How do you motivate an Aspie?

[bigbobble]

My 8 year old has AS and he is a real dreamer - great imagination, capacity to focus, absorbed in his work. But only when of interest to him.

It is extremely difficult to get him to do anything he doesn't want to or is not interested in. So he loves maths and science but can't be bothered with reading comprehension or writing (which is difficult for him) at length.

He hates being corrected and quickly loses heart if he doesn't get things right.

He has a statement but before he got a statement, he got by in class by not causing a fuss, doing the minimum and writing down any old rubbish. His grades are pretty good but I think school overinflate for their own benefit anyway.

Now the spotlight is on him a bit as he has a TA. So she often prompts him to write a bit more or to make sure he has read the question or knows what he is doing. He hates this. He would rather be left alone churning out any old rubbish than be made to settle to a task he doesn't want to do.

His school do optional SATS which are, bizarrely, externally marked. So all juniors are doing this at the moment. Yesterday, he went out with his TA who was there to assist him (prompting him with 'no that's not quite right' hmmmm, not sure about the point of that) and he just wants to be part of his class and not made to feel different.

These SATS are a waste of space so I've agreed with the teacher that it is better for him to feel included than do marginally with help but get stressed. I've also talked to DS about it. He clearly just doesn't care what he does in tests as he sees no purpose or benefit to them. I know he is only 8 but I really feel this is his school mindset and that it will continue if I don't try and show him there is some benefit to producing work as requested. He wants to be a scientist so I've explained to him that you have to do things you don't want to do to achieve this.

Did those of you with older Aspies go through this?

I have no solutions, but will be watching your thread with interest, as your ds sounds very similar to my 9 year old ds1, who also has AS. He hates writing with a vengeance and will basically only work on things that he's interested in. He barely gets past the date in literacy lessons and some days he doesn't even manage that. He will do more on the Alphasmart, but even then its usually only a paragraph or so. When he was asked to copy out an eight line poem last week, his teacher had to break it down into writing four lines one day and four lines the next or he flatly refused to do it.

We have a similar thing with him wanting to be a games tester/designer when he is older and I have discussed with him the qualifications he'll need and therefore why he needs to work at school and then later college and at the time he seemed interested and keen, but in truth, he doesn't believe me. He seems to think that because he's good at playing games, someone is going to turn up and pay him for playing them.

We constantly get, 'literacy is a waste of time' ditto art, ditto PE, ditto handwriting X 1000 - the list goes on and on. The only things he likes are ICT, Science and Designt and Technology. He used to like maths, as he is pretty much a natural at mental maths, but since they started doing longer problems that involve more stages and more actual writing, he says he hates it.

Yep, my DS is the same

Luckily he wants to be ruler of the world Prime Minister, so I can usually convince him that he needs to do X because a prime minister would need to do that....

Also, recently I have been much harder on him. So I have pretty much forced him to do things like handwriting rather than give in to him. Because he likes routines after a couple of days of 'forcing' he stops complaining so much...

I've got a meeting with his teacher on Thurs - but I am going to ask his teacher to be much harder on him as well. To put up with the tantrum / walking out of class for a few days and see if after that he complies a bit more....

I also don't expect him to 'always do his best' or anything like that. It's enough that I know he can write. And I work more on getting him to write for really important things like tests - and turn a blind eye to mucking around for the rest of the year.....

So basically, AFAIK, I teach him all his literacy at home, he mucks around in class for a year, and he still makes enough progress to keep everyone happy....

Thanks moose and indigo. I see it is a common problem! They do like things on their own terms.

I think you are right Indigo in that you do, as they get a bit older, have to start being a bit tougher about these things and it is a good idea to save the 'best' work for when it matters.

I had DS at home in the afternoons for about 5 months and things were definitely easier (for him not me!) as we got into a routine of doing those things he doesn't like to do. It is very hard to do things after school because he is so tired. What do you do with him at home Indigo?

