Talking about……. being naughty!

Apologies – I was ill, and then I had a lot of work to catch up on so have been rather quiet. I have some video to download and edit and hope to be up and running again as normal soon. In the meantime….

Archie has always loved being naughty. When he was a toddler I would say ‘don’t touch the TV’ and he’d immediately reach towards it, almost touching but not quite, looking at me and laughing. Teasing if you like. Interestingly this sort of behaviour was the reason why we were told ‘he definitely isn’t autistic’ when we first approached clinicians. Perhaps even more interestingly when I mentioned this sort of behaviour post diagnosis I was told I was imagining it. Hmm.

But anyway, one of the big hopes in providing a sensible system to communicate is that it will reduce challenging behaviours. Now a lot of Archie’s challenging behaviours centre around things he knows he shouldn’t be doing. A big one at the moment is sniffing people (please don’t ask where). So he would sniff someone and be told off and find the whole process hilariously funny (there are ways of managing this such as not over reacting to being sniffed, but there was still sniffing involved). I’ve noticed that recently he uses the talker to tell me who he is going to sniff on which day of the week, but then crucially doesn’t do it. Talking about it is enough for him. Archie tells me, laughs his leg off and then moves on. He gets his chance to tease, has a good laugh, and in the meantime no member of the general public is harmed.

Good stuff. Will be back online properly over the next few days.