How often should I instruct my Child in being “neurotypical”?

How often should I instruct my Child to be “neurotypical”?

Never.

That was a simple instruction, wasn’t it!

Of course you need to warn your Child away from doing dangerous things,
and discipline can be necessary, but these are different circumstances..
If you are undertaking ABA types of therapy, their answer to the above question
you will find, is a little different: “how often to instruct?” = “all the time”.

Instructing people to change what they are doing, is a small “assault” on them.
Whatever they have previously been doing, that action is part of them, it is an
outward expression of their character. The actions they do make sense to them,
because they come from their “personal base”. An instruction challenges that base.
It demands a neural adjustment, to ‘do things differently next time’.
As neuroscience can now tell us, changes in thought actually change
the physical makeups of our brains.
Thus an instruction is an ‘assault’ to compel a change in us.
If you view instructions in this light, you will henceforth be a little more careful
when issuing them, to anyone. Naturally we all need to be flexible enough
to receive a few instructions, but consider this

how many instructions can you receive per day before you are fed up?
If your partner for example instructed you in one day: to change a technique you always use
to cook a meal, to change something about the way you drive your car, to change the way
you described something, “you should have said this” – would more than three instructions
(with three more to come tomorrow) have you objecting, shall we say, ‘strongly’?

Similarly one of the most well-regarded videos made by a more-autistic person
Alex Olenkowicz, (video reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbgUjmeC-4o)
contains a very memorable comment from him at about 7 minutes in :

“If there were a cure for autism (here the video shows the sinister image
of a large syringe with needle) – I would not take it”

Why not? Because taking it would drastically change who he was.
He would be frightened to change his autism because if that part of him was changed,
(you might describe it as “lost”), the result would be like killing that bit of himself,
a partial suicide.

Yet instruction can often be beneficial, it can improve enjoyment of life greatly,
through gaining insight from others’ knowledge and experience.

What then is the solution to this “instruction-conundrum”?

The answer is in the way Instruction is presented.
There is a way for the “Instructee” to welcome the Instruction.
If presented badly there is resistance,
viz: “A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”.

A successful instruction answers a question the receiving person wants to know,
it solves a need, a curiosity that person has. In fact it’s no longer an ‘Instruction’.
It is better described as “offering desirable Information”.
That is why at the beginning of this article I said you should never “Instruct”.

It is also something that educators everywhere should be more aware-of, that if
you first engender in your pupils the desire to find the answer to a problem,
you never need instruct again: the pupils will clamber to know, they will be
grateful for the answers, and they will retain their learning far better.

How do you engender curiosity to know, in a child who is more autistic than most,
who spends more of his.her time in Own World than most of us,
who is more frightened to enter Real World than most of us?

It is done by demonstrating the fun to be had from interacting with others
in the Real World. If the effort your Child has to make to enter the Real World
is less than the fun that he or she will gain when having entered,
then the desire to Enter more, and Interact more, is going to happen,
and it is … SELF-MOTIVATED.
By finding out what the Child likes to do, and doing it with him or her,
it will boost his.her overall enjoyment of the activity, compared to doing it alone.
With this type of training there is no ‘assault from Instruction’ as I described earlier.

There is another aspect to ‘avoiding Instruction’ that I wish to add, and it seems
to be a unique step built into my “Real World Training” that even other forms
of “enlightened training” (meaning ‘non-Instructive training’) seem to ignore:
and that is to first make sure the Child is ready to “receive”.
Even if you know there is an activity your Child loves to do, it will still feel like
an Instruction if you initiate it when he.she is jangled, in Own World.
recovering from some Real World assault, assaults that of course our Children
feel more strongly, and more often, than us.
You must wait for the right time to engage.

Sometimes people ask me why they should listen to what I have to say,
I am not qualified in psychology, not a child-care worker, etc, I am ‘just a parent’.

One of the easiest replies I have to make is “if mainstream autism therapy is still
“Instruction-based” like ABA, I have nothing to beat, whatever such experts
have to “teach me” about autism they have lost credibility from the start,
if that is the kind of training they are going to tell me to do!

I sometimes think the “experts” have been indoctrinated in their learning.
When they began learning about autism, most probably had little or no experience
of autism at that point. Thus they took in the “accepted wisdom”.
By the time they confronted autism themselves, they already saw the condition
through lenses fashioned by those before them, and fitted what they perceived
into such preconceptions. It is easy to subsequently reinforce and “own” such learning,
and see it as the only way.

I greatly respect people like the Son Rise parents Barry and Samahria Kaufman,
who likewise worked it out for themselves, and have greatly improved the lives
of so many parents, carers, and most importantly Children for daring to do
what they thought made so much more sense.

If you have up to this moment in your Autism-understanding taken up the
Instruction viewpoint, firstly I would say “it is understandable you have done so,
it is not your fault, so to speak, because that is ‘all that is out there’ ”
(except in a few less-prominent places you haven’t found – up till now!)
I offer you the alternative to Instruction-based–training with humility:
please consider this alternative, and decide for yourself.

Consider the role of Instructing in brain-washing techniques.
The subject has his or her own perceptions to begin with. Trained brainwashers
progressively chip away at the subject’s firmly-held beliefs, day by day they keep
getting the subject to start doubting those core beliefs, which as described earlier
are really “parts of themselves”.
When you are continually instructing impressionable children, you progressively
remove their sense of self, they are encouraged to doubt all they originally feel
that they want to do. Then, like brainwashers, you fill them up with all the things
you want them to believe, in the case of autistic children, you fill them with
all the behaviours you wish them to exhibit. That is why you may see,
tragically, many slightly-more autistic young adults on YouTube saying
that they feel like they are ‘living a lie’, living another person’s life,
acting a role that they don’t feel…

(Note, I always say “more-autistic” because in my opinion we all display autistic traits
ergo we are all autistic, just less-so than the “more-autistic” among us.
Working from that premise, there is no “us-normal” and “them-different”,
we are all the same, just with a different degree, that can be lessened over time.)

The alternative to Instruction-based training is, as hinted, Self-Motivation- based training.
You become, in effect, a salesperson when you are training your more-autistically-oriented Child
this way, convincing him or her through having fun together, playing Games,
that interaction in the Real World is better than staying in Own World.

Looking back on our previous example, if our partner had motivated us, rather
than instructed us, by demonstrating a new effective technique of cooking
that was easier and produced a tastier meal; or showing us a video of a car-crash
caused by a driving method we used – that could be avoided with a modification
to our technique, or if he.she demonstrated we would receive much better acceptance
by others by tweaking the way we said something,
wouldn’t we be more amenable to listen, to change, to thank and trust our partner
than if simply being instructed?

Motivation-based learning rather than Instruction-based, utilises the principle
outlined some years ago (the age of the Greek philosophers in fact)
“A fool tries to convince me with his reasons. A wise man convinces me with mine.”

A video I made on the subject of Instruction can be viewed here
https://mild-autism.com/mild-autism-parent-power-video/