Should I stop him from stimming?

Q: Hi Wiley/Brian,

My son was diagnosed with PDD at 18 months and then at 3 with ASD. He is now 5 and nonverbal, other than a few words. My son does alot of stimulatory behaviors, mostly hand-flapping. I don't try to stop him, but some of the therapist seem to think that I should not allow him to continue. My thoughts are if he is doing this behavior, he "needs" to do this behavior for his own reasons. So my question is twofold: Why does he do this behavior, and should I allow him to continue, or should I intervene and try to stop him?

Thanks for your site!

Lisa

A: There are a lot of autism-related issues about which the Aspies I know are
divided. This isn't one of them. Lisa, I think you're handling this exactly
right, and I applaud your faith in your son having "his own reasons" for
self-stimulation. For an autistic child -- heck, for an autistic adult, even
-- "stimming" is automatic and enjoyable, and it can be painful to suppress.
Once in a while I hear about a child whose preferred mode of stimming
involves physically hurting himself, and that's clearly no good, but even
then it's usually possible to deal with the problem by helping the child
change the way that he stims rather than the fact that he stims.

So, why self-stimulation? I asked this question myself at a meeting of the
Aspie group at my college campus. Opinions differed, but everyone seemed to
share an intuition that it was related to stress. Life can be very stressful
for an autistic child, for any number of reasons, many of which are
unfortunately beyond your control to do anything about. Autistic people tend
to have very intense sensory experiences -- some, for instance, lack the
ability to "filter out" noises, like the hum of the air conditioning or the
sound of cars passing outside, that most people are able to disregard
without even thinking about it. Social situations can be similarly intense;
people are *weird*, and hard to understand. Having so many words and
behaviors coming at you at the same time can be overwhelming, especially for
a nonverbal child.
So why does this stress lead to stimming? Stimming, I think, is a way of
moderating that stress. It creates a single, separable, predictable sensory
experience which is under the autistic person's complete control. The stim
serves as both a channel for all that nervous energy and as a focus for
concentration by which to "turn down the volume" on all that light and sound
and information. (Paradoxically, we can process all that stuff better when
the volume is turned down than when it's cranked up.) I don't think it's an
exaggeration to say that stimming is one way of keeping ourselves from going
insane!
This explanation is two parts introspection to one part psychoanalysis. I
don't really know for sure why I like stimming, any more than you probably
know for sure why you like, say, asparagus. But I know that if someone
leveled a gun to my head and told me to stop stimming, I would still find it
difficult or impossible to do so. Autism can cause a lot of problems for a
growing child, but stimming, far from being one of those problems, is a way
of coping with those problems. Though you should be aware that I don't have
the colorful certificates on my walls that your therapists do, I encourage
you to think very carefully about this matter before you decide to follow
their advice.
--Brian

Comments

[Wiley]

I agree with everything Brian wrote here so I won't say it again, I
just wanted to add my own kudos for trusting your son enough to
challenge the professionals. Too many therapists think they can get
rid of autism by getting rid of autistic behaviors, but that just
leads to stressed out autistic people.

Wiley