Golden Key for Little Kish

COMFORMITY

My daughter works as a teacher assistant in American school with autistic children. It’s a very nice area in a good state. She likes to describe her work with autistic students
Unlike me she is a conformist, easily go with any flow. Although I always supported that way for her, still spending a lot of time together and being in good friendly relationship she could not avoid my rebellious influence. Unlike me, for her working with autism was not a goal, but rather life circumstances, just a job to make living.
First she got into Social Services System and her very first experience was pretty upsetting. She worked with the boy in his house and his mom was involved in everything, giving different instructions. The boy was upset and mother applied behavior plan for him and wanted my daughter to follow it. When mom left, my daughter started to do things on her own (following my way naturally). The boy liked it, his mood changed and he started to laugh. Mom came and expressed her non-approval of what was going on.
- But he likes it, he is happy,- daughter objected
- I don’t like the way he laughs-mom cut it off

Next day daughter was fired from that case. She ended up in Educational System. I could easily worked there as well. But visited schools, which my clients attended I preferred to stay in Social Services, as I found there more freedom to follow a child's path, which I consider very important. My attitude to those kids is a little different than in mainstream- I just deal with certain kid and problems which should be attended. They can cause by certain disease or by something else
 
Here my daughter describes the boy she works with in class

KISH the HARDEST BOY

I have been working with the boy Kishan for the second year. Kishan, we call him Kish for short, in fact the hardest boy in our class, very high maintenance kid. You can’t relax with him even for a minute, you must always keep your eyes open, watch him every minute, be ready to run and catch him up.

COMMENTS about THE BOY I WORKED WITH

Michal was a lovely quiet boy, but parent complained that he should be watched every second as he liked to break and destroy things around the house. Parents found a solution for that. Caregivers always hold his hand and passed it to the next shift. Anybody still surprised that Michal tried to use any opportunity to run away, breaking things on the way? When we created for him different environment, where could move freely around the problem with "breaking things" disappeared.
When I  read description of Kish I feel envious. I’d like to work with Kish. Those independent personalities are my favorite to work with.

DESCRIBTION of Kish

What is this boy about? It is difficult to describe him briefly, he is such an interesting, multifaceted boy, and I have studied him quite well over the past two years.

THE BEAUTIFUL PART of Kish

* Kish is a small thin boy, more like a day care child, than a third grader. Kish has big, very lively, always surprised eyes with long eyelashes.
* Kish - fast as an arrow, freedom-loving and creative in absolutely everything
* Kish is a born engineer. He has an amazing mind-set. He wants to know how everything works, what it's made of. He touches everything, feels everything, he is interested in everything
* Kish is one of those rare kids who doesn’t like to watch anything on a computer or iPad. He is not interested in cartoons, YouTube videos, and games. The only thing he can sometimes be interested in on the iPad is how something looks. At the same time, he has periods of simply manic passion for one thing. Last year it was rickshaws, especially electric rickshaws. Kish and his family travel to India almost every year, so I understand the passion for rickshaws.
* Kish loves to draw. I discovered his talent and passion for drawing last year, and since then I have been using it to the best of my ability. He has a very unusual method of drawing, a kind of technical autistic. He goes through periods when he is very fascinated by something; he constantly draws it, or asks other people to draw it. Last year he drew a lot of rickshaws, this year he went through the Light bulbs, Swings, Guitars- conventional and electric, car seats and booster seats.
*At the same time, he is often interested in the technical side of the picture, where are the fasteners on the car seats, the strings on the guitars. Drawing is not just an interesting pastime for Kish, he seems to comprehend better and deeper what interests him, when he is fond of drawing the same

*Two of Kish's favorite activities are playing and drawing. Whatever he plays with, he almost never plays by the rules. He doesn't like rules at all. Last year, his favorite toy in class was a plastic wagon. How did other children play with this cart? One or two children could sit in it, and we, adults, rolled them. Or one child could sit, while another rolled him. Kish rarely got into the cart to be driven. Most often, he put a board on top of it, a blanket or other toys over it and tried to climb on it all. We reprimanded him to make stop. Or he tried to climb onto the cart and jump down from there. Again, a sea of remarks, you can’t jump from the cart, it’s dangerous, blah blah.

