Why Autistic Children Get Anxious and How to Deal with It

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist. Today we want to talk about why ASD children or people in general get very anxious. They are not tolerable to new things and so on and how to deal with it. All right? So I've said it just now. The main reason why ASD children or people get stressed out and have tantrums and meltdowns and so on is because intolerance to uncertainty, okay? So anyone will get anxious when things happen. When you're doing something you've never done before, okay? Imagine yourself giving a TED Talk or speaking to a huge crowd, right? This is where you will become very nervous, very anxious, and you don't know what to do. You get jittery and you get. Get very angst, right? So imagine that for autistic people, but it's maybe nearly everything in their life. If a ASD child hasn't been to a mall before, there's loads of light sounds, you know, crowds, people around. And what happens is that it becomes. It's something new, so they cannot deal with it. And when this happens, they get really anxious. They don't know what to do, right? So the tolerance to uncertainty is a lot lower. So anything outside of their routine, they will not. Like, for instance, a student of mine, when she goes to a mall during the pandemic, it looked very dark. It didn't have all the lights on. Um, there were less people. All of the stores were closed down because of the quarantine, the lockdown, and so on. So what happened was that she couldn't take it, didn't like it that the mall had changed so much. She couldn't do it. And every time she went to the mall, she had to park at the same spot. If you're watching it right now, one of my students are watching, you will know that I'm talking about you or the parent, right? They'll know, oh, that's my kid. So, yeah, even the same car park spot, she needs to go there every time. And she will wait there for a long time just to be there. And that's because there's an intolerance to uncertainty. They cannot think about that. It would be that way. It's just that their tolerance for that is a lot lower. Whereas we, we can think we can be a little more flexible. Okay, if I can't park here, I'll park somewhere else. I walk further. Or when we see something new, we get excited instead of getting. Getting scared, okay? That is why most of the time we have to slowly and in a controlled manner to help them deal with anxiety, which is the second point. Right. There is a generalization problem. Okay. Generally speaking, children on the spectrum cannot generalize something or idea or concept that easily. All right? So that's why learning language is difficult in the beginning, because it's a matter of matching different words with their sounds and their meaning and putting it together and also match it to the way that we're supposed to use it. Right. So that matching is actually generalization. So if they can do it in this setting, maybe at home, they talk a lot, but when they go to the classroom or somewhere else outside, when they need to mingle with other children, the environment is so. Creates this anxiety and then first of all increases what we call cognitive load. Right? It's. It makes it harder for them to access the knowledge. Such as when we are in a high pressure environment, we tend to talk not as well as before. So for instance, for me, when I just started talking on the camera, I would all. There's a lot of arms and ahs. I couldn't speak properly. I still can't on the camera, by the way. But this is where, you know, like the stress and the cognitive load gets the better of the child. Right? That's one thing. The other thing is the generalization problem is that they can do it in one place doesn't mean they can do it in somewhere else. And this is really, really, really severe in some of the autistic children. For instance, the same student I always talk about, she doesn't like to go to any toilet other than the brand Toto. Like, if it's something else, like American Standard or something else, she wouldn't, she would just not go to the toilet and just not go there. Okay. Another kid only eat, who would only eat chips in like a bag of potato chips in a certain way. If you, if you open it one way, he's not going to touch it, he's not going to like it, he's not going to eat it. It's like he doesn't even know that's chips anymore. If you open it that way, okay, it's that severe. There's a slight variation. Just changes everything for them. Okay, so how do you deal with that? Like dealing with anxiety? You have to think about this. If a child cannot be flexible, you have to be flexible for them. So this is a very hard task. Don't think that it takes one or two times and what we call flooding by. Oh, I just make him do it. I'LL just throw him in and I'll do it for them, right? A lot of the students that I teach, they have problems with cutting the hair because, number one, someone is holding a scissors or a razor and it's very loud and it's very high pitched, or it's like the razor, like a clipper or whatever you call it. It goes like that, right next to the skin, right? One bad experience, they will be really scared. So they really have bad day. I mean, like people on the spectrum, they have a hard time to generalize a general concept that can be used in different situations. But they have the superpower of generalizing the fear, the feeling of that whenever they. They associate it with a tool. So for instance, one of my kids, they really, really, really do not like. What's that called? Plasters. Actually, there are a few that really hate plasters because it's sticky, it's like, it's really bad. A lot of them do not like that I play with their mouth. It's called tactile defensiveness. They've learned that, oh, whenever someone touches their mouth, they're trying to do something hard, such as speech or making them do like, oral motor tasks, which they do not like, right? So