Yes you’re a great motivator and the inspiration guru to the stars, but I’d like to see you step up to a truly great challenge and get involved in the Autism community.

Let’s face it, motivating people that seek you out (so there’s already something there that they’re just waiting to hear) and are readily able to pay for the tickets to your show, or ebooks or premium services on your site or what ever else… that’s all well and good… but it’s not a real challenge for a man like Tony Robbins.

I want to see you walk into a house and prevent something like this from happening: Murder Suicide Involving Mom and Son with Autism

I’d like to see you contend with children that won’t look you in the eye, that won’t answer your questions, that throw a tantrum at the drop of a hat… I want to see you talk to the parents that give up their cable, telephone and other luxury expenses to be able to afford their child’s diet and therapy sessions and try to motivate them.

Mr Tony Robbins, I really do like your work, honestly I do… it has no effect on me and I don’t feel inspired in the slightest however, but that’s not your fault… it’s mine. I know that I’m not the only one though, I know that there are many of us that know that our children will never be able to attend your seminars because they would never be able to handle being in a crowded room of screaming people with lights, sound systems and everything else. I know that many of us would never be able to afford the tickets anyhow.

I also know that it’s not a good business decision for you to get involved in the Autism community because no one makes money helping people that have no money. It’s good for public image but between you and I, I know you don’t need much help with that anyhow.

All the same though, I’d still love to see you get involved. I’d still love to see moms and dads and lonely people with Autism brought back from the brink and helped out by those who have the ability to do so.. you are one such man.

We don’t need a spokesman, we don’t need a celebrity to bring awareness, we need honest to goodness support and compassion… quite simply, we need help.

We’re the Autism community, we support each other and try to pass along words of encouragement knowing no one can see our tears while we sit at our computer keyboard…  but if that news story and the dozens like them are any indication, we’re just not strong enough. There’s too much to live with, too much to deal with and, because this is our children we’re talking about, there’s too much at stake.

You talk about challenges during your seminars, well… I’m putting this one out to you, because I respect you and I think (in the extremely unlikely event that you should ever even read this) that if anyone could say the words necessary to stop news stories like that from becoming more frequent… it’s you.

What do you say?

Parents can easily become overwhelmed having to deal with all that entails a child’s schedule… there’s school, extra curricular activities after, there’s camps, programs, summer get aways and if your child has Autism, then there’s also therapy sessions, other camps, group sessions and so much more.

Wait, the parents can be overwhelmed? Just imagine how the children must feel!

Naturally, not all children are created equal and so many will be just fine with all that there is to do.. after all, children don’t seem to run out of energy like adults do. They just move from one thing to the next and keep right on going.

This generally isn’t how it is for children with Autism though, at least not in my experience. All of these things are really great and essential to treating the Autism within your child, to helping them over come it and break through. However, when my son gets home from school on a Friday afternoon, you can visibly see the tension that has built up from a solid week of it.

When you start to add up the school days, the friends visiting, the therapy sessions, the camps, groups… without down time, your child might get progressively more and more overwhelmed and possibly even regress. That means that all that you accomplished with the school and therapies and such would be for nothing.

One of the things that bugged my wife and I early on was how other parents kept pushing “me time” on us, telling us how great it’ll be when the kids are in school or day care or off to a baby sitter… it’s not the notion that bugs us but how much people seem to think that it should be done to excess.

It’s as if people are eager to “pawn off” their children at the first available opportunity so that they can have someone else “deal with them.” This does not go over well with me nor my wife because we’ve come to realize that the more family time we can get, the better our Autistic son does.

That’s not to say that one extreme is better than the other… we can’t keep him from every therapy session, never let him go to school and never socialize and hope he’ll be ok… we just have to recognize when it’s been too long and step back and maybe go to the beach or something.

Family time, it’s not something to be feared! It’s also not something to be scheduled for that one 2 week period that you get vacation time. There are evenings and week-ends you know! Don’t be afraid of your kids, do stuff!

The moral of the story is, too much of anything is not a good thing.. unless it’s love, of course. Your children can’t spend all their time away just as they can’t spend all of their time with you.