ANNOYING PART of Kish

*If Kish has a question, he will ask it 10, 20, 30 times. Many people do not have the patience to answer the same question.
* This child has completely uncontrollable curiosity and impulsivity. If you just look away for a second, Kish will run up and turn off the lights in the room, or even in the entire dining room. He can also tear a picture off the wall, hit someone, brush things off the table. This is very annoying for those, who work with Kish. I find myself periodically feeling super nervous inside, ready to rush after him at any second to stop his next impulsive action.
*Kish is constantly taking things apart. He has amazing abilities to touch a thing and it stops working.

SAD PART of Kish

*Kish has very pronounced ADHD and ODD (oppositional defiance disorder). I have worked quite a lot with children with autism in the 10 years that I have been in schools. I have seen a lot over the years, many different manifestations of both ADHD and ODD. I have never met such a strong one as Kish's. Usually the system of behavior in public schools for autistic children is quite strong, and in my opinion, not flexible. It makes children obey, helps to cope with their bad behavior. But this system does not work on Kish. It feels like his ODD is getting worse year after year.
* This year we have a very experienced teacher.. It can be seen that she has more experience, she has seen a lot in her work with autistic children. But even she, by the month of May, gave up, she just ran out of ideas of what else can be done to control the extreme behavior of this little skinny boy. It can be seen that she did not meet with such pronounced manifestations of ODD and ADHD.
*Unfortunately, in the realm of public schools, and especially autism support classes, children are most often viewed through the lens of their behavior. There is acceptable behavior and there is unacceptable behavior.
*Most employees have generally accepted norms of what behavior is considered right and what is wrong. Much of Kish's behavior is considered wrong. Kish behaves completely differently from how a child who has already spent 4 years in the Autistic support room should behave. Who was trained tirelessly by the ABA system, who over the years has received several thousand (maybe already several hundred thousand) comments on how not to behave and how to behave.

SYSTEM ISSUES

 Being a member of the Special Education public school system for a very long time. I noticed that with children like Kish,   whose behavior is very annoying for us, typical adults, it is not customary to look at the strengths of such a child. On the part of teachers focus is on negative behavior and it is not customary to emphasize the strengths of the child, to use them, not to let negative traits overshadow the strengths.

This is what my mother used to say when she worked with autistic children. She really worked not in schools, but in social services system. I see something similar in schools.

 We sometimes talk about it, definitely talk about it at trainings, but in life, that is, at school, I don’t observe this. Perhaps because this is a very painstaking task, it takes a lot of time and efforts to notice the strengths when the child behaves so annoying most of the time. It takes a lot of time and efforts to learn how to work with these strengths so that they benefit the child.
Teachers often do not have time in Autistic support. Most of the time our classes are understaffed. Our teachers do not have a chance to be teachers, they often have to play the role of assistants due to lack of people.
KISH and the SYSTEM APPROACH
Because of this, Kish is usually subjected to some pretty severe punishment for his ODD behavior. He is sometimes deprived of a break in the street, he instead has to pick up everything that he has scattered. These would seem to be normal methods of punishment, but I see that in 2 years Kish's behavior has not improved much. Punishment doesn't work. As soon as Kish is irritated, he again does everything in his own way, and again he is forced to pick up, apologize, and not go to recess. The effectiveness of punishment is zero. But no one knows what to do with this child, how to show him that he is behaving incorrectly.

OUTSIDE of SCHOOL PART of KISH

Of course, school is only a small part of a child's life. He spends more than half of his time at home. From what I managed to put together from the words of the teacher last year, at home dad beats Kish mercilessly for his bad behavior. This certainly adds to its ODD behavior. Unfortunately, in many families where there are children with difficult behavior, very often dads cannot accept the behavior of the child. Some of the dads generally stop paying attention to such a child, someone leaves the family, someone takes off the belt and tries to raise the child in this way. I don't see how this method would help Kish, but probably it helps his dad

COMMENT on CHANGING the FOCUS

In a Social System Concentration of Bad Behavior is a main focus and this is the biggest part of problem for Kish and many other kids like Kish.. Many different adults, dealing with a certain kid, respond to his behavior in different ways. Some strict way, some use different technique –positive or negative reinforcements, some simply bribing the kids. I focus in positive and strong traits of the child, using it for unwanted behavior as well.
How it worked with Kish the teacher describes further

LUNCH is TOO LONG

In the very first school year one of the things I was responsible for going to cafeteria with Kish. It takes a maximum of 5, maybe 10 min for Kish to eat his lunch, since everything he does he is in a big hurry to finish. He eats so fast, I wonder if he even chews his food..
Lunch lasts about maybe 30-35 min. With a good 20-25 minutes of doing nothing Kish would start running around the cafeteria and doing other things where I had to discipline him.  I hate disciplining in the pure sense of this word. And Kish is the kind of child who enjoys negative attention, so disciplining him makes no sense whatsoever.
     You need a different tactic with this child who always likes to do things his own way and has a strong opposition to everything that's being said to him. It was especially bad in the beginning of the year. We were put into someone's classroom for lunch. I was new working with a child, like Kish, back then. I got very nervous when he would start running around the room. I felt way too responsible for things he may break.

