Ming explains that stimming, or self-stimulation, is something everyone does to regulate mood and seek sensory input, not just autistic people. The real issue is that autistic children often don't recognize which stims are seen as inappropriate in mainstream society, and stimming instead of engaging can hurt their social lives.
Stimming is short for self stimulation and through the years where I'm teaching children on the spectrum I've seen a lot of stimming and a lot of people label stimming as a bad thing but the reality is that we all do it we all seek for some sort of sensory input that calms our mind that helps us regulate our mood and so on right? Main difference between us when we do it and with children is that it's inappropriate. It's not accepted in the mainstream society that hey you're not supposed to tiptoe and walk you're not supposed to bounce about and the problem with children on the spectrum is that they don't understand that they don't understand how people look at them and how people view them and they don't really care and that's actually a good thing to a certain extent right but inappropriate stimming will actually hurt their social lives right? First of all it will reduce their communication because they're too busy stimming.
