Mini Training Series: Ep 23 Why You Should Be Teaching Your Students to Say NO

Hi, this is Sasha from The Autism Helper, and in this episode of the mini video training series, we're going to talk about why you should be teaching your students to say no. I know that's probably surprising, right? Why would we want our kids to say no? But actually, the skill of protesting and saying Saying no is a critical life skill. It's so important. If you have kids or nieces and nephews or friends that have kids, you might remember that those little baby toddlers, one of their first words was no, because that's how important the word no is. If we want our kids to become independent adults, they need to advocate for themselves, and saying no can help keep them safe. Safe and healthy and protect them from things that harm them. You and I say no all the time. If someone offers you something you don't want or you don't like, do you just take it? No, we say no thank you, that we don't want it. We don't want to create learners that are just going along with everything because those kids will turn into adults that can get taken advantage of, and that is not something we want for our kids. So if you are a teacher, I want you to really work with your staff on identifying why this is important. If you've created a team mission statement, one of the things you probably put in your team mission statement was that you want your students to be independent. I think that's a really common goal that a lot of teams have for their students. And if you are a parent, that is probably a goal you have for your child, right? You want your child to be as independent as possible and not need you as much as they do now when they're older. So if that's your goal, if that's one of your core values, is creating an adult that is independent at some level, then you have to be teaching the skill of protesting. You have to be teaching our— your child or your student how to say no. And by teaching that, that means that you need to reinforce that behavior sometimes. So when your child does say no, you need to respect that and you need to move away or move on. So how do we teach the skill of saying no? The first step is that we need to teach them that no is okay, and we need to use questions that are truly questions. So what I mean by that is you really want to avoid rhetorical questions. So questions when saying no is really not an option, like, hey Johnny, do you want to come to lunch now? Because it's really not an option to say no to going to lunch, right? But instead use questions like, "Hey, do you want to play this game with me?" And if they say no, respect that. Be like, "Okay, cool." Carry on with what you're doing. "Hey Johnny, do you want an apple with lunch?" And if he says no, "Okay, cool. You don't have to have an apple." So make sure to utilize questions throughout your day where no really is an option, and then when the child says no, that you're respecting that and reinforcing him saying no by Removing whatever you offered. Really incorporate that into your school day. And if you're a teacher, make sure that that's a team endeavor and that you're really teaching your staff that those rhetorical questions aren't important. Because what a rhetorical question is going to do is teach your kids that their no doesn't mean anything. So if you say, "Hey, are you ready to go outside for recess?" and they say no, and you're like, "Well, too bad, it's time for recess." we're teaching our kids that that no isn't valued and doesn't work. And that's not what we wanna teach them. We wanna teach them that their no does work, and we wanna teach them the appropriate time and place to do that, right? With those questions where no is really an option. So after you've taught that skill and your student is readily using no, I wanna highlight that I've used just the phrase no right now. So with our kids with emerging language, we don't wanna immediately jump to a more polite or respectful way of saying no, like no thank you, because that's a 3-word utterance, and for many of our kids, that's challenging. So we wanna keep it simple here. Think back to those little toddlers. Their first phrase isn't no thank you. They're just saying no, or like my toddler, no way. So think about just teaching no. Once you have that successful and your child is readily engaging in multi-word utterances, then you can shape it to something that's more appropriate and polite, like "no thank you." And then with our older kids, we can start to teach times when you really can't say "no," when maybe someone does use that rhetorical question with you, and then start to teach the discrimination of when it's okay to agree if someone kind of encourages you. A situation like that might be a teacher says, "Hey Johnny, do you want to come play a game with me?" and they say, "No, no thank you, I don't want to," and the teacher says, "Well, this game is really cool. I just got it. I think you're really gonna like it." That might be a time where it's safe and okay for a teacher and a trusted adult to encourage you to change your answer from no, but we all know that there are situations where someone putting that type of pressure is really not appropriate for that student, and we want to teach them to stick to their guns and stay with their no answer. So I hope you enjoyed learning about no, and if you've kind of forgotten about it, it's okay. I think we get really stuck in, you know, teaching our children to request things and greet peers and answer and answer questions, but sometimes we forget about teaching this skill of protesting. So I hope you really will encourage your team, or if you're a parent, encourage the other members of your family to respect your child's no and really think about that as a skill you need to teach. So this was an episode of our mini video training series. If you'd like to see more, head over to YouTube, to our YouTube channel, The Autism Helper, or the website theautismhelper.com.