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Adult behaviours that help the autistic child’s development: Strategies, principles and games


What’s our direction? Where do we want to take the child?

  • The human mind is designed to solve our problems through thinking.
  • It produces thoughts (pictures, ideas, fantasies, wants, fears...) all the time.
  • In order for thinking to be possible, these thoughts need to be dealt with, stored and processed by an ‘apparatus for thinking’.

Adult behaviours that help the autistic child’s development or How can we help the autistic child to develop an ‘apparatus for thinking’? by

  • reclaiming him into human interaction through face-to-face play
  • keeping him ‘live company’
  • helping him to use his mind and to remember through shared attention
  • ‘tugging on his mind’ and ‘lending him your mind’
  • helping him to notice and be interesed by ‘making it bigger’
  • and to stretch his non-autistic potential: ‘be a traffic-warden’

 Strategies, games and songs

  • How can I make an activity communicative?
  • Don’t go silent too: talk to him - if only to keep you alive and thinking.
  • Remind him when it is ‘time to do something different’ and wait.
  • Remind him that he could stop, find something to do, that he has a mind.
  • Remember that he is at a much earlier stage of mental development:
    • people-games of ‘pure interaction’ e.g. looming games
    • walking the tightrope between fear and delight
    • using suspense and surprise e.g. ready - steady - go/ clap hands/
    • playing with distance e.g. ‘I catch you’, ‘I can still see you’
    • mouth-and-face games

    BUT:
  • Remember to keep tickling and purely sensory stimulation to a minimum.
  • Avoid mindless activities, eg. TV, video, music, repetitive physical activity

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