If your child is in school, camps, summer programs and more and you find there is no break, or if you find that your child is not only benefiting less but even regressing to a point… there’s no harm in taking a break and just being a family. They won’t “lose what they’ve learned” nor will they “miss out” on anything they could have learned.

Your child needs that security, that love and that comfort that only you can provide. Don’t deprive them of that in your search to get them “back to normal.”

Today’s been quite the day for revelations for me… it happens rather often when you become a parent of a child with Autism, learning new stuff all along the way. It happened when I saw the Temple Grandin movie and it happened again today when I watched not one, but 2 videos.

These two videos are rather similar yet depict 2 different people… both of them, women with Autism that are unable to speak. They’re not 4 or 5 either, one is an adult and the other is a teen. They both display the normal severe Autistic traits such as arm flapping, screaming, fits of rage, repetitive motions and so forth and both of them are truly brilliant.

Both of these women found their ‘voices’ when they discovered computer programs that would speak for them when they typed and they typed real thoughts, real feelings, real expressions and do so remarkably well… better than most people I know in fact.

What you will see is an example of what you and I perceive, their Autistic traits and then, if you have the patience to continue watching the videos, you will then see them explain exactly what you were actually seeing.. what was happening in their mind, what was happening to make them do what they do.

And hopefully, like myself, you’ll have a revelation… you see, like most everyone else, I thought that severe Autistics were “trapped in their own world” or unable to cope…  mostly, unable to communicate.

But having seen these videos, I don’t think those things anymore. Well, watch the videos and hopefully you’ll see what I mean.

Carly’s Voice

In My Language

I would love to hear from you, how did these affect you? Has this changed your perspective? Does it give you (more) hope that there’s brilliance “trapped” inside someone you love with Autism?

It’s a bit of a long title but it gets the point across. When you have a child with Autism, you quickly find that certain diets will or won’t work, you quickly learn that having a stable routine is essential to not just getting things accomplished but for the sanity of your child and yourself. These things work best when you not only impose them on your newly diagnosed child but also when you work them into your own life and that of your whole family.

When you have a child with Autism, or any real disorder/disease/disability, you quickly find that your life changes so much more than what your family and friends teased you about when they bugged you about getting little sleep or dirty diapers. Your life quickly becomes a juggling act of research, cooking, time management, doctor, advocate, psychiatrist and so much more. You look back and think to yourself how all those family and friends really had no idea how good they had it!

If you’re a single parent having to deal with Autism, I truly feel for you because from where I sit, I don’t even know how it would be possible to manage it… so kudos to you for doing it!

My wife and I tag team it, that is to say that she does 90% and I do 10%… maybe I’m a bit unfair in being modest but it’s not far off, but even if 10% is all I could contribute, I know it’s an important 10%.

This is a short glimpse of how it is in my house, perhaps some of you can relate, perhaps some of you are looking forward to something similar, perhaps some of you are just interested.

If the day were to start at midnight, then I’d be the one on call, getting up with Cameron when he can’t sleep, or has nightmares or gets thirsty. Why does he get thirsty over night? Well, because he doesn’t eat… we’ll get to that later in the day though.

Then I get up at 5am on school days or 6am in the summer (because we let him stay up later in the summer) and handle the mornings with him. This means either scrambled eggs or bananas with peanut butter for breakfast, more soy milk to drink and we sit on the couch watching a movie while we struggle to wake up. We play and watch stuff and do stuff until 9am when my wife Natalie gets up and takes over.

See, Natalie has Fibromyalgia which means that she needs 2 things to function, sleep and exercise. So I handle the nights and mornings… and the fact that I work from home means that she can sleep until I start work since I have no commute or anything. However, this means I generally get no breaks between waking up early, doing stuff all morning and starting work.

So I work while Natalie deals with both boys all day, all the while cleaning, cooking, educating them when she can, taking them to the park or even shopping and more importantly, to Cameron’s therapy appointments.

You see, she doesn’t even drop off the boys anywhere, especially Cameron. She stays with him to ensure that the ‘experts’ don’t do anything that might cause our son to regress (because even they don’t know the cans and can’ts for all Autistic children until they get to know them) and she also soaks in all they teach, learning it all and bringing home reading material when ever she can.

