Do Unto Others – Or in other words, if it would hurt you, it would hurt them

This week-end was a big family week-end, there was a lot going on at all times. To cut right to the chase, my boys were playing with their cousin and while wrestling, Cameron jumped and landed with his butt on his poor cousin’s head… while she was laying down on the floor.

My son is not small. He’s only 5 but he’s about the size of an 8 year old. His cousin is 12.

Suffice to say, it hurt her quite a bit and the playing promptly came to an end.

The boys came to find me and told me that she was crying but didn’t tell me why. We had to track her down and find out what happened.

I don’t think anyone ever questioned it but I could just tell that if anyone else had put much thought into it, it would appear that Cameron had no remorse about it at all, he just went off and played with something else.

But I could tell, because he was in the opposite end of the house on a different floor, playing by himself. You wouldn’t know it just to look at him, but he felt bad about it.

A little while later, when I was alone with him, I tried to talk to him about it. The only way I could think of to get it through to him, which is what I’ve always done with him, is to ask him how he’d feel if it was someone jumping on his head.

It seems that, for the most part, he does not understand nor realize in the slightest just how much his actions will hurt someone else, but he does know what would hurt him.

And so the only way I can make him understand how to be careful or avoid certain things is to think first about how it would feel if it was done to him. Naturally, when playing, there simply is no way for him to stop and think about it like that. He just does what he thinks is fun.

I mean, this is a tricky enough topic for any child to learn but when you have Autism in the mix, there’s just no way for a child to understand how their actions will affect the person they’re doing it too. Especially when it comes to another person’s 5 senses, such as touch. Pain is just too foreign a concept to know how others would experience it.

But like everything, this is a learning experience and he felt really bad about it. So even though he likely doesn’t quite get the whole concept of what happened, he does know what he did wrong.