Why Do Autistic Children Hit People?

Hey guys, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com today we're gonna talk about why do autistic children hit people or just people in general? And when I started as a junior therapist, I would come home with bite marks, scratch marks, and sometimes, you know, pinching marks that, you know, like, it's very hard to avoid if you don't know what you're doing. Alright, so let's talk about, like, the reason why and how to avoid it, prevent it or overcome it, let's say, alright? Basically, it comes down to the child's ability to express themselves. And usually even for autistic adults, when they cannot express themselves correctly, they will go into a fight or flight situation. And I don't know that there aren't really proper documents about this or scientific research per se, but I'm talking from experience, alright? And how I came out of it and how I taught parents to overcome aggression is basically to understand that there are some things that your child cannot express, alright? That's something you cannot avoid, all right? Because anyone who is on the spectrum or like there is some sort of language delay going on, he or she might not understand jokes. He or she might not understand your words 100% correctly, right? That's why. Let me just talk to you about just us neurotypical people, we get into fights just because of cultural differences. And even for like, for instance, me and my wife were from different countries, sometimes we say something that doesn't mean the same thing and it will become verbal aggression as well. It's like, hey, what do you mean by that? What do you want in that situation? Right? And something I've seen in adult autistic people when they don't understand the situation. Whereas it can go both ways. If they don't understand it, they might think that, oh, this is nothing, and they might be bullied or whatever, they don't understand the situation. The other side will also be true when, you know, like a mom asked me a long time ago, she was like, oh, my kid doesn't understand jokes. Every time I say a joke, she gets angry because she takes it literally. So my answer to her is like, why would you joke around with her when you know that she's going to take that literally? That is literally the worst thing to do. So many literals. And I just said, but anyways, unable to express and unable to understand the context fully is something you have to take into account and be okay with at this point in time, alright? And the second thing is rigidity. So there are Some things that autistic people or children have rigidity towards. And what do I mean by rigidity? So things must be placed this way. Things must be put here, they must shower first or they must put on their socks or whatever. These things are ritualistic and it's a hallmark of autism, right? I mean, you and I, we have some things that we prefer, right? I prefer to put my chopsticks, I'm Chinese in a certain way. Some people do it another way. And sometimes speaking about, from my experience is that when they put it that way, I feel like it's stupid, right? Or that's not correct. That's not how we do it. Nicely culturally and practically speaking, right? But autistic people who have a language disorder, what's going to happen is they have certain reasons for doing things in a ritualistic manner, but then they cannot really express to you what, why it's a better way. They just want you to do it, right? They don't like it when you don't do it their way. Okay? And this is a personality issue sometimes. And at the same time, this is something you have to be careful and it takes a lot of guidance and therapy to help them understand that these rituals may or may not be actually justified, right? So take some time, respect these rigidities, don't go against them, don't trigger them necessarily, and then you will see a lot less aggression towards you. So let me give you a small story. So there was a parent who used to eat before the kid. So like for instance, the kid wants to eat together, alright? He's verbal, he's everything. He just wants everyone to eat together at the same time. But then the mother would sometimes start giving food to someone else or she would start eating a little bit and then it would trigger the kid. So what do you do in this situation? Well, follow his rules for now, right? Follow his rigidity. Because if you don't, it ends in verbal aggression, like violence, sometimes slapping and it happens a lot. All these other. There are two more things I want to talk about. So the other thing is stress and the feeling of being threatened. So a lot of times when you see if you have a pet, right? If you have a pet, there will be certain people that come to the house and your pet will become more aggressive, right? So I'm not saying that your child is an animal. What I mean is there's a reptile brain in all of our, of our evolutionary. I don't know what your beliefs are, right? But we share certain brain structures and systems and functions the same as animals. So when that happens, when we feel threatened, we tend to, like as humans, we tend to speak more aggressively, our body language is different. So it happens with autistic people and children as well. So let me tell you another story about how we overcame aggression. So whenever the mother would take the phone away from a child, he would slap her. But when I took it away, he didn't. So what's the difference is that the kid felt the threatened. Like he felt threatened that he wouldn't have the phone back. But for me, he knew that I would give it back to him. It's just a matter of time, how long, and I'm not gonna, I'm gonna let him know a way of getting it back. Right? So there's a difference. Alright? And when you're like, sometimes how we overcome it, for instance, how we did it was basically you would tell the kid, hey, listen, even if the child wasn't 100% not able to understand all the words, right, you can just tell them, tell the kid naturally and say, okay, Steve, or whatever, I'll give this to you after whatever, just five more minutes, okay? And sometimes just having that conversation with the kid will actually like make them feel a lot more safe and therefore not try to attack you. Alright? So the last thing that sums up everything above is your relationship with the kid. So the relationship with the kid is very, very important. So you will see that in my case or if you go to a therapist's place, right, your child would behave very differently with the therapist than with you. Your therapist will have a lot of leeway, have a lot of passes, be able to do certain things, touch them in a certain way, not being naughty or ugly, but like for instance, I'm able to touch someone's head, like or the chin or the nose or whatever, or even the hands sometimes. And that comes down to your relationship with a kid. How many times have you had actually, have actually had a quality time with your kid? Have you been able to play with your child nicely? Have you been able to get them to do certain commands or whatever, like listen to you multi multiple times. And also that you are always rewarding and praising and there's a lot less like making them stress, meaning I'll say this, say that, do this, do that, you better listen to me or else. And then the threat comes and then they feel threatened and then they hit you, and then they hit you. It becomes habit, I would say. And it's a way of them communicating to you. And because they're always high stress, they would much rather just hit you because that's the fastest way to tell you to bugger off, to tell you to go away. So how do you deal with that situation is to increase the quality of play, quality of time, have a lot of rewards and a lot of praises and ignoring when stuff happens and have a compromise with them. Like just I said, are you able to compromise and allow them to do some rigid stuff? Are you going to allow them to stim, to self stimulate? Do you give them a pass when they don't want to talk? Okay. Are you able to teach them right way, the right kind of communication to get what they want instead of drilling them on something that they cannot do? Do they have a good experience with you given that every time they work with you, it's not always a lot of stress? Is it always successful? Are you avoiding a failure? So I'm talking a lot of stuff, right? So these things you have to think about. I cannot really tell you more in this video, but at the same time watch more of our videos inside of YouTube of our YouTube channel. The big philosophy is that you increase no better your relationship with the kid and you can do anything, right? You get the behavior acceptable and you can teach anything. So that's it for this video. If you haven't, Please go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to get a list of tools and toys I recommend you getting when you're starting home therapy. Okay, so I'll see you in the next week. Bye. Bye.