Aspies For Freedom

My five year old son, who is diagnosed with AS, likes to flap his hands when he gets excited. I also have AS and did the same when I was a kid, but back then my parents were more intolerant and would scream at me and shame me into stopping. This only led to me spending a lot of time in the toilet or my room flapping in private and quickly stopping if someone walked in. I never stopped doing it; I just learnt not to do it in front of anybody else. I guess I'm just wondering about how I should deal with my son's flapping. Personally I don't really mind if he does it, but I just don't want him doing it in front of the kids at school, because I'm scared he'll get ostracized for being weird.

Any suggestions?

There are lots of things that small children of all kinds like to do, which will get them censure or ridicule as they grow. You are right that you need to help him to control his flapping for his sake and very right that inducing shame is not the way to go about it!

This is where your own experience comes in very handy. Have you considered telling him that you enjoy flapping too? He will be surprised if he has never seen you doing it, but you can tell him that it is because it gives you such pleasure, so you prefer to keep it private like a lot of pleasurable things. That keeping it for private times when you are alone makes it even more special. You could also say that all big people have special things that they do in private, and he might have noticed that he doesn't see big people flapping.

This may give him the idea that cutting down on public flapping is something that is natural as he grows. He may ask you what you do instead when you are excited but in a public place. Try to think of something subtle that you could do as a 'private signal' between the two of you that acknowledges the excitement you are feeling. I 'count' my thumbs against each of my fingers in turn.

I was a leg-swinger and and also used to rub my wrist on my face. I got a lot of teasing!   Sometimes just imagining doing the action is almost as satisfying.

That sounds like a good practical approach. He only has three days of school to go this year and then he has six weeks off. I'll have a good chat with him over the holidays and hopefully it'll sink in a bit by the time he starts school next year. He responds quite well when I explain things to him.

Thanks Tiger.

It's great that he's been able to find a level of control over it.

When my son does it he's doing because he's excited about something. I was the same when I was young but as I got older it became something that I just compulsively did regardless of how I felt. I guess its become a habit for me and I'll do it whenever I'm alone. Sometimes I'll even remove from self from the company of others to go do it, simply because I feel like it.

It can be an expression of any strong emotion, positive or negative, from what I've seen.  Even non-autistic people do it sometimes.  (Ever watch people when they win game shows on TV?)

I don't know about the stopping the flapping in public thing.  That's something I tried to do on my own (due to intense shame, I don't know from where, so probably from bullies or teachers).  It didn't work.  It eventually acted like one of those things... where you try to shut a lid on it and it starts spilling out the edges all over the place even more intensely.  And I had been trying to keep it to something I either did at home or in the bathroom.

At any rate, what I've figured out over time, is that a lot of the movements I was trying to suppress, are actually things that, when they occur, are part of how I figure out what's going on.  If I don't do them, I don't understand nearly as much.  So I have to be able to squirm and flap and flick and rock and whatever else I do.  The only time I regard flapping as a problem is when it starts aggravating my repetitive strain injury.

I see it this way... would you tell a child with athetoid cerebral palsy to stop their repetitive movements?  Autism is certainly not cerebral palsy, and we might have more control over our movements, but I think that they're something non-autistic people just have to get used to provided our movements don't involve poking them in the face or something.  They have to get used to people with cerebral palsy (and I've known some people with CP who definitely are always moving in unusual ways) so they have to get used to us, too.

If someone chooses to stop doing these things in public, that's their choice.  It's a choice I've made at times.  But it has a real cost.  One autistic person actually tried to stop stimming by their own choice, and ended up doing all the movements in their sleep so hard that they slammed into the bed over and over.  And I'm afraid that sometimes children are too young to understand the cost of not doing it.

Then again... a lot of the things I was teased for as a kid, I don't know why, but I just could not get into hiding them for the sake of other kids.  My eyebrows were a major part of that teasing, and nobody could ever get me to pluck them, not even by force.  I had more body hair than most girls (including before puberty) but I mostly refused to shave it (I allowed it for a certain period of time but then rebelled against that the moment I could).  There was just something in me, I still don't know what, that refused to bow to the laws of playground bullies, which infuriated them, and frankly in some ways still does when I run across any today.

I guess part of it was that somehow I knew it was me they hated, and not the things I did that they chose to pick on.  After all, there was a boy with one arm and he rarely got picked on, in fact he was a bully himself who was extremely mean to me.  The problem was that I was low in the pecking order, not the individual traits that they chose to mock.  It was who I was they didn't like, not just the outward traits they chose to constantly get on my case for.

I remember one time they were always teasing me about not having a particular name-brand article of clothing.  One day, I walked in with that article of clothing, and they just picked something else to tease me about.

I think flapping is like that.  Failing (sometimes) to flap or do other things like that, didn't stop them from thinking whatever they thought about me, or being mean to me.  That was never the thing that pushed it over the edge into their meanness.  When I began flapping (and doing many other things) in public again (around junior high, the point when stuff gets more complicated), it changed the shape of the rumors told about me, but there would have always been rumors anyway, and I might as well not have caused myself the pain and discomfort that withholding it did.

So overall, I don't think that limiting flapping in public is a useful message to give an autistic kid.  I mean, you can let them know that some bigoted people look down on it, but it's the same way bigoted people look down on the girl whose breasts grow too fast, or too slow.  It's not the person's fault for the thing people like that look down on them for.

I also got teased in high school about having unshaved legs and unplucked eyebrows but I ignored them. I never pluck my eyebrows because I don't think they need anything done to them but have used a silkymit on my legs in recent times to remove the hairs.

I don't think I was really aware of any of my stims until age 12 or 13, when I started to notice how other people were interpreting my image to fuel their abuse. But I remember when I was young and sitting in the bathroom that I would rock back and forth intensely. At age 10, in particular, I would spend maybe four or five hours per day sitting in the bathroom, not even needing to go, just rocking and thinking.

