Social interaction, leisure skills, and participation in social activities Q: How can I help my child find things that interest him so that he has things he wants to do to spend time and be happy in his future life? A: This is a question that parents of children of all ages should consider – and of course, it will be especially important as the child gets older. Children with autism usually have unusual interests and a narrow range of interests. To help a child or adult find his hobbies, it’s important to introduce him to a wide variety of activities. You will never know what he likes if you don’t let him try it. Swimming, jogging, painting, sitting outside in the park, playing with the dog. Expose your child to a rich variety of activities and encourage him to help him participate in them successfully. He won’t necessarily enjoy all the activities, but he will find the one he likes. Parents often say their children just run around aimlessly all day – that’s why we need to provide opportunities for them to engage in other activities and teach them how to get involved. Q: How can I improve my child’s social interaction skills. How can I be of practical help when my child is having problems with social interaction. A: A very important thing is to practice more. Children with autism can learn social skills through practice. Therefore, we must create more opportunities for them to practice. For example, at home parents can pretend to be a teacher or a child at school and then teach your child how to respond to specific social situations (including positive scenarios when they are invited to a party and negative scenarios when they are bullied by others). Role-playing is great for this kind of practice. If there are other children present who can help you ((cousins/cousins), neighborhood kids are fine), invite them to come along and act. Teach your child directly what to do in those scenarios just described. This method works well for many children, but is probably more effective for children who are slightly higher functioning. They would love to know how to deal with others, but this ability is not innate to them. By role-playing to act out various scenarios, they can learn or improve their social skills. Cognition, Memory Q: Children’s cognition is very poor and it is difficult to teach recognition of pictures. How can I improve my child’s comprehension skills faster? A: There are ways to help children with autism learn. But if you are already trying these methods and your child’s learning is still slow, it doesn’t matter. Children with autism do learn more slowly than other children, and are weaker than other children in their ability to understand things. This is just a characteristic of autism itself. Some ways to help your child improve comprehension are: simple teaching instructions, aids, and reinforcement. If you teach your child to recognize pictures, make sure you let him recognize the objects first (recognize real bananas before teaching him pictures of bananas). Then there is teaching him to match pictures with objects – another way to make him understand that abstract pictures are concrete objects. Once he has completed these basic steps (simple tasks, simple instructions), then use an aid to get him to carry out the instruction: “point to the apple” (apple picture) – the aid can include hand-holding, demonstrating, or placing the picture closer to him ( called range aids). Next, use reinforcement – When teaching a new skill, repeatedly reinforce the correct response, whether he does it independently or with assistance. Using a small cookie, fruit, or anything that the child loves to eat as reinforcement will encourage the child to continue to respond correctly. This will help the child focus, improve comprehension, and make him enjoy the learning process. Q: My child’s biggest problem right now is that he has very poor cognition and can’t teach it for a long time. Memory is very poor. A: If you teach your child for a long time and he still can’t learn, you must consider the problem of your teaching method. Is it too difficult? Is it too demanding? Is there too much external stimulation? When teaching a child new skills (for example, recognizing pictures on cards), always start with the simplest. If you want him to recognize the apple on the card, make sure he knows the real apple first. Also, make sure that you want him to recognize it (“Show me which one is an apple”) or express it (“What is this?”). . In the beginning, do not mix these two skills. Teach your child to recognize the item first, then teach her to express it, and then teach her to recognize that item on the card. Take it one step at a time. The more concrete and real, the better. Go from concrete to abstract. Go from the apple to the apple on the card. Memory problems are related to “repetition” and “review”. When teaching a child something new, be sure to repeat it many times. Even if he says “banana” once, when you ask him “what is it” again tomorrow, he probably won’t know it and won’t learn it as quickly. So, it’s a good idea to repeat new skills or cognitive knowledge for days, outside, inside, in the kitchen, on the stairs, and so on. This is called generalization, which means that he will say the word and do the cognitive item anywhere. Schedules (Schedules); Independence; Visual Cues Q: The child has no goals or plans, and all he knows how to do is go to class, exercise and eat and sleep and play every day, but is lazy and doesn’t seem to know why he lives. Here are two answers for your reference (written by Helen in collaboration with Chi Chaoyang) Answer 1: 1. Children with autism are first and foremost children. And the basic daily life of a child is just that: going to class, exercising, eating, sleeping, and playing. All children learn and develop through these most common activities. Many of the activities that seem to enrich children today: playing the piano, practicing dance, learning English, etc., are actually imposed on them by adults. Children do not need these extra activities to develop healthily and fully. If children can play with their peers, they can develop themselves, learn social skills, and improve their language skills; if they have enough toys to play with (not advanced toys, but water, sand, daily scraps, and ordinary toys), they can learn to understand many basic concepts, learn to use tools, and promote the development of cognitive and perceptual skills . Therefore, these most common activities are sufficient to meet the growth and developmental needs of every child, i.e., the fundamental purpose of his or her life – and this is no exception for children with autism. The child’s “lazy” behavior may be a characteristic of some individuals with autism: developmental dyspraxia. Dyspraxia/Apraxia also translates as “motor planning difficulties,” “motor coordination difficulties,” or “motor difficulties,” which means “Dyspraxia/Apraxia is a condition in which a person is unable to perform purposeful or fine movements in the absence of motor or sensory impairment, and sometimes it means the inability to use part of the limb correctly to perform a habitual movement in conjunction with a whole-body movement. In short, it means that certain movements and actions cannot be performed or are difficult to do. (This manifestation is not the result of a cognitive problem, meaning that the person has the presence of mind but not the ability – he knows exactly what to do, but the motor impairment prevents him from doing it.) Answer 2: Setting up a daily schedule for the child may help with this problem. People with autism often seem to live a passive life, as if they only respond mechanically when a parent or teacher tells them to do something. In reality, however, people with autism have a strong desire to live a well-organized and predictable daily life. Research has shown that using visual aids to prompt daily routines can be extremely beneficial for children and adults with autism – the aids can be in the form of a picture schedule or a corresponding text schedule. Imagine how anxious you might be if you woke up every morning, didn’t know what was going to happen that day, and had to wait for someone else to decide before you knew anything that needed to be done. The same holds true for people with autism. To help your child better understand the daily goals of life and get him better adjusted to daily life, you can prepare pictures for him that represent daily routines and hang them in a place where your child can easily see them. Each morning, review this schedule with your child. For each activity, have your child take down the corresponding picture, set it aside and put it away (in an envelope, box or bag near you), and ask him to point to the next new picture. This way, the child will be mentally prepared to know what to do next. Schedules can help people with autism become more independent and more comfortable with their daily routines.