Incentives for Autistic Children

The world is often an overwhelming, hurtful, frightening place for children dealing with autism. Their neural pathways deliver a double whammy by inefficiently filtering out incoming sensory data and then frequently skewing data by exponentially increasing its message to nerve endings. When another person attempts to hold his hand -- a comforting gesture for a non-autistic child -- the autistic youngster's body may perceive it as the flesh being ripped from the bone. Yet learning to live in such a distorted environment is just what parents, teachers and therapists hope to accomplish with autistic children. Determining and consistently offering meaningful incentives for these young ones can motivate them to change negative behaviors into positive ones.

  1. Determining Incentives

    • With the world delivering such chilling sensory messages to autistic children, they often act out in self defense by screaming, punching, pinching, hiding and focusing on self-stimulating behaviors -- like hand twirling -- to calm down the incoming chaos. But as with any youngster, autistic children will have special interests, activities and foods that they turn to. Make a list of any activity, item or interest that your child truly enjoys. For the autistic child, this includes self-stimming behavior such as spinning a bottle or flapping his ear lobes. Does he like computer games or a certain movie? What about popcorn or chicken nuggets? This list of high-interest items serves as motivators or incentives for your autistic child to be cooperative and learn.

    Establishing a Rewards System

    • Employing the incentives through a rewards system influences your child to cooperatively join in a given activity. The rewards system can be as simple as explaining to your child that if she stays on task for two minutes -- be sure to have a timer present and highly visible -- she can have two minutes to play on an electronic game. Other rewards systems require increased cooperative times, yet give your child frequent feedback that she's doing well. For instance, provide her with a small glass jar. Tell her that for every two minutes she's on task, she'll get a warm fuzzy -- large pom poms work well for this -- and place it in the jar. When she earns five warm fuzzies, she can have 10 minutes to work on a puzzle. Rewards systems can be wildly imaginative; they need to be visible and close to your child so she is always aware of her progress towards her goal of enjoying the chosen incentive.

    Catching Them Doing Good

    • It's easy for an adult working with an autistic child to lose focus when the child is peacefully working on a task or cooperatively playing. However, when you're actively working to establish a new behavior pattern, closely tracking behavior, giving them verbal feedback as to how they're doing and consistently providing them with the incentive in a timely manner as promised are vital to children making progress.

    Fading and Creating

    • While your son may continue to favor chicken nuggets into his adult years, other incentives may change. He may discover trains, or drawing or chocolate! When you see a particular incentive no longer motivating him, observe what other interest he's indulging in. Update the incentives list as appropriate. As he masters whatever behavioral or learning objective you've set for him, you can begin to fade incentives linked to it. However, if negative behaviors begin to creep in again, return to a rewards system with meaningful incentives for your autistic child. Using incentives is a beneficial approach to making any learning not only more relevant to a struggling child, but just plain more fun.

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