self-talking, flapping hands, giggling and laughing with no reason, jumping, moving around constantly, getting out of seat, touching others, body rocking, etc.) in the absence of demands, he is telling us that he needs sensory stimulation. Thus, the recommended treatment in this case is (a) Increase/Provide Access to Alternative Sources of Stimulation: Sensory Diet: various sensory-based activities visually scheduled into the child’s daily routines; (b) Teach replacement behaviors: acceptable methods for gaining the same type of stimulation; (c) Interrupt and Redirect Behavior; and (d) Reward the replacement behaviors: use rewards that provide preferred sensations.
Sitting/standing next to student or behind him and telling/modeling him "stop", "quiet hands", "quiet mouth", etc. is not enough and should not be the only intervention.

Different treatments would be recommended if the child engages in the behaviors to escape non-preferred activities, or to obtain attention.

To summarize, the intervention should focus on teaching appropriate, functional replacement behaviors to communicate desired objectives, thus eliminating the need to engage in the problematic behaviors.
As stated in the textbook Applied Behavior Analysis, by John Cooper, Timothy Heron and William Heward, chapter 3, page 60, “A practitioner should never plan to reduce or eliminate a behavior… without (a) determining and adaptive behavior that will take its place and (b) designing the intervention plan to ensure that the replacement behavior is learned. Teachers and other human services professionals should be in the business of building positive, adaptive repertoires, not merely reacting to and eliminating behaviors they find troublesome (Snell & Brown, 2006).”

And this applies also to teachers, parents and every adult who interacts with that child.

For more information and tips, check out our blog “Responding vs. Reacting” at http://totaleducationsolutions.blogspot.com/2013/08/responding-vs-reacting.html 

Be a teacher, a behavior teacher and you will be not only eliminating/reducing problematic behaviors, but you will give that child the tools to be independent in life.

Daniel Adatto, BCBA.
cadatto@tesidea.com