Skill Aquisition – How Autistics Learn.

First, take note, this isn’t about a method for how autistics learn but more about the differences in the difficulty of learning for both NT and autistic people.

Michelle Dawson recently pointed me to a thread where a discussion was taking place on the nature of ‘learnability’ (is that even a word?). And an NT parent asked Michelle for advice on how to help her child who was self-harming. As part of her incredibly helpful answer she linked to an essay on autistics.org on how autistics aquire (and maintain) skills. Its a truly fascinating piece of writing and an insight on how hard autistics fight to try and conform to how the general public feels they should behave.

Some autistic people…. have to do things like decide to look at something, see a garble of shapes, start differentiating individual shapes, focus in on one of the shapes, figure out that the shape is a Thing, figure out what the Thing is, and figure out what the Thing does. And that’s all just to get to the bare minimum of what NTs do automatically, and it’s leaving out things like differentiating one sense from another and doing this in a non-passive setting.

As Megan’s parents we’re aware of how hard she finds certain things but we also felt, as most NT’s do, that once a skill is learnt it stays learnt. Thats why when Megan forgets to use the toilet sometimes its frustrating for us – but we forget about how difficult it is for Megan to keep up the semblance of normality that even beginnig to make such a decision entails.

Back to Michelle’s post, she says:

Most autistics are very, very patient. We will communicate a basic need ten, twelve times. This may happen over a long span of time, as the basic need we are trying to communicate gets more and more pressing and becomes complicated by more recent difficulties. At some point, we will blow up…….This then becomes the *one* behaviour everyone notices (and also the one behaviour a behaviour analyst will analyze). Then everyone looks for what happened just right before this unacceptable and unexpected (where on earth did that come from??) behaviour. Then they decide what the kid wants, or what he means, according to the one and only behaviour they have noticed. They then work to have the child communicate appropriately what they have decided the child was communicating at the point the child blew up.

We are sometimes guilty of this – you can sometimes see the frustration on Megans face as she tries to let us know what it is she wants and its the singe most helpless feeling in the world to see your child trying to tell you something important to her and you not being able to decipher it. Sometimes we have to end up guessing and its wrong a lot of the time and Megans has a tantrum borne out of pure frustration. Its our biggest wish for Megan that we or her could find a way to each other so we can meet her needs better. She has speech therapy and is beginning to use a pictoral timetable at school and to a lesser extent at home but other than that – its guesswork.

So, thats our holy grail. Its also a large part of the reason why I started listening to autistics in these matters as oppose to ‘experts’.