Meals generally consist of what ever Cameron can eat which means rice, eggs, brown rice pasta, bananas, corn and peas… beyond that, there’s not too much. So we’ll usually be eating something that fits that. This means that we may have some meat and things extra that he doesn’t have but generally his diet dictates our diet.

Come supper time, I’m done work and we all sit down for a family dinner which is to say, 3 of us sit there while Cameron runs around the house playing and coming back for bites from time to time. If he’s overwhelmed or had a rough day, chances are he won’t even eat at all, much less come back for bites. If it’s not something he wants, he simply won’t eat. Again, our meal generally fits his diet. When all is done, either we play together for a bit or we all go to the beach where Natalie goes for a run around the lake and I take the boys swimming. Again, exercise is important for her and swimming is very beneficial for Cameron… and just plain fun for both boys.

From there we return home and I give the boys a bath… another downside to my wife’s Fibromyalgia is that she can’t be hunched over the tub or wrestling with wet boys all that well.

We enjoy another movie or tv program, some quiet time and then I put the boys to bed where I read them a story, get them a drink and tuck them in.

Then I go back to either watch a movie with Natalie for some much needed quiet time or, as most often happens, I sit down to do even more work. You see, the therapies and gluten free foods and trips to the city for things like test and such, they leave us living paycheck to paycheck, or worse in many cases… which means that I need to work that much more.

Also, my wife has even started working a little as well, doing some evenings and part time work here at home as well.

We’re both extremely lucky that we can work from home, because commute times would kill us, doing things separately/individually would kill us…. we wouldn’t be able to cope quite as well anyway.

Then around 11 or midnight, I’m back to bed to start it all over again. No days off, no day cares, no babysitters, no rests or breaks. It’s the routine, it’s the diet, it’s the life.

I kind of skimmed over my wife, Natalie’s, part but truly it is the 90% to my 10%…. she takes him to all of his appointments, she deals with all of his meltdowns through out the day, all his fighting with his little brother, does all the meal preparations which often includes 3 different types of meals from mushy processed slop for Cameron (to mix up and hide things such as meats in his meals) to solid pieces for my toddler who likes to use his fingers and then a ‘normal’ meal for she and I. She learns all of the methods and processes for treatments and also learns of the products and toys and devices which aid in helping him write, deal with his senses and so forth… she handles them out and about doing groceries and walks and such…

Every little thing you could do that sounds like a chore when you have a child becomes a very real challenging task when you add in Autism.

You can’t deny the complexity and you can’t deny the struggles that all of us feel every single day. But if you don’t adapt and learn when to make your child’s life a part of yours and to sacrifice and make your life a part of your child’s, then it can be down right impossible.

It’s even more difficult to explain it to friends and family around you who think you’re strange or even down right mean that you don’t take your child to a county fair, or late movie when they want you to just up and join them… if it doesn’t fit the routine, if it doesn’t fit their sensory and social needs, if there is no food for them to eat….  you simply can’t do it. And while they may never understand, you stay home and you keep your kids home… even when they are judging you for it.

Because as much as having a child can be a life changing experience…  their life is now your life.

First, I’m not a doctor nor an expert, so if you want a detailed technical explanation, I suggest you talk to the doctors that diagnosed you or your children. However, if you would like my take on it and details as to what my son does and why, then please feel free to read on.

A recent discussion on Twitter about visual stimming really got a lot of people thinking and some people asked what it is. It’s a bit of a vague question for many reasons, for example, some people have witnessed it but don’t know why it happens, some people have never witnessed it and some people have witnessed it yet didn’t even realize that what they saw was actual stimming.

While there is no concrete definitive answer just like how there are no two people with Autism exactly the same, it can be broken down into a few distinct categories. And much like a newborn baby’s cries, it’s up to you to distinguish what each stimming event means.

In most cases, stimming comes as a form of meditation for the person, a way to narrow their focus down onto one thing so as to remove themselves from an overwhelming situation. In Cameron’s case, sometimes he has a friend come over to play and finds that every hour or so, he needs to remove himself to the kitchen where he’ll pass two toys back and forth in front of his face over and over and over again for a good 10 to 20 minutes. This eases his mind, allows him to wash away the anxiety and stress of being overwhelmed and then go back to join his friend and play some more.

