February 25th, 2019

       I have a student with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), and with a high level of cognitive, normative, and social severity. He attends a regular school, but there are plenty of difficulties regarding his relationship with his peers.

Recently, we organized activities where some students presented their projects about the universe, and others worked on food habits, where they taught us how to eat healthy with tapas. (…) This student with ASD didn’t want to participate nor he wanted his parents to attend. His parents wrote me asking me to help to convince him to attend.

He knew it wasn’t mandatory, but even so, 95% of the students confirmed their assistance. Here, my strategy was, at first, making sure that the only reason he didn’t want to go was the schedule (people with ASD are extremely structured when it comes to their routines, and anything “abnormal” that they can’t control makes them feel bad and anxious). From a more comfortable environment, with a group of kids, I decided to confront him, so it was up to him to come or not, knowing what he was going to miss. By groups we prepared the entire event, and I participated specifically on his group.

I told the other two students that I wanted to talk about the importance of assisting and showing people our projects because we had put so much

time and effort, and it would be “cool” if they could value them. This was easy to be honest because the other students were very “motivated” and creative, and they were glad to do things like these. And as if it were a casual conversation, we started talking, about what we were going to do that evening, the time we would arrive, what we would show to people, we talked about the food the students had prepared, and about healthy food, etc.

The student with ASD just listened, and from time to time he would say: But I’m not coming!

Finally, his friends confronted him, telling him the pros and cons, and they told him that schedules can be changed (they structured the evening visually).

That evening, the student came with his parents, saying that he had changed his mind because schedules can be changed, Sometimes we don’t intervene in other people’s decisions because these are theirs, but we can teach them about which things to reflect on, without imposing or ordering.

(…) And like that, there are strategies and resources that help empowering the young person’s environment, which in return helps the own person. It’s also true that, as adults, we need to know how to select who can or cannot play that role appropriately, since we have to guide them so they can do it.