After several years of managing The Autism Education Site I’ve decided to start a Facebook page to complement the blog. I’d love to invite you all to Like The Autism Education Site’s Facebook Page if you have an account.

The page’s wall is open for questions, comments, photos and more. I’m not an autism expert, just a mom that is traveling the same journey that many of you are and I wanted to create a space where we can all share our expertise and support one another. Thank you all for your support over the years.

Thank you,

~ Melissa ~

Pardon me while I step away from my usual topic – autism – and share with you a new hobby of mine. In September I purchased a new camera, my first dSLR, before we took a family vacation to Disneyland. I didn’t realize it at the time but photography would quickly become my new hobby. I not only enjoy learning about cameras, photography and post-camera processing I also find that I enjoy the peacefulness that comes with doing something that I love.

Other parents of children with special needs can relate. It has been more than five years since my daughter’s diagnosis and my journey as the mother of one child with autism morphed into the mother of two with autism. Then there’s my son’s epilepsy diagnosis. Needless to say life can get a bit chaotic and I know that those of you reading this blog can understand that chaos. So I am happy to know that I can find a little calm in all that chaos. It brings me a bit of peace and I hope that others in my shoes find that little bit of something that brings them peace as well.

Thank you for letting me stray off topic for a minute. I promise to get back to my regular posting schedule now that I’ve had some calm time in my life to rejuvenate. In closing, here’s a picture I snapped this weekend. I lucked into it, really, and managed to get five pictures before the bee flew away.

A press release of interest for families of individuals with autism in the Sherman Oaks, California area.

The Help Group & Music for Autism Present a Free Interactive Concert for Individuals With Autism and Their Families on Sunday, January 29

The Help Group & Music for Autism present their fifth interactive concert for individuals with autism and their families. Music for Autism offers professionally performed, enriching musical experiences in an environment where individual differences are celebrated. The one-hour interactive concert includes three segments – “concert time,” “conducting time” and “percussion time” – where concertgoers are invited to join the experience with their movement and provided instruments.

The show at 1 p.m. on Sunday, January 29, will feature Michael Zonshine & Friends. A Southern California native and principal trumpet player with the Honolulu Orchestra, Zonshine has delighted audiences across the country with his artistry. He has given performances and masterclasses for many prestigious organizations including the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, USC and the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

The performance is free and will take place at The Help Group Autism Center Theater, 13164 Burbank Blvd, Sherman Oaks, CA 91401.

Reservations are required and can be made three ways. Email rsvpmusicforautismorg; go to the Concert Calendar section at www.musicforautism.org; or by calling 877-863-7473 ext. 1.

Happy New Year from my family to yours. May you all have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2012!

Taken from “Social Anxiety and Social Skill Competencies”
Michelle Garcia Winner
An article in the Autism Asperger’s Digest (www.autismdigest.com).
You can get a 15% discount on the AADigest or any other products from Future Horizons if you use our discount code: MHO.

My goal was to find a way to help our clients decrease anxiety while increasing their social competencies. The result was a treatment strategy called the Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure.

I developed this approach for high-level teens and young adults who had first developed social competencies and were now ready to explore social anxiety. We discovered this teaching strategy helped motivate them to challenge their anxiety by giving them alternative strategies to use when stressed by specific social situations. An overview of the social concepts we shared with clients, as well as the description of the spirals, follows.

Social anxiety has deep tentacles; once it disrupts our functioning it likes to keep that power in place! Once it inhabits a person, anxiety will not go away without a fight. This means as our students recognize they have increased social competencies, they have to actively work at reducing their anxiety. This involves learned strategies, as well as their own shift in perception in making a choice in the moment: are you going to default to anxiety or use your strategies?

Some of the key social learning–social anxiety reduction strategies we teach our clients include:

1. Take ownership; be personally accountable for what you need to learn.
After many years of working with adolescents, I realized that while I understood they had social learning differences, as long as I prompted them to use their strategies, I was the one taking ownership of their problems. Now I realize that as I teach them these strategies, they have to work at using them, which first means they have to realize these strategies are theirs and not ours (the teachers and parents).

