Parent’s Question:
My son is 6 years old and is diagnosed with ASD. After 2 years of training, he can greet people spontaneously with eye contact. However, he still engages in shaking head, flapping hands, etc. All those self-stimulatory behavior makes me feel embarrassed when we are in the public. Except yelling at him to make him stop, anything else I can do? Self-stimulatory behavior and what to do about it is a very common question from parents and often becomes more in the spotlight as children get older. Often, when the children are still young, it may be less of priority but as the children get older, it begins to highlight their ASD and can be socially ostracizing.

- It is critical to teach and develop replacements skills. Play and leisure skills are critical and are often overlooked in favor of cognition and language skills. A good play skills program is essential to teach students ways they can engage in their free time constructively. Breaking down play and leisure skills into small parts and teaching step by step is a great approach to this problem.
- Teach daily routines and other chores. According to the age of the student, it is also important to have them engage not only in play but daily routines and chores that can engage their time constructively.
- Once you have been teaching some of the above you can begin to infringe upon the self-stim behavior by stopping it and redirecting them to a play and leisure skill or a daily task.
- Provide encouragement, praise and reinforcement for absence of the behavior and also more importantly engaging in appropriate use of their time. You may need some more specific behavior systems which we will talk about in coming articles. These can be much more precise but may require some more training to implement.