Another example of this is in Temple Grandin’s movie where she invents a squeeze machine which holds her as tight as she wishes to be held and it calms her, focuses her and even prepares her for what she knows will be an overwhelming day.

Some people fear this stimming, they wish their child wouldn’t do it and so they try to make their child stop or they look for a cure. In these cases, I think the stimming is a cure (at least in the Autistic’s mind) to an overwhelming world. It’s their escape and so taking that away from them could be rather disastrous.

Some people believe that what a child with Autism might be seeing or tasting or hearing could be an after effect of the food they eat. Sounds strange but the premise of the GFCF diet is that the proteins affect the brain much like a powerful drug, which in turn makes it so that when they see an object pass before their eyes, it looks as if it’s leaving trails behind it. Or sounds echo more than before, or touching something can be almost painful. Most of us haven’t done heavy drugs like that but I’m sure we’ve all heard stories or seen enough movies to imagine what it could be like. If those gluten or casein proteins truly do react like that then it’s easy to see how and why an Autistic child would stand there waving their hands back and forth in front of their face for an hour.

In some cases stimming is sometimes not stimming at all! For some children, they may have visual impairments that no one but trained experts would recognize and the issues that it gives these children end up looking to us like stimming. If one eye is out of alignment, if the vision is clear but causes things to be jumbled, if the vision to brain link is not 100% causing the child to be unable to track a moving object without moving their head…. these things can result in a child doing repetitive motions over and over again trying to self correct a problem they don’t even realize they have and to us, and even most doctors, it would simply look like an Autism symptom. In these cases, a visit to the proper doctor that can recognize and treat these things could be all that’s required for a full recovery! Shocking, I know.

Take schizophrenia for example, where a child is imagining things as if they’re real, where they’re hearing voices talking to them as if they’re real… these children may do what the voices ask, they may refuse and end up hitting themselves trying to make the voices stop… again, results of what they don’t understand end up being diagnosed as Autism to us. If there is enough going on in the child’s mind, they may not even notice the real world… which may come across as ignoring, or violent, or again… stimming.

This brings us to the ‘violent’ stimming, which is often seen as children banging their head against the wall or hitting themselves in the head… but can sometimes be something more simple such as bouncing on their beds, hitting a toy over and over or even, as mentioned, a strong comforting hug from a blanket or device (almost never from a person). Most people think of it as a psychotic crazy thing, one of those things you only ever see in horror/thriller movies where the kid will eventually start ripping animals apart and family members go missing… but the truth of the matter is, this is just stimming.

There’s a lot of debate over this, whether it’s frustration of being locked in their own little world, or if it’s their need to simply feel something. It could even be that on their level of sensory input, it has the same effect as a visual stimmer having an object pass before their eyes repeatedly.

These are the more extreme cases that tend to come from internal factors such as Autism, sensory issues or other things like that but you have to realize that there doesn’t have to be something like that under the surface for stimming to occur. Have you ever chewed your pen or pencil? How about your nails? Ever tapped your fingers on a table or bounced your knee up and down? Ever rocked back and forth in a rocking chair? Yeah, you know where I’m going with this. These are all forms of stimming that you and I do every day and as you know, half the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Cameron, luckily, is a visual stimmer mostly, in fact I have even an article written on his “thai chi” but he also does like the “banging” stimulation where he needs a heavy comforter to sleep, and likes to have his mattress on the floor… with him under it.

I think it’s really important that doctors figure out the differences and the causes. I don’t care if there are 1000 different causes, they need to be determined and a solution needs to be found where we, the parents, can differentiate between them.

Quite frankly, I’m happy that my child takes a 20 minute breather from social play to ease his mind. If that’s what it takes for him to be happy, have fun and have friends, then by all means, take your time! But if my child is hitting his little brother because it’s a voice in his head telling him to do it instead of just an Autistic need to fulfil a sensory input… I would kinda like to know!