DS is 10 (Y5). Every day at home he does:

• Piano Practice (10 mins before school) - excellent for his fine motor skills.
• Homework (10 mins after school)
• Handwriting (1 sheet after school)
• Retained Reflex Therapy (10 mins straight before bed)

None of these were easy to introduce. But now we are in the habit they are all pretty much OK. And obviously there are some days when we don't achieve all that. But by and large we do.

Then in the school holidays when he's bored I usually manage to get him to do some creative writing and a few worksheets on punctuation.

And as I only care about whether he can string a sentence together or not that is the only bits of literacy I teach him

If school want him to learn anything else - they can teach him themselves!

You are absolutely right in this approach as I know it worked when we were doing half days. I do still try and get him to 'do his jobs' e.g. he is learnign to play the violin (ten mins) and he has 'football exercises' (physio exercises) to to (ten mins in front of tv!).

I probably need to identify key areas for him to work on at home to support stuff for 5 mins here or there. Like I need to get him to learn to tell the time as it will make life much easier for him. And his timestables. He was doing really well at home with them.

We've had to start being tougher on ds1 recently as well and I had a conversation with his teacher last week where we agreed that she could be firmer as well.

We already keep to a set routine after school and I do his handwriting practise with him as it avoids a fight for his teacher every morning.

We came to the conclusion recently that we need to start encouraging him to be more independent and think for himself more, so we came up with a checklist for him to follow of what he needs to do in the morning, after school and before bed. Its working quite well and he quickly got used to checking the list, doing the next thing and then ticking it off. We have had to supervise from afar to make sure he's actually doing it all (he's developed a worrying habit of lying recently) but it definitely seems to have reduced the stress and we've had less confrontations.

I think its working ok at home now with regards to self-care and homework, but I haven't a clue how to motivate him at school. If his teachers try to be too firm with him he can't cope, gets stressed, anxious and/or angry and its counter-productive, whereas he knows my limits and boundaries and can deal with me being firm. The bottom line is that he has to do what he's told at school, whether he likes it or not but for him personally, he needs a good reason to do every single thing he's told to do. Unfortunately the two don't mix well. I'm thinking we are in for a bit of a bumpy ride while I have to support the school in being firmer with him, until he gets used to being more compliant with their demands and doing as he's told without arguing.

It would be great if he was able to keep his eye on the prize and work towards his end goal of the career he wants, but ds doesn't do deferred gratification and basically, if he isn't going to see the results instantly, he doesn't want to know.

Moose - DS is the same. He would get completely freaked out by teachers/TAs starting to be a bit firmer with him as he already finds it difficult to know when he is being told off, when he is really in trouble, or when he is just being asked to do something he doesn't want.

If you ask him, or make him, do something he doesn't want to, he feels like he is in big trouble and he's getting told off or punished. We can explain that at home but I suppose it's harder at school, especially when you've spent the last 2 years encouraging them to back off him!

I was thinking of motivating him with a day at Legoland!

Generalising, the motivator for many of us is "is this right?". The trouble with written work and essays is that there is no 'right' that seems to make sense. Questions that are yes/no, or have a definite answer, are great. Questions that have an answer some time next week and the answer is "you need to talk about X and Y more" are just baffling and irritating.

Any social motivator, e.g. "I'm so proud of you", is completely meaningless for many of us as we don't have a good grasp of what 'proud' is anyway.

The knack is to make as much as possible 'instant yes/no'. And a chance to correct any 'no' to be a 'yes' by giving the right answer. A score of 100% is what we'll try to aim for every time with logical stuff (remember I'm generalising - there will be a few children on the spectrum who have different approaches).

Legoland worked for us!

In fact this very morning I reminded him that little boys who are rude to their Mummy's don't get return trips to Legoland!