Yes, this is something I learned after, in 10th grade, the speech therapist and the director of special services wanted me to stop what they called my gestures - it is a movement of my hands and fingers, and I was surprised when they said it was a goal to stop them, and I explained that it was especially helpful when speaking and listening (the latter especially important in school lectures). I did that year, however, try to curb my "behaviors" in front of adults, as my parents said that my receiving of an AlphaSmart to write things when speaking is too difficult would probably be contingent on me stopping my "gestures".

This is true. To me, whenever I was told "don't do X, or you'll be made fun of" and "Y makes you look weird. Stop that" I felt that it was my fault when they would bully me, as I thought, "I could've prevented this I bet if I'd just have stopped flapping."

I have tried at various times in my life to stop in public. To me, it's not so much that it's a horrible fate not to stim (although I do have trouble getting things done or making much sense - the effect is more pronounced now that I have a terribly busy schedule). The worst part of it for me was watching myself, everything I did, at every moment, even while doing taxing activities at school.

I wrote an essay the other day.

Of course, here we are talking merely about flapping/other stims, but it is a complex thing to keep track of one without losing the ability to cope, let alone keep track of many things AND be expected to not melt down, to get the same grades, to feel okay about one's own self. When I was 12, I would say that I felt my whole life was just an act, I was a big liar. I didn't know much of anything about autism, and it never occurred to me to identify stimming as some separate category within myself; it was just the way I operate, much less did it occur to me to identify my own suppression of stimming.

I wrote an essay called Just Pretending that was about fitting in (and why I made the difficult decision not to try bending myself unnaturally in hopes of doing so) and what I thought of the counselors' justifications of the bullying resulting my peers' intolerance to difference.

While I did want to learn to shave, for me the process was very difficult and took me a few years to learn. I think it took a few hours for my older sister to learn, but my parents never made me ashamed. It was just as well that I didn't, as the bullying quickly grew to such an extent that for 7th and 8th grade I didn't have PE after the first month or two of 7th grade. This was their idea of addressing the problem, which admittedly is better than the way the problem later got addressed.

Unfortunately, in the junior high the adaptive PE kids would go on the field the same time as the regular PE kids, and so there would inevitably be all kinds of teasing going on. That was a poor choice on the part of the school. Then again, people working for the school made a lot of poor choices. One thing I am always glad for, though, is that I was able to get away from it, and spend class time wandering the halls. If you look like you're a teacher aide or office aide and have an old pink paper pass on hand, nobody looks twice.

Not that I recommend ditching, but when you're not even learning anything because bullies are too busy attacking you and threatening you in class and nobody's doing anything, f*** the system and its rules. Though I wouldn't have done anything like destroying the property or making idle threats to staff, which would've landed me in even worse trouble, being stuck with the people you're trying to get away with for even longer.

Ha! Same thing happened to me, though I never got around to having any sort of desirable clothing. I'm actually surprised that the antisocial-school-shooter stereotype wasn't perceived on the part of these bullies or the school staff, as this was just a couple years after Columbine and I wore a trench coat to school every day. Maybe if I were a boy. Now THAT would've sucked. On top of the "don't-miss-class-to-report-abuse" lectures, having the "don't-look-strange-or-we'll-assume-you're-going-to-kill-people" lecture would've made me so angry they'd probably start to actually believe it.

About there being rumors anyway - exactly. Even though when I was in elementary school I think I suppressed my "odd" behavior significantly. I am not a very objective source, but I don't think I used to rock very much in public, nor did I do most of the other stims I find essential today. But people would call me "retarded" and "stupid" and "weird" and "crazy" and all those kinds of labels.

And from elementary school to 8th grade, I was frequently harassed for being lesbian, even though I didn't come out until high school. I liked some things traditionally male-associated (such as cars and dinosaurs and digging in the sandbox), but I also enjoyed female-associated things (such as dolls, butterflies, and playing house). I hated makeup and shopping, but I also hated competitive sports and aggression. It didn't matter what evidence they had; they used that as one of their many excuses.

I speak fluent feline to cats, and jokingly, sometimes greet my friends with a meow

I find flapping in autie chicks kinda cute actually.

I use the language of every animal I encounter whenever I have the opportunity.

Well, the spoken and body language. I cannot use the odours, obviously!

I don't flap very often but when I do it is because I feel agitated. I sometimes make a noise of annoyance at the same time.

*grumbles*

I may, occasionally, flap one hand or leg in private when excited about an idea of project

Occasionally lol.

It's pure GOLD for getting rid of stress.

I also tend to swing my legs if I'm sitting down and waiting for something like a bus to come along.

Well, this thread has been an eye-opener.

I didn't go into detail about my finger stims; I think I was a little embarrassed! But, as everyone else has been so open and honest I reckon I can be, too!

I finger-count to tunes in my head, sub-dividing the total number of notes into factors, and grouping those factors into multiples of ten.

I also have an invented language that I speak to myself - one of the things that convinced me as a child that I was really an alien from another planet! Sometimes, especially when I am really stressed, the 'words' just pour out. When I was a baby, apparently my poor godfather had to leave the church to laugh outside, because the priest was conducting my baptism in Latin, and I would earnestly reply to everything he said in my own funny 'language'!

I don't think I've done much flapping.  

I sit a little hunched over right now, right leg bouncing fast, head + upper body rocking up/down.
Have been cracking my big toe joints since my teens.
Rocking in bed or shaking a leg in bed; a distractive stim.
Counting fingers with my thumb.
Talking cat.
Making clicking noises with my tongue at birds; especially magpies.
Chirping.
Twisting my fingers.