The big deal about this is that doctors can only help us so much, and that’s usually after we, the parents, are able to break through the shell and figure things out ourselves. No one will ever know if a child hears voices unless we are able to get our child to respond to us and not just respond, but actually vocalize the issues.

And this is why stimming is still such a mystery. It comes in so many forms, most don’t even know they’re doing it and the reasons change with the seasons.

I realize that sometimes it’s simply difficult for some children to get a grasp of, but in Cameron’s (my son) case, he doesn’t get it in the slightest. For example, he never knows what to call each meal that he has… he knows that it is breakfast, lunch, or supper… but he has no idea which it is.  I know that it’s entirely possible that we’re simply not teaching it to him in a way that’ll sink in but for comparison’s sake, my 2 year old has a better grasp of it already.

After talking to his therapist about it, she confirmed that many people with Autism (especially children) have no concept of time… it’s just something that is beyond their realm of understanding. For my son, everything is either happening, or it happened yesterday or it will just be “soon”. There is no specific date or time it happened, just “yesterday” or “soon.”

We’ve shown him calendars, we’ve shown him digital clocks… but nothing will get through to him. He’s been out of school for a month now and yet he still tells us about each of his classmate’s birthdays as if they happened yesterday. In fact, he says “yesterday, it was my friends birthday!”

In contrast though, funny enough, he is fascinated with months… he asks us “is it July now?” despite having no concept of what day or how many days has gone by. He asks purely for the sake of his curiosity, not because he understands that one month is different from another.

I’ve done a lot of reading up on Autism since my son’s diagnosis but I have to say that I’ve yet to see any articles or studies on an Autistic’s understanding on the concepts of time.  Is the therapist right? Will it be years before my son is able to get the basics on time? Will he ever?

What are your experiences with Autism and the concept of time?

As a father, I get a lot of moms asking me about denial when it comes to their child with Autism. It’s because most of the time, if a person is going to be in denial over their child’s diagnosis, it will be the father. Now, this isn’t 100% of the time obviously, but generally speaking, men do not want to hear that their child “is retarded”… I know, that’s harsh but that truly is what goes through their mind when they hear the diagnosis.

It’s amazing that we’ve come such a long way from our barbarian ancestors and yet many of us still can’t accept that there may be flaws in our offspring… that they aren’t perfect.

It’s not as crazy as them wanting to cast them off a cliff for being imperfect, it’s just that they don’t want to admit that their child has a disorder, they just keep telling themselves that their child is just taking longer to develop.. they’re just struggling… they’re just not ready… they’re fine.

Now, I can’t emphasize this enough so I’m going to repeat it several times… the worst thing you can do for your child is nothing! If your child has Autism, doing nothing means putting off their road to recovery. If your child does not have Autism, what harm did it have in helping them learn to talk or walk or socialize?? What harm is there in finding out more information??

For each and every single day that you put off a doctor’s visit, a therapy session, a chance to read up on some material or a chance to talk to an expert, you are putting off your child’s entire future… and you’re not just putting off their future by a day, you may be putting it off completely.

That one day of extra work could have made the difference between a communicative adult with Autism in the world and a communicative adult with Autism still living with you at home. Think that’s extreme? It is. And it’s the grim reality of it… every single day, every single moment… makes a difference.

It’s true that early diagnosis is key to treating Autism, but it’s just the key. You have to use that key, open the door and go through it and until you do, the diagnosis was for nothing.

Being in denial about it, refusing to believe, refusing to accept… you’re shutting the door on your child and on your child’s future and for what?? You’re pride? Will you feel good about it in 30 years when your child still doesn’t talk? hmm… that sounds extreme too, but again, it’s the grim reality of it.  It’s the risk you take when you say no. It’s the risk you take on behalf of your child when you do nothing because again, the worst thing you can do for your child is nothing.

In fact, most often times when a father (or either parent) is faced with an Autism diagnosis that they are denial with, they actually spend even less time with their child than they would have if they hadn’t gotten the diagnosis when in reality they need more attention. They need your help, your love, your guidance. And if you are not there to give it, you haven’t helped, you’ve condemned.