2. Accept that your job is to become more comfortable with social discomfort.
The neurotypical teen and adult world is filled with social discomfort. Using strategies does not mean our clients won’t feel discomfort. Their job is to work at learning how to be comfortable with the fact they will be uncomfortable socially at times! The mentor’s job is to encourage the client to use the treatment strategies even when experiencing discomfort.

3. Recognize and celebrate the small steps of progress being made.
We need to help our students feel intrinsically proud of themselves for their progress. Avoid using token rewards for progress as these provide extrinsic but not intrinsic motivation.

4. Use your inner coach, rather than your self-defeater voice, inside your head.
You and I use an “inner coach” or “private voice” in our heads to encourage and motivate ourselves through difficulties. Our inner coach may say to us: “You can do this!” “Just do it and get it over with!” “Remember last time this wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, so just go do it!”

Unfortunately, many of our students have a “self-defeater” voice in their heads. This voice discourages rather than encourages: “You’re bad at this.” “You’ve never been able to do this, so you won’t be able to do it now.” Individuals who have a loud self-defeater voice in their heads will default to avoiding the uncomfortable task at hand; those with an inner coach have a far better chance of pushing themselves through the uncomfortable task. We need to help our students be realistic about their strengths and challenges while reinforcing their choice to use their inner coach as much as possible.

5. Stop making excuses for avoiding social encounters.
Those with strong self-defeater voices tend to find a lot of benign excuses for avoiding the task at hand. Many of our students don’t recognize that what they are saying is, in fact, an excuse for not pushing themselves through an uncomfortable moment. Instead, they automatically default to their excuses. Our strategy is to explore the personal excuses they make as we assign them tasks that provide opportunities to practice social competencies and use their anxiety-reducing strategies. Once students begin to notice and then take ownership of the fact they are making excuses, they further progress.

6. Your brain always learns; whether it learns positive or negative ways to cope, it is always learning!
We discuss how our brains are always learning, all the time, that anytime we are awake we are learning from our experiences. If we “default” to what we are accustomed to doing, we constantly teach our brains we can only do it the way we have done it before. If students want to teach their brain a new set of skills, they have to try to do things differently. This idea may seem elementary, but it can be difficult for our concrete-thinking, rule-bound students to change the way they do things, especially their thinking patterns. I often ask them a direct question: “Do you want to teach your brain you can’t do something, or do you want to teach your brain you can do something?” Hopefully their answer is a “can-do” response, and we circle back to our other strategies to help them retrain their brain.

The Spirals of Social Success and Social Failure
Visual representations are strong—and welcomed—tools in helping our students understand the interrelationships that exist in social thinking and social processing. To help our students understand the concepts outlined in this article, I developed two graphic representations of the thought processes used in working through social situations. The Spiral of Social Success summarizes these concepts:

• You will encounter some stress approaching this situation. In the past your anxiety would prompt you to bail out of this situation. Instead of starting by doubting yourself, explore what strategies you can use to help yourself deal with the uncomfortable social situation.
• Use your inner coach to remind yourself how much better you will feel once you use your strategies—that you are capable of using these strategies as well as choosing specific strategies to use.
• You feel better about yourself when you are demonstrating your abilities or social competencies.
• This encourages you to use the strategies.
• In doing so, you are training your brain that “you can do it” better than you have done it before!

Conversely, the Spiral of Social Failure illustrates what happens when our clients fail to embrace their social-learning–social-anxiety reducing strategies:

• You encounter the same stressful situation, one you previously avoided.
• Your anxiety prompts you to think of excuses for why you won’t engage in this situation today.
• Your self-defeater voice assures you that you can’t do it and that you have never been able to do it.
• You have negative emotions about your inability to get through this situation.
• You avoid putting yourself in the situation.
• You teach your brain one more time that you cannot do it! Your memory now reflects your inability and your self-defeater voice grows stronger.