that's the defensiveness that they've learned associated with the object or the event. So, so therefore, a lot of times when parents bring the kids to cut their hair, what they do is they lock them down and get the thing done, right? Just get it done and over with. And what, this makes it even harder the next time to bring them to the barbershop, because the next time, before they even get there, they can sense that you want to bring them to cut the hair. You're already dragging them, you're already holding them down, and so on, right? So therefore, the first step to all of this is to prevent. Do not think that you can make them do something just by force, because by the time your child is like 12 or 13, probably you're the one who's gonna get hurt, you know? So the first step is always preventing. Okay, There's a new student of mine that we've been working on. She'd been working with a therapist all her life, right? But the problem was that there was always things that triggered her tantrum. And how we got rid of it or we're trying to, is to prevent it from happening. So think about how to make the child calm and pair it with good stuff. Whenever they're calm, you should reward them, reward the calm behavior. Do not reward them or give Them or recommend them, or give them like be very reactive to a situation, you know, whenever they become pissed off. And then you go, oh, stop doing that. Like, oh, why stop it. Oh, how about I give you this? And then. And then you do it. Like that works. But you know, it rewards them for being angry. So what should you do? Well, the thing is, you should, whenever they are calm and doing something nicely, you should be already rewarding them. And that's something that, it's an oversight to all of us. And if you have watched the video about like having a good behavior on this channel before, we talk about this little case study from Canada where they give positive tickets to people instead of having them like traffic tickets, you know, when they see someone doing the correct thing, like crossing the lane correctly, crossing the pedestrian crosswalk correctly, they will actually give them coupons. What happens was, was that all the traffic related, what do you call violations, right. Actually decreased by significantly. So if you think about that, if it works with us, it will work with ASD people. So what you do is you should praise and reward whenever the, whenever they come and they're listening and they're compliant. Right? That's number one. Preventing is number one. So other than preventing, what you can do is to do it in a controlled environment, right? And then slowly increase the demand you. You give the kid. So for instance, if the child. I've worked with several kids who are scared of scissors and razors and so on. What we did was that we put him inside of the clinic room and we slowly exposed them to the scissors, right? Got him to touch it, got him to like play with it. Well, it's like a dummy one, not a sharp one. And got him to use it on me. Use it on a doll, use it on mom, use it on dad, just to try out how it feels like. And it's safe. Like, I'll let you use it on me. You can use it on dolls. It's totally fine as long as it's safe, right? We use dummy scissors, you know, like put rubber guards or whatnot. And you need to tell them that it's okay and just push them a little bit outside of their comfort zone every time, right. And then reward them for it. Okay. So maybe they touch it, they slowly come up to the hand and then they go up to the neck. And then finally you can touch the head with the, with scissors on a hair and use this for every type of, every type of thing that you can think. Like any type of thing that your child is scared of. And has anxiety towards. You can use this. All right? But sometimes you will say, hey, what if they are already mad? Well, the thing is, you can help them. You can, you know, like, them getting mad usually is because of a few things. Number one is that it's a. It's a tsunami of emotions. Right. They're already very, very, very unhappy about the situation. And this fear is probably illogical because it doesn't make sense. Right. It's just a past fear or something that they're rigid about that made them like that. So no amount of scolding or telling them what to do will work. So therefore, best choice is to remove them from the situation. Right? Right. Soothe them with a. With a routine that you already know, such as singing a song, counting down, giving them something to watch, you know, giving them, like, something that they usually do, like jump up and down with you like 10 times or something. This sometimes works, but it's not all the time. The. All the work should be done when your child is calm, when they're already angry, Try to find a way to soothe them with something that they like and something that they have a routine with you. So that's pretty much all I want to talk about here. Okay. So at the end of the day, you still need help from especially ABA therapists to look at this behavior and think about the functions and break it down to the lowest level where your child won't fail. We want the child not to fail. All right? And that means we are always trying to give them a structure to work with. If they can tolerate it for this long, they will get rewarded. Right. They have chances for tolerating it. Right. And we always push them a little bit further, further than what they're comfortable with. And therefore, it becomes easy for them to control the emotions because at the end of the day, it's something illogical and something that you can train by slowly exposing them to the. To the thing that is scared and rigid towards. Okay. Okay. So that's all for this video. If you haven't, go to agents of Speech.com checklist for a list of tools and toys that we recommend to parents if you want to start home therapy. Okay. So that's all. I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.