I’m not here to make you feel guilty if you refuse to believe your child isn’t perfect, I’m here to help protect you from the guilt you’ll feel later when you finally do realize that if only you had acted sooner… your child would have been so much better off. You can’t go back, you can’t erase the guilt.

All you had to do was act. All you had to do was be there. The worst thing you could have done was nothing.

When most people think about Autism, they think of a child that has social problems, probably can’t speak and is possibly even violent. Many forget that it usually affects a child’s motor skills as well, especially when exerting themselves by doing things such as running or in this case, riding a bike.

If you’ve ever watched a child with Autism run, you can see it quite clearly by the complete lack of control of their arms, their body being off balance and their legs kind of kicking out to the sides just as much as moving forward.  It kind of looks like a 1 year old just learning how to run for the first time.

Riding a bicycle is a tricky thing to learn for most children as pushing the peddles forward in a circular motion, one foot at a time, is a lot to process for even the most gifted children but when you lack fine motor and muscle control, it can be near impossible.

In fact, I know some people who’s children are over 10 and have yet to be able to master it. It’s not from a lack of trying, it’s just not in them yet to be able to coordinate all of the body parts at once that it requires to get the bicycle moving.

In my case, I had another issue on top of all of that and that is Cameron’s size. You see, he was the size of an average 5 year old when he was 2. This meant that he was immediately too large to learn how to peddle a tricycle. He never had that first learning step because his legs were too long before he ever had the chance.

We got him a 2 wheeler with training wheels shortly after, so that he’d have a better chance at peddling something with his size but again, he was never able to get the concept.

This is where patience came in, and lots of it… over the span of 2 years.

Cameron got pretty frustrated a lot of the time, not wanting to try after failing at it for a few days… sometimes I even had to fight with him to get him outside to try. But we just kept at it a little here, a little there…

Now Cameron is just 1 week shy of turning 5 years old and after a lot of trying and trying and trying… he can ride! Granted, he puts his feet on the front tire to stop and he doesn’t turn yet… but he has the basics down and for me, that’s the biggest hurdle.

Keep in mind that he’s now the just about 5 and is the average size of an 8 year old… he looks pretty big on his bicycle now, but he can ride it and that’s the important part!

If you’ve ever wanted a challenge in your life, try bringing an Autistic child out for dinner some time. I’m not saying that it’s so difficult that we’ll never do it again, because we do still go out from time to time… but it can be a bigger challenge than you might imagine.

First of all, you have the sensory issues to deal with… restaurants can have a lot of noises going on, especially if busy, they don’t have the best lighting most of the time, smells all around you and then… there’s the food. 99% of everything I find on every menu… my son simply will not eat. It’s not a matter of whether or not he can, he just won’t. Taste and texture issues prevent him from eating any meats (including fish and chicken), most veggies, most fruits and so on.

Now that we have 99% of all foods excluded from his diet, let’s talk about… his diet. My son is on a gluten free diet because when he eats it… he becomes a monster for the next 3 days. That sounds harsh but quite literally, eating some gluten will result in him becoming totally violent, completely uncoordinated, very difficult to communicate with and completely unwilling to listen or do what we ask of him. So, the few things that he would be willing to eat at the restaurant such as pasta or a grilled cheese sandwich are completely off limits. There’s no way we’ll put him through it or go through it ourselves.

Finally, there’s the tantrums… all of the sensory issues and food issues put together on top of a general uneasy/uncomfortable feeling that comes with being Autistic in public can add up to a complete and total meltdown right there in front of everyone. We’ve been there and had the glares from the people around us as we try to reel in our child back to a volume that’s a little less disruptive.

Then there are the hidden secrets, which is what we’ve been learning to deal with… recently we took my son out to a chinese all you can eat buffet where we figured that they would have at least something that he could eat, maybe rice?

Well, it turns out that they didn’t even have white rice, it all was fried rice… and all of it, fried in soya sauce. Well, as it turns out, half of the soya sauces out there are made with the primary ingredient being wheat, which is gluten. Some are not but many are. So giving him rice becomes a crap shoot… who knows what the outcome will be.

And sure enough, there was nothing else that he would or could eat. He ended up having watermelon, jello and ice cream for dinner. Even the ice cream is not really recommended as ‘casein’ is often included in the ‘gluten free/casein free diet’. But he has less of a reaction to it and a small scoop of ice cream wouldn’t affect him to any noticeable degree.

