Many parents struggle to find the right balance between acceptance and discipline with their autistic children. But these are in no way mutually exclusive and can actually support each other, as long as we find the right positive and conscious approach to discipline.
Autism for Parents is a series of conversations on aspects of bringing up an autistic child based on attachment parenting, with Guy Shahar and child development specialist, Andrew Shahan. This episode focuses on eating issues.
If you'd like Andrew Shahan to work with your family, please check out his website at - https://www.autismcoaching.org/
Find Out More About Transforming Autism at https://transformingautism.org/
This video also appears on the Heartful Healing channel at heartfulhealing
Find Out More About Heartful Healing at: https://heartfulhealing.co.uk/ and about it's work with autism at https://heartfulhealing.co.uk/autism/
Many parents struggle to find the right balance between acceptance and discipline with their autistic children. But these are in no way mutually exclusive and can actually support each other, as long as we find the right positive and conscious approach to discipline.
Autism for Parents is a series of conversations on aspects of bringing up an autistic child based on attachment parenting, with Guy Shahar and child development specialist, Andrew Shahan. This episode focuses on eating issues.
If you'd like Andrew Shahan to work with your family, please check out his website at - https://www.autismcoaching.org/
Find Out More About Transforming Autism at https://transformingautism.org/
This video also appears on the Heartful Healing channel at heartfulhealing
Find Out More About Heartful Healing at: https://heartfulhealing.co.uk/ and about it's work with autism at https://heartfulhealing.co.uk/autism/
Dealing with every incident in a way that gets the child to behave acceptably is the first priority. We can adapt or add emotional validation, observation, etc if we have that luxury, but it has to go with useful advice about actually correcting the behaviour.
It's like someone is exhausted from working 2 jobs and doesn't have enough money and says in desperation
"oh no, my bank account is empty, how am I going to pay rent?!?"
and some helpful experts say
"oh well we need to get out of the old 'do what's necessary to pay the bills' mindset and instead focus on an attitude of investment and financial responsibility. By putting asside $100 a week into a balance of housing investment and growth funds, we know that in the long term we're more likely to be able to pay the rent!"
It's true in theory but in practice it's useless and lacks understanding and empathy for the person, because financial responsibility involves spending that $100 on the rent and any extra money on investments. You'd either tell them how to pay rent every week AND invest, or you'd admit they're in a pickle and you don't have a useful answer rather than talking to them like they're just not understanding the wisdom of investment.