The Special Needs Child - How Much is Too Much?

We have a special needs child. He was diagnosed PDD-NOS (autism) when he was 3 years old, he is now almost 11.

One of his biggest problems is self-motivation. This seems to be a problem with a lot children with autism. He takes a long time to get things done, and will often not do them at all unless his mother or I is sitting on him. A lot of times, we will actually take care of things for him (tie his shoes, help him dress, give him his pills, etc.) that we feel he should be doing for himself by now, just to save some time. He has a full-time aide in school that is having the same problem with him - she takes a lot of his notes because he will drift off. We all want him to be independent, but we want him to succeed. What do we do about this?

I am an assistant coach on his special needs baseball team. This team has special needs children (mostly autistic and Down's Syndrome) children and we use special rules. Everybody gets to bat once an inning and they get to bat until they make contact with the ball. The coaches pitch and try to put the ball where the child can hit it. Some children hit from tees. There are no putouts or strikeouts, and everybody scores. The last person up for each team gets to hit a "home run" so they can score as well. Everybody is pretty happy with the arrangement. We were, too, until our son's public school had a field day where the kids played softball. Our son didn't understand the concept of balls and strikes, and that you only got some many swings to hit the ball, and that he could be thrown out at first. He seemed to like to play, and he got a hit, but he didn't run to first hard enough and he was thrown out. What do we do about this?

In our zeal to create success for our special needs children, we have a tendency to overprotect them. This is natural reaction for a parent of a special needs child. But does it help them or hurt them in the long run?

The answer seems be a solid, "Maybe".

Protecting our special needs kids from risk is not preparing for life in the real world. Even typical children will suffer many failures early in their lives. The idea is to let them make their mistakes (as long as they aren't dangerous) and see that they learn from them. Mistakes are our greatest teachers. And special needs children can learn from their mistakes, too, on varying levels. If it is difficult or not very possible for a special needs child to learn from his or her mistakes, then we have to help this child. It is important for this child to be helped to achieve success, even if we have to rig it a little. However, if a child is higher functioning, and is capable of learning from mistakes, then that child should be challenged more.

I have told my wife that we should have my son's aide stop writing his assignments for him. I figured that if he had no homework to turn in the next day because he forgot to write it in his assignment book, he would fail the homework assignment, feel bad, learn from it, and write his assignments quicker from that point on. The child learns that there are consequences for his actions or lack of them. We haven't tried implementing this yet, because my wife and his teacher don't want him to fail in order to learn a lesson. I feel that he won't grow to his fullest potential unless we allow him to mess up once in a while and learn from it.

Finally, to all of you parents of special needs children, I say this - love your children. Appreciate their abilities and look past their disabilities. Help them become the best persons that they can be. Don't always rig things up so that they will allays succeed. Allow them to mess up, and allow them to feel a little bit of the pain for doing so. But always, ALWAYS, let them know that they're loved and you think the world of them whether they win or lose. And if they fail and come back to succeed, be happiest of all, because they've learned one of life's biggest lessons - "Don't quit!"