Taken from the article “Autism: From Mind Blindness to Context Blindness”
By Peter Vermeulen
Nov/Dec 2011 Autism Asperger’s Digest www.autismdigest.com
Note: You can get a 15% discount on a subscription to the AADigest when you use this discount code; MHO

Remember the scene in the movie, Rainman, where Raymond is trying to cross a street? In Raymond’s mind when the sign displays “Don’t walk,” it means only one thing: “Don’t walk.” We laugh when the sign changes from “Walk” to “Don’t walk” and Raymond stops in the middle of the intersection. Raymond does not understand that “Don’t walk” means many different things, depending on the situation or context. When you’re halfway through the crossing, it means “hurry up” instead!

Here is another example of context blindness: When the doorbell rang, the mother of a seven-year-old boy with autism asked him to open the door. He opened the back door instead of the front. His reaction was logical, but his choice of door was out of context.

Emotion recognition training is immensely popular in the field of autism. Typical materials used in this training are photographs or pictures of facial expressions of emotions.

Although these materials can help children with autism learn about different emotions in a rote manner, they do not reflect emotion recognition as it happens in real life.

First, we rarely see faces out of context in real life. When we try to figure out what a person feels, we look at context as much as we do facial expression: the situation, what that person says, body language, our past experiences with similar situations, etc. In fact we don’t even need a facial expression to recognize emotions. Even without a facial expression you certainly know how the man in the photo at feels, based on the context. Studies on how people process facial expressions have shown that when we look at faces, our brains always spontaneously encode the context and that in certain instances, context plays an even bigger role in emotion recognition than the facial expression.

The second problem with traditional emotion recognition training is the underlying assumption that there is a direct relationship between an emotion and its facial expression. This assumption goes back to Darwin’s idea of universal expression of emotions in which each emotion has its own distinct facial expression. Unfortunately for people with autism, facial expressions are not that straightforward and quite often are ambiguous. Take tears for instance. What do people feel when they have tears on their cheeks? It could mean sadness. But it could also mean happiness or pride. Or it could be an allergic reaction or the result of dicing an onion. How can a brain tell the difference? It uses context.

In recognizing emotions—the same is true for all mental states—the human brain relies on context. When people with autism find it hard to empathize, it is because their brain lacks contextual sensitivity. They are affected by context blindness, rather than mind blindness.

We can teach people with ASD a lot of rules and scripts, but for social understanding and competence to flourish, scripts and rules are insufficient. To effectively teach emotion recognition and social understanding to people with ASD, we must add context to the materials we teach. Even using a term such as “socially appropriate behavior” becomes misleading unless context is specified; behavior that is socially appropriate in one situation might be inappropriate in another context!

Social competence is not about knowing whether a certain behavior is socially appropriate or not, it is the knowledge of when that behavior is appropriate and when it is not.

Research has shown that more able people with ASD know quite a lot of social rules, but they have difficulty adapting these rules to changing contexts or making exceptions to the rules. Most social skill training programs focus on teaching generic social skills (e.g., how to start a conversation). However, having a conversation while waiting in the dentist’s waiting room or visiting someone at the hospital is quite different from the conversation you have hanging out with a group of buddies because the contexts are very different.

Instead of putting our focus on teaching social skills, we should focus on teaching social contexts such as visiting someone at the hospital or hanging out with friends. And then teach all the necessary rules, conversation, and behavior attached to a certain context. When you visit someone who is ill and in the hospital, what kind of present do you take? How long do you stay? What do you talk about? What should you say/not say?

The same logic about context applies to Social Stories™, a powerful tool to help people with autism navigate the social world. Instead of creating stories about certain social skills, we should build them around contexts and introduce sentences that start with if and when. In this manner a story can be adapted to different contexts. For instance, a social story about welcoming guests to your birthday party could contain the following contextual sentences:

• When the person who arrives is a close family member, you kiss them and say “hi.”
• When the person who arrives is not a close family member, you shake hands and say “hi.”

Social competence requires more than social skills; it demands contextual sensitivity— something difficult for people with ASD. Training programs designed to help people with ASD navigate the social world should therefore emphasize social contexts, not just focus on teaching social skills.

Peter Vermeulen, PhD, is a senior lecturer and consultant at Autisme Centraal in Gent, Belgium. He has written 15 books on autism, some of which have been translated into several languages.

