Читать книгу Playing, Laughing and Learning with Children on the Autism Spectrum - Julia Moor - Страница 18

You might feel that this sounds fine in a therapeutic or educational environment, but how does this work in a busy home environment with a three-year-old? We shouldn’t feel that the only way to help our child is to follow a specific private programme executed by a therapist, not a mere mortal parent! As primary carers for our children we can learn how to structure their play – it’s about choosing an activity, looking at how your child already engages (or doesn’t) in the activity, whether he plays appropriately or inappropriately, how he interacts with you (or doesn’t) during these times and how you can make improvements. It’s about looking at his day and working out how you can steer him into constructive interaction and play for more hours than he currently does. Introducing structure is also about being aware of what makes him distressed and working out how communication can be improved to make him feel safer by making his day seem more predictable and less chaotic. It’s also about taking some control yourself; making your child aware that he is a part of a functioning family, with the comings and goings that this involves, and not always the nucleus that the rest of the family revolves around. Giving your child structure allows you to do this in the kindest way.

Structuring play works by systematically breaking a play activity into its component parts so that it is no longer a jumble of language, objects and actions that has no meaning for your child. By breaking it down into very simple elements you give your child a chance to work out what each element represents – you give him the chance to interpret the activity and give it meaning. Fundamentally you are giving his brain a chance to keep up with processing incoming information. I expect achievements will vary according to your child’s potential, but even the smallest of successes will justify the effort. This is how structuring an individual activity works. Throughout the book I also refer to structuring the day as a series of activities. These will not all be play activities – the day is represented in pictures showing the sequence in which they will happen, including the particular play activities that you have planned for that day.