That's a good point amberlight. Ds is always more willing to work within a writing frame that has specific areas for specific points to be made. This works to some extent at school, but its getting harder and harder for them to be able to split the work down like that as he gets older. He is highly motivated by tests, loves his weekly spelling and mental maths tests and loved his SATs so much that he asked me to buy papers for him to take do on our summer holiday afterwards!

Its hard for me to get my head around, as I loved literacy and the more freedom I was given on a writing task, the more I loved it. Anything relating to tests and logic was an instant switch off for me at school. So really we are the polar opposites when it comes to education.

Yes, as always Amber has hit the nail on the head.

The motivator is getting it right.

Literacy can't be 'right'

QED - problems

Now I just need to think of a way for me or school to make his literacy be 'right'....

Maybe we need to concentrate on more direct rules:

• You need a 5 sentence write a description of X including 5 adjectives, 2 connectors, different openers and using capital letters and full stops.....

Amber does something like the above make things better or worse?

Ooh, this is very interesting. How similar our boys are! They don't all love Lego and Star Wars too do they?

Thanks Amber that is really interesting advice.

Blimey, what's an adjective? That's not a trick question - I've no idea at all. It may help you to know that people have explained the word 'adjective' to me probably a couple of hundred times over my lifetime but I still have no idea what it is, because the word isn't a picture-word. Might as well tell me to put in two wimbles and a sproggit, with a sprinkling of hows-yer-father.

Sometimes the wording gets in the way. Hugely. I'd panic and not write anything at all if I was told to use 5 adjectives and some different openers, though I might try drawing some connecting pipes and a can opener to see if it helped?

LOL Indigobell - my DS (14) HF ASD always wanted to be 'ruler of the world' when he was in primary school - has now settled for more realistic career aims, thank goodness.
He finds work easier to achieve when school set work which has guidance such as 'To achieve Level X you need to include ... key phrases and describe ..... This makes life easier for me too as when he has done the bare minimum on his homework, I have some ammunition for saying 'have you included everything on the list?' which of course he hasn't, so he then has to motivate himself to write more as he always wants to get the highest level!
Oh and I always find "if you don't do this you'll be banned from the play station for x time" to be an excellent motivator.

Do your boys have statements? How does school offer assistance? DS is really not liking the intervention under his statement as he sees it as a spotlight on him so that he can't get away with doing the minimum any more!

School seemed to think that getting a statement meant employing a TA who shadows DS and does all his programmes with him. He doesn't know her from adam and can't stand this.

I feel like I'm the only one arguing for less 1:1! Although, in reality I probably mean less of this particular 1:1. I was annoyed for example that this TA (who is very inexperienced) was prompting him through his paper (and he was too). I'd rather he got things wrong then be told the right answers for the sake of a better score as this benefits the school only.

My DS doesn't have a statement and gets very little help in class. Which is right, he doesn't need much. Mostly he needs help at play times. (Help to stop hitting the other kids )

But he does walk out of class when he disagrees / is stressed.....

My DD also doesn't have a statement - but I too am asking for less 'support' for her in class...... I was absolutely furious to find out that on Fri she'd had a scribe for her writing assessment.....

Bigbobble, ds bought a Lego Star Wars game for his Nintendo Dsi with his birthday money when we were at Legoland last weekend. Funny thing is, he has a phobia about feature films, so he's never actually seen any of the films, but knows all the plots and who the characters are etc.

My ds doesn't have a statement. We are supposed to be applying for SA at the moment, but the school has 'lost' all his records.

He gets no help at all in class and sees an ASD inclusion teacher for half an hour a week.

Pretty much the whole team agree that ds needs a 1-1 support, not for every lesson, but definitely for literature etc. Since he hit juniors his achievement has completely stalled, with zero progress across two years (the school denied this right up until I tripped the temporary SENCo up at his last review meeting and she accidently let his NC levels slip. He left infants at the top of his year, now he's looking at being moved into the lower group for pretty much everything. Without a 1-1 keeping him on task he simply doesn't produce any work, but I suspect his reaction to it will be the same as your ds's. The ASD Team also want him to have several, offloading opportunities every day with a 1-1 to help control his anxiety levels and he needs help with organisation and team work.