Last week I was invited to submit my holiday gift recommendation for the AbilityPath.org 2011 holiday gift guide. The guide is now online and it includes my Amazon Kindle recommendation, check it out: Holiday Gift Guide by Bloggers of Children with Special Needs.

“Are We There Yet?”
Traveling with a Child with Autism
By Pamela Levac
Autism Asperger’s Digest,Nov-Dec 2007 issue (www.autismdigest.com)

Family vacations can be stressful under the best of circumstances. Throw a child or two with autism into the mix, and it can seem overwhelming and perhaps easier to just stay home. But more and more families who have children with autism spectrum disorders are traveling to all kinds of destinations near and far. Though vacationing with a spectrum child requires a good amount of planning, it can be a fun and rewarding experience for the whole family.

Preparation is key when traveling with a child with autism. It is essential to begin planning the vacation long before the actual date of departure. There are many things to consider, from getting the child acclimated to the idea and the destination to choosing appropriate lodging or ensuring your child will have familiar food available.

When making travel and hotel plans, take into account your child’s particular sensory issues. Book rooms on the quiet side of the hotel, arrive at less-crowded hours, or bring along a kit filled with ear plugs, familiar toys, video games, snacks, comfortable clothes or whatever else might be needed to ease the transition.

Talk to your child about the upcoming trip and involve him or her in making plans. Have the family explore the destination beforehand: visit internet sites, get library books, travel brochures, and perhaps even request photos of the hotel room you’ll be staying in. Some parents create story books that describe the vacation from start to finish, including each day’s activities. If you are driving, map out a route for your child to follow, with all the stops (including breaks!) marked along the way. This can ease travel anxieties and make a long trip more palatable to the concrete thinking mind of the spectrum child. Be sure to talk about the vacation frequently to calm worries and rev up excitement, or read your travel story book regularly.

As every parent of a child with ASD knows, routines and predictability are like air and water for a child who doesn’t handle new situations easily. And, travel to unknown destinations can literally starve these kids of the familiarity that is their lifeblood.

Go back to your story book and be sure to emphasize things that will remain the same. We’ll still eat meals together; you’ll have your favorite T-shirt; there will be your beloved cereal for breakfast. If vacation involves a repeat destination year after year, for instance to a family condo, the transition turmoil will get better with time. Peggy, mother of Eric who has autism, says “The first few times you go someplace new, it’s hard. He wants to come home so badly. But each year it gets easier.”

Danielle, the mother of Pierre and William, both with autism, takes her family on an annual car trip to visit relatives at Christmas time. She offers the following advice: “Keep the events as simple as possible. They like to do the same things every year. Create new traditions.”

Airports, planes and trains can be sources of fascination, distress, or both for children with autism. Peggy says, “Eric finds airports and planes to be interesting, but delays, long lines and schedule changes are difficult.” Some delays are unavoidable, but traveling off-peak, bringing along books on tape, hand-held video games or puzzles can help. Scan the area for a quiet space to retreat to when you notice signs of overload. If you can talk to airport personnel ahead of time or bring a copy of your child’s diagnosis, you may be able to sidestep waiting in long lines. If you must wait, one of you can take the child aside to distract her with stories or a snack.

Choosing to travel as a family alone or with other people is also an important consideration. If you do decide to vacation with others, Peggy recommends traveling with people who “get it.” Pair up with friends or relatives who you know can deal with your child’s need for space, regularity, simple routines and familiar food. Also make sure you travel with someone who can handle meltdowns without getting upset or offended. Somewhere, sometime, they will occur.

Danielle strongly believes that spectrum children should not be hidden away. “The world is vast and diverse. Because individuals with autism tend to not want to socialize by nature, I believe it is important to impose the reality of having to accept and deal with the fluctuations of daily life.” Though it may be challenging at times, it is worth getting out there and seeing the world, both for the child with autism and for everyone he meets.

Check back on Thursday for Part Two.

