Managing Environmental Stressors
This story is about verbal communication, early childhood like intervention strategies for speech and communication coaching. But this is done like at home.
In general, I have observed that when my son goes to a big arena, he needs to move around a lot. When he sits in a bus, I insert a book and try to find a seat beside glass so that he does not constantly kicking somebody's seat. So, I find that that has been very effective in helping him to have movement during any show without you know really impacting those around him. And then I also find that when we go to MTSC he tends to do better if it's quieter exit. Because at the end of any show it's quite busy, he will usually go the opposite direction of the crowd. So, I just make sure to give us a lot of time when we leave so that he can have his sensory needs met. And then taking it one step further when we leave. I let him ride the escalator and go up and down the stairs as many times as he wants. Because it's a good proprioceptive activity to help calm his nervous system so that we people can leave without having a sensory meltdown. He had many meltdowns and sometimes it ended up being quite dangerous when his fight of flight would kick in as you know one time he ran into. I try to get his needs met. So, I found that by giving him those sorts of, I don't know if I call accommodations, but considerations when we attend a busy event.
We can now attend without any meltdown, which has been really, really obviously helpful when we go to the MTSC center or any sort of show where it's really, really busy. The most recent one was just at Disney on Ice, but we've gone to many shows. And every time we go, it's a little bit more successful. In terms of you know, managing with them free. Initially when he had a meltdown and was a sensory meltdown and was hurting that also looked like hurting my body and running. It was terrifying because the traffic, he was little, and my body was being hurt as well.
When a sensory meltdown happened, and I didn't realize what he needed. But by giving him naturally as this went over time and giving kind of paying attention to what is telling me without using with his body and with his actions, now we are able to go to shows and generally have a very engaging experience. We're the last ones to leave any event, pretty much. I guess what I've learned from that was how and where to sort of pick seats really big events but then also kind of going up the ceiling, going down, going the opposite way of the crowd because he looks like he's trying to get away from the sound of the overwhelmingness of it all.
This story is important because this story is about success and learning that heavy work activities can help to calm the nervous system. And also creating experiences for my kid that I know he would like as opposed to just not going. He has sensory needs. He doesn't vocalize them he will walking the opposite way of the crowd, wanting to go up and down the escalator. I can just watch him do that. First time it was dreadful; It was quite scary but with some plans in place I am seeing some positive outcomes which encouraged me to try again.