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A Parents Guide to Autism
Please use the link below to download a parents comprehensive guide.
If you’re autistic, your brain functions in a different way compared to if you are non-autistic. This can mean you have a different sensory experience; you process information differently and have different social and communication preferences.
How does autism affect people?
Autism is a hidden or invisible disability. This means you can’t tell if someone is autistic just by looking at them. Sadly this often means there is less understanding and support for autistic people, due to lack of knowledge about autism.
Below are some of the ways autistic people are different to non-autistic people.
Social interaction
Autistic people and neurotypical people often socialise and communicate differently. Neurotypical people rely on lots of unwritten rules to take part in social interactions, which aren’t always obvious to autistic people. Also, some autistic people don’t love informal chatting, while for neurotypical people this is an important part of building a bond at school or work.
Having to decode so many nuanced and illogical rules - as well as the risk of getting it wrong and facing social rejection - can leave autistic people exhausted and stressed.
Empathy
It is often said that autistic people lack empathy, however the research for this shows that what autistic people can find difficult is the ability to read what is going on for someone else intuitively (i.e. without being told explicitly what the other person is feeling).
If they are told what someone is feeling, autistic people wish to do something about it to help the other person at the same rate as non-autistic people. So, it's untrue to say autistic people lack empathy - and it's important to note they care as much as the average neurotypical person.
Among the reasons why autistic people find it hard to intuitively know what is going on for someone else is to do with their difficulties in interpreting what is going on with their own emotions. If you struggle to identify emotions beyond the basic ones, because of a difficulty known as alexythmia, it’s very difficult to interpret what’s going on for someone else. While this may not be intuitive it can be learned - as the number of autistic psychotherapists and psychiatrists attest to.
Sensory differences
Autistic people have a different sensory experience compared with non-autistic people, and certain aspects can be more intense and chaotic (which can make schools and public places stressful) and certain aspects can bring pure joy. Exactly what the sensory differences are – and why they happen- is poorly understood due to a lack of research. But below are a few common areas of difference that we know about.
Auditory processing disorder
Someone with auditory processing disorder will take longer to process conversations. That’s why it’s a good idea to give autistic children and young people extra time to reply, and not prompt for a response (if you do this, you just give new information they will have to process).
This is one reason why autistic adults find phone calls so difficult, as people with this will rely on lip reading or contextual information to increase their real-time understanding – without these things it can get very stressful.
For young people in school it can lead to missing parts of the lesson or a conversation in the playground – auditory processing is also made more difficult in places with lots of background noise that is difficult to tune out. Reducing background noise will help; putting subtitles on the TV does too.
Eye contact
For lots of autistic people eye contact feels too intense, uncomfortable and can be anxiety provoking. This is particularly true when people have been taught to give it, and they are left not knowing how much is “appropriate”. Instinctively their eye contact may be fleeting, because that’s what their body can cope with, but then they may be left worrying that the other person thinks they are odd or rude for giving too little of it. As they may be doing something that isn’t instinctive it becomes another thing to think about in a social interaction. An autistic person may stim more when making eye contact as a way to cope with the anxiety.
Sensory overload
If your child is very moody or irritable for no reason, it’s possible they are overloaded. Being put in overwhelming sensory situations can leave a person stressed and anxious. It’s also exhausting. Sensory overload looks different for different people, but can lead to someone having a meltdown, or less obviously can lead to someone ‘shutting down’ or feeling intensely stressed and not able to feel okay.
As non-autistic people don’t tend to have the same sensory experience it can be assumed an autistic person is being dramatic. It can also lead autistic people to disbelieve their own experience: why do they find the classroom noise so oppressive when lots of other children are clearly fine?
Helping young autistic recognise what is going on for them and giving them the confidence to advocate for their needs is vital.
As parents the best way to approach it is to be curious about a child’s sensory experience, articulate for them what you observe they may be feeling, and not assuming your child’s sensory experience is the same as yours. On a day-to-day level it’s about being flexible. Busy museums may never be the right place for your child, but there are times you can go when it’s quiet (first thing in the morning), or a time the museum reserves its space for SEND kids.
Sensory seeking
A child is described as ‘sensory seeking’ when they like to move around more, fidget lots, or are looking to feel more regulated by, say, hugging others or being squeezed themselves.
Sensory seeking is how it looks from the outside; how it feels on the inside is being very restless and not able to feel calm, with your body screaming at you to move, fidget or jump on a trampoline. Doing exercise or movement may top you up so you’re able to feel regulated, until the effect wears off.
Fidget toys can also help focus or regulate these needs when you must do something else (for example, listen to a teacher).
A sensory-seeking child may be prescribed something known as a ‘sensory diet’ by an occupational therapist: this is a way to give them alerting or calming regulating activities to help them learn or feel OK throughout the day.
Anyone prescribing a sensory diet needs to be careful that the environment is manageable for that child – giving a child a sensory diet to help them cope with a chaotic, noisy environment is not fair as what they need is to not be in that environment, rather than expected to cope better with intervention.
This information is taken from- What is Autism (Ambitious about Autism Website)