Every November I take a brief break from my autism-themed posts and remind you that November is Epilepsy Awareness Month. Epilepsy is one of the most common comorbidities in individuals on the autism spectrum, including my son. Check out this PSA created for Epilepsy Awareness Month 2011.

Do not withhold the few foods that are acceptable. If you take away that one brand of mac n’ cheese, you’re taking away one of the few sources of nutrition for your child, even if it is a poor one. Pizza can be healthy if you buy or make it with high-quality ingredients.

I start by identifying one food the parent would like to add to a child’s diet, typically a fruit or vegetable. If possible, the child selects the particular fruit or vegetable.

Here’s how we approached a similar situation with a client your daughter’s age. She and her mom identified bananas as a food she would consider eating “when she is older.” For about 10-20 minutes each session, we worked on bananas. Session 1: We made a collage of banana pictures. Real bananas were within sight. Sessions 2-4: she learned to slice bananas and fed them to her mother, in a playful, unpressured interaction. She smelled and felt the banana and observed her mother enjoying it. Sessions 5-8: She touched one banana slice to her lips before either feeding it to her mom or throwing it away. Sessions 9-12: She touched the banana slice with her tongue and threw it away. Sessions 13-14: She nibbled on the banana slice and then spit it onto a napkin. On the 15th session, she swallowed the nibble. Sessions 16-17: She ate one slice of banana. Session 18: She ate half a banana. Now she loves bananas and has selected sweet peas as a vegetable she will eat when she is older.

While you do want to “work on” just one food at a time, don’t give up introducing new foods. When it’s dinner time, go ahead and serve her favorite food but also make other food available on the table. One exception is if your child cannot bear the smell of a food such as brussel sprouts, which may be so nauseating that she will be unable to eat at all. Remember that it may take dozens of introductions before a food becomes familiar enough to try. Here are a few other ideas:

• Combine acceptable foods with new foods. While your sensitive child will immediately detect when you’ve snuck some peas into her mac n’ cheese, you may be able to get her to dip a “tree” (broccoli) in the cheese sauce. Many kids are willing to try new foods if they can dip them into a favorite sauce such as ketchup, tahini, or salad dressing.
• Try introducing a food that is similar to another food the child already eats, such as a different and healthier brand of frozen pizza or chicken nuggets. Remember, you may have to introduce the new food dozens of times. Change accepted foods slightly to present new textures, shapes, and colors. Break crackers into four pieces instead of two, cut bread into a funny shape. Experiment with food temperatures. A child might try frozen blueberries or snow peas for the novelty of it.
• Avoid empty calories. Don’t let your child fill up on high-sugar fruit juice during the day or snack on high-calorie junk foods like chips. Keep treat portions small. Rather than give a full bag of Veggie Booty (which doesn’t count as a vegetable), serve a small bowlful.
• Provide “oral comforts” that help normalize mouth sensation. These nonfood items are safe to suck and chew on and come in a variety of shapes and textures. Some favorites include: Chewy Tubes, Chew-Eaze, Dr. Bloom’s Chewable Jewels, and Kid’s Companion Jewelry. You can find these in most therapy catalogs and on the sensorysmarts.com website under Toys & Equipment/Oral Comforts.

Above all, avoid food battles. Mealtimes are social time, not therapy time. Serve food you know your child will eat when your family sits down for a meal and focus on having a pleasurable family experience.

You may need to work with a feeding specialist (usually an occupational therapist or speech language pathologist) especially if your child has significant oral sensory issues, oral motor weakness, muscle tone problems, or extreme reactions to food. The feeding therapist will evaluate your child’s issues and implement a therapeutic program with a home component. Also investigate supplements such as multivitamins and essential fatty acids to make sure your child is getting the nutrients he or she needs to stay healthy.

Find more on eating difficulties and other sensory challenges in Raising a Sensory Smart Child and at sensorysmarts.com. You may also want to check out these books: Just Take a Bite (by Lori Ernsperger, available in bookstores and online) and Happy Mealtimes with Happy Kids (by Melanie Potock, available at MyMunchBug.com).

Got a question? I’d love to hear from you. Please email questions to Lindseysensorysmartscom.