Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article reaches far beyond the researcher-stated implications. It, in fact, strongly supports what I find myself telling autism parents frequently: you have to let your kid try, struggle, and even fail.
The researchers here were interested in finding out how it affected a child's motivation to try challenging tasks when a parent swoops in and does it for them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if the parents took the task away from the child and finished it for them, the kid mostly stopped trying to finish the puzzle themself. The motivation and persistence was quashed.
This is a common tendency I find in parents of autistic people, to be honest. It's not just the tying of shoelaces, which is the example they use in the article. Or even challenging math problems in this or that class.
No, what I tend to see is that, because autistic people struggle harder for more basic skills, that there's this tendency to do things for us. Either, as the article opines, because it's really hard to watch us struggle with simple tasks. Or, because our skills develop at different rates than neurotypical people, it's not as simple for our parents to recognize that "maybe they can do this themself now."
In the traditional developmental trajectory, there seems to be a sort of accepted "now this child is 5, so they can begin to help around the house with simple chores" mentality. Certain expectations of certain ages. Obviously every person is different, even in typically developing folks. But by age 16, it's usually more than reasonable to expect the person to know how to do their own laundry, for example.
But when your autistic 16 year old struggles hard with executive functions and doesn't remember they need to do the laundry at the best time in everyone's schedule, it can be easy to fall into the habit of just doing it for them. And then, because inertia is a mighty force, it stays like that.
The thing about shielding autistic people from struggles is that it also shields us from learning opportunities, and erodes our tolerance for trying new and difficult things.
Adult life, as I've frustratingly discovered, is just chocked full of new and difficult things. And while those things can be frustrating and scary, one of the things my parents did right was letting me try them. I have no doubt that's a large part of why I was able to learn to live independently. I wish it didn't seem to be such a rare experience.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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