I don't want him to have full time 1-1 though, as he doesn't need it for every lesson and from what I hear in our LEA, he would be extremely unlikely to get it anyway.

It doesn't sound right that your ds's TA is pointing out mistakes during assessments, how can they assess what his levels are if she is correcting him?

I would also love to know the answer to your question Bigbobble! My son sounds very like yours, he's 9, plans on being an inventor, but doesn't intend to do any literacy for the next few years at school. He gets little extra support and has no statement but mostly does absolutely fine - except in literacy where he can't get started (or finished!). His teacher is planning a pokemon chart for him where he is rewarded by money (from us - not his teacher :) ), we did something like this last year and it worked for a while until the teacher got bored!

I am worried about how he's going to progress as he becomes even less motivated in literacy, unless he starts to get some support. I think Moosemama's idea of asking for his NC levels is a good idea so that if levels aren't rising school should look to provide extra help.

The lists of what a child needs to achieve in their piece of work is a good idea - at least they know what they are aiming for, and as with my child - if all else fails bribe him with money!

Literacy is just too abstract. My DS has problems doing his Y6 SATs today as the TA wasn't allowed to help him with the really nasty (for ASD) short writing task of persuading people to support a charity. Yuk, he doesn't know how to persuade other people to do anything except by shouting at them!

In literacy my DS and the child I support as a 1:1 TA both have real difficulty thinking up ideas on their own and planning a writing task, even with planning frames. Once my DS has an idea suggested to him he can write about it fairly well but he comes back for help 2 or 3 times. The child I support needs help expanding his ideas, otherwise he'd just write one sentence. How can you help them within lessons, which are learning opportunities, without suggesting ideas when otherwise they would produce nothing, and then help them to achieve some independence so they can be assessed without help? I genuinely don't know. The hope is that all the help they receive in lessons means that they are learning strategies they will be able to put in use on their own. But DC on the autistic spectrum find it really hard to transfer these strategies from one situation to another. So they can write beautifully in class with just a little help, but can't transfer the techniques learnt to an exam situation. Aaaarrgghhh!

Funny (in a strange way!) reading this as my ds is exactly the same (aged 10), the only way to motivate him in school (he has a statement) is using targets (they get bees) and when he reaches his target he gets a small prize (it might be pencils) and that seems to keep him going. He also gets bees for completing his homework, or for example, being really neat (that's a tricky one!) and it definitely helps. However, we have our moments and that's managed with sheer perseverance (and it's hard work!!) x

EJ, that's exactly it. Transferring info from one situation to another is what many of our brains won't do. Even as an adult, if something different happens, I can't remember how to solve a problem. Everything relies on me having enough previous experience of exactly that same situation before. If there's a change, it's very scary. Exams test for examination ability, not intelligence. Our intelligence is often fantastic, but often no exam allows us to demonstrate what we can do. We're made to fit what society expects a child to do, not what amazing things we can maybe actually do. All very frustrating.

Too true, Amberlight. Our society values examination success and that makes it hard for 'quirky' people to succeed. But succeed they still do! There is more than one way to skin a cat! (Did you enjoy that one? ) With people like you helping and showing us the way our amazing children will still be successful at life. ( I hope.)

Thats interesting Amber cos I (ASD) see stuff as systems. I can ignore the irrelevant details and transfer the previous knowledge. Mind you I see the literacy stuff as a complex system so maybe thats why I am good at it!

I can see visual stuff as systems - rotating and designing 3D models in my mind etc, and thinking how to improve on them, but non-visual words are hugely difficult to understand.

Weird things can motivate us, too. A few mins to stim. A favourite cloth that feels particularly good to touch. It'll vary. Might be worth asking a child what they'd like as a small reward and setting some limits on it.