Behavioral Challenges in Autism

Many parents of children with autism are confused about which behaviors they need to address and which they don't, and become overwhelmed as a result. I am listing the most common behaviors observed in children with autism under two categories - behaviors that need to be addressed and behaviors that don’t need to be addressed.

Behaviors that put the child or others at risk need to be addressed. These include:

Medically challenging behaviors - food refusal, eating non-food items, splashing urine, smearing faeces, self-harming, walking on toes.

Physically challenging behaviors - hitting, biting, scratching, pinching, kicking, pulling hair, head-banging, throwing things.

Handling Challenging Behavior

I strongly believe that behavior is communication. Challenging behavior is a symptom of a problem and not the problem itself, just like fever is a symptom of a problem and not the problem itself. You can control the fever by taking fever-reducing medication. However, to treat the fever, the doctor has to identify and address the root cause of the fever. Similarly, you can control challenging behavior in the short run by superficial methods like reward and punishment, but in order to rectify the behavior in the long run, you must identify the root cause of the behavior and address it.

Handling Sensory Meltdowns

We experience the world through our senses, namely, the sense of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. What happens when these senses don't make sense? They distort the way you experience the world.

Sensory processing issues fall under two categories - hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity. Hypersensitivity causes sensory overload. Imagine experiencing everything much more intensely than you do: imagine the clothes rubbing against your skin feeling like your skin is being scraped by sandpaper, imagine people chatting with each other sounding like they are shouting through loudspeakers, imagine the lights in the room feeling like floodlights blinding your eyes. It would be torture. In fact, such methods ARE used as means of torture around the world.