Salad Spinners and RDI

That picture pretty much tells the story. You stick a paper plate in to the salad spinner. Some acrylic paint and spin to your hearts content. It was a hit with K, required no preparation or waiting for things to dry or stuff falling apart. And I mean, the salad spinner spins, like crazy. So enough said.

There are many ways to make this nicer and prettier, and you can google all those. The homeschool blogging community is abuzz with salad spinner art. I did not come up with this. 


RDI

It was a silent activity. I modelled the first two plates for K and "expected" him to join me and he does not need prompts or invitations for such things anymore, especially when you do something cool for the first time. By the third plate, I kind of just sat there and waited for him to regulate his body. He flopped around on the chair and the bean bag for a bit and then gathered himself to take charge. His movements are jerky and not very controlled. It is amazing for me to watch him.

3 years after his diagnosis, he is going to be 6 very soon. In many ways, physically he is still as clumsy as my little girl, who is 1. His "hyperactivity" is just a guise for severe physical dysregulation.

He is not a hyper kid by nature! No one would believe me if they met him. No. Instead what I have learnt about my son over the last few years is that he is a thinker. He is creative and has an amazing imagination. He actually LIKES to sit and color, but he cannot do it, physically. He likes to sit and look at books and try to read them. He is an easy going person. I feel if I peeled off the layers of physical chaos from him, he would emerge a calm, sweet, intellectual type who likes to read and write stories. Someone who would probably enjoy creating something with his hands or solve a complex problem, more than a physical activity. I don't know. I am just guessing.

Anyway, I got lots of great referencing during the salad spinning/painting. Even while he was spinning (which is really stimmy) I got some genuine joint attention and sharing without having to do anything to coerce it. It was fun.

There was shared anticipation when we lifted the lid each time to discover what new design the spinning had created.

He wanted to touch the paint and the patterns it left on the sides of the bowl and on the plate. I got to practise more emotion sharing.

So we still try to use simple frameworks and RDI principles in our interactions, when we can.

Where are we in our RDI?

We are actually at a roadblock in our RDI. Which brings me to the email I mentioned earlier. Someone on that list is always arguing about the ABA vs RDI debate. For us thankfully it was never an either or situation. This has to do with getting the correct guidance and training from the beginning from people who have done both for years with various children. We were so lucky. Something I have learnt over the last few years is to not be cultish about any one thing.

There is no one key, one therapy or one technique that will solve all your problems, regardless of the negative or positive impact of one or the other. You have to pick and choose and maybe even change whatever you do. We chose ABA and we changed it. Our ABA doesn't even look like ABA anymore. It is natural, flexible, flowing, creative and individually suited to K's particular challenges. It is just good teaching. Thanks to great therapists.

In our RDI, we have stopped seeing our consultant for a while. We are kind of at a standstill, where we have made progress but cannot move further. RDI is great in theory and I think they have really nailed the autism deficit and what to remediate and why. However the how is still very murky and that is expected because of the nature of the disability. Every kid comes with some splinter skills, some other deficits. There is no typical autism. A lot of great RDI techniques work for us, and we now truly appreciate that "Its a marathon not a sprint" phrase, because we are now at a point where we cannot speed up to any new RDI objectives. We have to go at a steady pace for a while. We did the Education (phase 1) and when we got to phase 2, our son's obstacles, or co-morbid conditions, or whatever you want to call them did not allow us to move any further.

I have concluded, for now, that due to K's physical dysregulation we may need to just constantly work on the same RDI objectives for years before we can move on to the next phase. Perhaps as he developmentally overcomes these hurdles we will be able to move on to more RDI objectives.


Where to from here?

So that is really the summary. The cultish people will come at you from all directions. ABA is the only research proven thing, nothing else works. ABA is cruel and mindless and will ruin your child's life. Floortime cured my kid. Put him in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Son Rise made my kid typical and now he has a girlfriend. I have been filling my own capsules to give my child the best biomedical treatments for years. We live on chicken soup. And so on and so forth.