Imagine, your child is forced to have dessert for dinner because he/she can’t eat anything on the menu in a place where he’s too loud and prone to having a temper tantrum at any moment. Sound like a nice quiet dinner out with the family?

That’s what it’s like when your child has Autism.

I’m not going to offer up solutions for those of you that are looking for ways to make those dinners go more smoothly because I’m neither a professional nor do I think that any of my solutions will be solutions that will work for you… all children are different as are parenting styles.

What I will tell you is that you’re not alone. I will tell you that simply not going out is not much of a solution at all but understandable if you go that route. But I think that the only way a child will be a normal part of society is to get out there and be a normal part of society.  Like with all things, practice makes perfect… your child will get better as will your ability to handle those situations.

We took Cameron to get his hair cut yesterday, his 5th birthday is coming up in less than 2 weeks so we want him to look his best. Now, if you have little ones with Autism, you know just how much of a huge shock to the sensory system a hair cut can be to them. It has never gone well* but has been getting better with each hair cut so we knew it was just a matter of time before he finally became accustomed to it.

This time, we took him to the local Walmart for his hair cut. It’s not our first choice for a good hair cut but this time, there was a very good reason for picking it. You see, we went in, and went straight for the toy section where Cameron and his little brother found a lot of things they’d love to walk back out of the store with.

We told them both, and made it very very clear, that if they did well for their hair cuts, we would come back and they could pick something. Now, don’t think I’m crazy here, they had a limit of about $10 each so nothing too extravagant.

Anyway, Tyler found some bouncy balls and Cameron found Mario toys and Toy Story toys. He couldn’t decide which he wanted but he knew he wanted them.

So we returned to get his hair cut where he was very nervous, very shy and very anxious. We continued to assure him that it would be just fine and that he had toys waiting for him if he did well.

To our complete amazement, not only did he do well… he did exceptionally!! He put his head down, he didn’t squirm when the lady held his head, he didn’t shake his feet or hands when he was uncomfortable… he was perfect!!  Well, next to perfect because you could see the obvious discomfort/uneasy feeling by the expressions on his face, it truly was bothering him.. but other than that look in his eye, you’d never have known.

He’s almost 5, which is to say, he’s still only 4… and to be able to deal with such a massive overload of the senses and an obviously very uncomfortable situation… let’s just say that I couldn’t be prouder. It takes a pretty big person to be able to do that at any age, much less 4!

As a reward, he got his Buzz and Woody, we also got him a Mario tshirt and an ice cream sunday… he earned it. Although he doesn’t get the tshirt until his birthday.

Anyway, bribery isn’t exactly endorsed by ‘the experts’, but it got him toilet trained and now it’s getting him through hair cuts. These are exceptionally difficult things to do for children with Autism. It’s hard enough for children that don’t have Autism! So like I’ve said a million times before… do what you know will work for your child, not what an expert says you should do.  I know Cameron won’t become dependant on rewards, he never needs them the second time. I know his next hair cut will go just as well despite not being promised a toy.

But that’s because I now my son better than the experts do.

The moral of the story? My boy is all cute and has new toys so he’s happy too and therefore… I’m happy too! We all win!

*** Why does a hair cut never go well for a child with Autism? Well, you have to imagine just how many senses are at play that you and I probably don’t even notice. First, Autistics don’t like to be held, hugs are definitely out of the question, so when the barber puts their hand on your head and holds you down or starts moving you around… you might as well be torturing the poor child. Then you have scissors rubbing across your skull over and over again, especially weird around the ears…. they’re very sensitive for even me. Next you have all that hair on your neck, it’s itchy enough as it is but when you’re extremely sensitive? You’re feeling it all. And finally, the electric razor… that thing sends chills down the spine of even the most hardened individuals so you can only imagine if you’re extremely sensitive to those sensations… it tickles, it is very loud, it rubs the skin, it…  well, let’s just say that there is so much at play during a hair cut that it can be easily overwhelming for the average child and may as well be war time torture techniques on an Autistic child.