This post will detail Thomas' journey through school only--Later posts will address our reactions/feelings as well as brother's
Thomas was diagnosed with Autism at three years of age, something we had suspected for almost a year as his development had regressed, delayed, or disappeared altogether. His once articulate speech was reduced to screams, screeches or brief loud shouting demands. His potty training, almost complete, now regressed back to diapering; the alternative being soiled underwear as he no longer saw fit to use the commode. It was disheartening and frustrating as Thomas was so bright and talkative. To further complicate things, we were also raising a younger brother who was already mirroring Thomas' behavior.
Thank fully the school district has an early intervention program(ECI) and we were able to get him into a class called PPCD-preschool program for children with disabilities. PPCD was a mixed blessing as it was all new-bus ride to a new but foreign environment-a school classroom with rigid rules in accord with Applied Behavioral Analysis guidelines. Bless those first year teacher and aides for Thomas is a stubborn as they come and in those early months they had their hands full.
The thing about autistic children is they thrive on structure, a regularity throughout the day rivalling any neurotypical human who claims to have OCD. Thomas thrived knowing the rules of the room and how his day would go. That was all he knew though, there was no flexibility to changes. How he learned something or saw something,
that was how it had to be
every subsequent time. So anytime the teacher wanted to make an adjustment to schedules or how they did an activity, it could result in a meltdown as Thomas' couldn't cope with adjusting to the change. A great example was at Thanksgiving celebration in the classroom-parents were present, the schedule was different, and a special meal was to be had in the room with family members. That's a lot of new stuff for him to accommodate. Up to now Thomas had been learning how to transition to activities via a timer; when the timer went, it was time for the next activity no matter what. If Thomas finished 5 minutes early, he would wait for the timer to go off 5 minutes later before starting the next one. So this day the teacher set the timer for how long everyone had to enjoy their meal before we had to clean up and prepare for the bus. Thomas interpreted the timer as the amount of time
before he was allowed to eat and there was no convincing him otherwise, even though the rest of the people in the room were eating. So he waited and waited for the timer to go off and of course had very little time to eat as everyone else was packing up.
There are reasons for this I won't go into depth here, however I will say we later learned from the Son Rise Program that these behaviors were a protective measure, a defense mode for Thomas as he didn't know how to effectively communicate frustration or appropriately adjust to changes. In other words his stagnation was protecting himself from being overwhelmed, rather than allow himself to be overwhelmed by something foreign/new, he would be stuck and oppositional to change.
It is this we will address in depth throughout our program.
