All kids struggle with waiting, on the spectrum or not. And of all the age groups, toddlers seem to battle the most with it. They have a primal need for instant gratification and are decidedly in deficit when it comes to patience! But normally, a child can be instructed to wait a minute by a parent who is in the middle of doing something, and despite some protestations, mostly, they will. But not my son! Asking him to please wait a moment will kick his adverse behaviours into overdrive! He skips a tantrum and goes straight into meltdown. Often, with aggressions.
While his peers were finding their voices and learning how to use them, Aidan was nonverbal – and still is. That meant that he had to show us whatever objective he wanted to achieve by hand leading us each and every time. I can only imagine that this must’ve been incredibly laborious and frustrating for him. Especially since we couldn’t always fulfil his unspoken request because we didn’t always understand what it was that he particularly wanted our help with – even after following him to a particular location. The possibilities are endless when you have a sensory seeking toddler who is very specific in his wishes and desires, and you’re scanning the room for clues, guessing in the dark. Of course, knowing his personality and learning to read the signs helps a great deal, but we often feel pressure to work things out as quickly as possible, because Aidan becomes dysregulated so quickly. It is understandably important to him that we understand what he needs. It’s a very basic validation for any human being.
Life being life, and people being busy, it’s not always convenient to drop everything to follow Aidan somewhere. And, more often than not, Aidan will walk straight past his dad to come and get me for a specific task. This means that I have to give almost all of my time and energy to my child, and it makes getting anything else done, or finding time for myself, incredibly difficult. When Aidan was little and obsessed with educational songs and games, I could sometimes divert his attention to a device, giving me precious minutes to complete a chore. Now that he’s older and less occupied with devices, it’s become much harder to redirect him to buy time. After a whole weekend of hand leading, Aidan is often left feeling frustrated, and I am left feeling touched out. A fellow autism mom often refers to “belonging” to her child and that’s the most apt way to describe it. My son doesn’t only need me for love, comfort, and care. He also uses my body as a tool to access things he wants or needs. We are almost always on the move, walking hand in hand around the house together! It’s very sweet to be sure, but not sustainable. So, we are now working diligently on waiting and on developing his communication skills in his ABA therapy.
Like so many basic skills, learning how to wait must be taught to an autistic child from the ground up. It doesn’t come naturally, and it won’t be learned through imitation of peers or adults. It’s a skill that’s built up slowly and systematically. It also takes a lot of repeated practice and reinforcement to take. We’ve been doing months of learning how to wait in different environments and under differing circumstances, and Aidan is still only marginally improving in this area. His impatience is something that is clearly hardwired into him, so we are taking it moment to moment, and day by day.
The thing that further complicates things, is that once an autistic child learns a particular skill in therapy, they then have to learn to generalise it to different people, and varying environments. Aidan’s overall compliance with his therapist is excellent. His compliance with us, is definitely not as good. The only way to generalise a skill that requires prompts, timers, and compliance to parents, is to reinforce it in the parent training we do with Aidan’s therapist. At the moment, I am doing one-to-two waiting exercises with Aidan every day. Each waiting period is short and easy for him to tolerate, with a view to extending it bit by bit. I think we began with 30 seconds, and we’ve moved up to about 2 minutes, incrementally. It sounds pretty hard going, and it is. But the work we are doing now, will enable Aidan to have the patience to wait for me to finish what I’m doing before attending to him, and that will be far less frustrating for us both in the long run!
Ultimately, Aidan’s early intervention therapies focus on decreasing Aidan’s general anxiety, providing him with the inner resources to tolerate things he doesn’t like, and equipping him to be somewhat independent of mum and dad. Helping him to understand and respond to social dynamics such as waiting for another person to finish what they’re saying or doing, is critical to Aidan’s ability to function within social groups, family dynamics, school settings, and the workplace. That’s why it’s such a focal point for all his therapists. Hopefully, by year-end, I will be able to give you an update on how Aidan is coming along with waiting in therapy! And I’m hoping further still, that waiting will no longer be the trigger for him that it is right now.
