I try very hard to keep prepared & to teach my son this skill. It affects everything, from cleaning up after yourself, to having everything ready to go to get out the door. As we all know, if you don't put away your breakfast dishes, they will be there waiting for you later. "I'll do it later," is the common thought right. Well, then later comes, you have other chores to do, and other commitments to run off to. Later never comes. Next thing you know its tomorrow morning & there's the stinking dishes from yesterday, still sitting there. This is typical action & consequence in real life. Being prepared to get out the door has its own obstacles. I have found that I have to break it down, every day, to the essentials. If I leave it open to guess, stuff gets missed, like lunch. The natural consequence for that is to go hungry and to play on your friends generosity to share their lunches. When there's a lack of friends because of exclusion practices in play, who's going to share their lunch? Then it snowballs into a hungry morning since there's nothing to snack on. Then a hungry grumpy lunch time with nothing to do or eat while everyone eats their lunches. Other kids can sense he's on the brink of not coping, so they tease his last nerve because thats what kids do (and its kinda fun to push him around a bit, power play stuff). Then the afternoon is where the struggle really shines. Being outside on the playground is usually okay, outside is nice, there's other things to think of and do. Class starts again & the hungries set in. This wouldn't bother a regular kid the same way because they would've mootched of their friends lunches. My auspie kid didn't. So now there is learning to do, behaviours to keep in check. Again with other kids zeroing in on this, they quietly but steadily take turns bugging the last nerve. It doesn't take long for a full on Mad to erupt, this ends the learning, the concentration, and the coping that was on thin ice anyway. Off to the school office, where the Mad is out of the classroom, but needs to be vetted somehow. No adult seems to know how to communicate or address the Mad, or defuse it. Enter Yelling, and what looks like Uncooperative arm & arm with Defiant. Or thats what it looks like to any adult that has no knowledge or comprehension of the backstory. See, autism is invisible now. My son has been punished like this multiple times every school year. Despite multiple communications, extra snacks stashed in the backpack, and repeated occurrences, it keeps happening from time to time. Sometimes it happens if he was busy minding the social interactions in play during lunch between his classmates. Sometimes he's way off task & no one was around to check & cue him to get on with it, eat your lunch. The fallout overflows to the school bus ride home, where other kids, even much younger ones, enjoy poking the last shreds of nerves. Then if he's really lucky, he can't communicate it to the bus driver because he's so overwhelmed & fed up, HE gets punished by the bus driver with a disciplinary warning bus note. Next transition is coming home, bang the front door, with Mad & Unpleasant in full power. The cats know to hide. I know that he needs to calm down but there's no way he's gonna snack at this point. On goes happy cartoons, with my direction, "
on the next commercial, go wash your hands & face so you can snack."
This is just one day, that can happen several times a week. I've seen it happen enough to know the whole sequence. I've done the "sleuthing" the "planning" and the "problem solving." It doesn't do any good to hide him from daily interactions or events. Life isn't fair, or easy. If an auspie kid is never made to go through the everyday challenges, how will they ever learn to figure it out themselves? We've had lots & lots of problem days, similar & different to the one described today. Sometimes all the planning & preparedness just goes out the window. Thats life isn't it.