But again, Kish doesn't really need things to break. When this child has nothing to do and is bored, which happens a lot, when he has any free time, he would just get up and start running around cafeteria. Depending on his mood he can start hitting other kids, out of the blue. I got very nervous and needed to think of something to distract his mind.

NON-HELPING TOOLS

I didn't feel like asking our classroom teacher for help. A lot of staff doesn't understand how to deal Kish. The teacher in the first year was no different. She was into being strict, punishing Kish, having him pay for his actions. That's not how you work with a child, like Kish. Back then I knew about it only intuitively, and after working for many years with autistic kids I've also learned to avoid teachers making me do things with kids that seem counter-intuitive.

Dilemma: What to do during lunch?

So, I started to experiment with toys. We would bring different toys to cafeteria to see if they would occupy him. However, Kish has his own way of playing with toys, a lot of times it's very annoying and unnerving way of playing, at least for us, adults. We tried with different toys, but nothing worked with him

SOLUTION for DILEMMA

Dilemma: What to do to keep this child still for 20 minutes without destroying cafeteria and driving everyone around him crazy?

Well, when my mom worked with special needs kids she always tried to find their strengths and what they really love to do. I follow in her footsteps.

After working with Kish in the classroom I found that this child enjoyed drawing. Kish has a very interesting way of drawing that is different from most kids I know. If he is "obsessed" with some theme his drawing will reflect it. A lot of time it looks like engineer kind of sketching. Kish would get interested in a topic and then he would draw pictures on that topic for days

FINDING COMMON INTERESTS

In 2020 Kish's family came back from India and his obsession back then were rickshaws that he saw in India, we assumed. Back in the classrooms he would ask me to draw him rickshaws. I also enjoy drawing a lot, I spent my entire childhood drawing pictures.

So, I would wonder, how do you draw a rickshaw? We would open a picture of rickshaw on my phone and draw it. With Kish I learned that there are Electric rickshaws, which I've never heard about. Well, after his multiple requests of drawing Electric rickshaws I learned a lot about them. Sometimes I would go on the Internet and read to him about those electric rickshaws, and he enjoyed it a lot.

BACK to CAFETERIA

After many failed attempts with toys I decided to try drawing. I brought some markers and paper from the classroom and ... voila ... Kish loved the idea of drawing in cafeteria.
Drawing is something that this child genially enjoys, so there is NO REASON for him to misbehave, to use art materials in any other way as destroying them.  Kish loves to draw, but in the majority of cases he likes to draw WITH someone.

(Kish needed and enjoyed company!!!, but the one he is comfortable with)

Sometimes he would try to destroy markers or crayons, if he is in bad kind of mood. However, if I sit with him and both draw together, either side by side, or if he asks me to draw things for him, then he is much less into misbehaving.
And here teacher could be creative to use an opportunity to influence bad behavior.
 “You broke crayons Kish. I’m so upset. I wanted to draw an interesting rickshaw with you today. My friend sent it specially for you, knowing how much you love them. But we have nothing to draw with. What could be done? I have no idea. Maybe you have”
Here teacher passes initiative to the child, showing him in a natural and logical way the consequences of his misbehaving. She teachers him being responsible for his own actions, showing “cause and effect”, but not in a form of lecture, but through her own frustration that Kish would not enjoy drawing.

Eventually, our drawing together with Kish in the cafeteria grew into a kind of an Art club. We had so much fun with Kish drawing and talking about things, that other kids from our two other Autistic support classrooms wanted to join us too.
Here there is a great opportunity for a teacher to teach social skills as sharing things or helping each other

TEACHING the NATURAL WAY

In times I considered home schooling my own kids. I've read books and internet resources on that topic, as well as reports on how other home schooling parents do it. I ended up not home schooling; however, I taught them quite a lot of things. What I learned from all those years is that the best way to teach is when a kiddo doesn't realize he is learning. That's how many home-schooling families teach. They don't sit down and lecture, they just learn stuff as they go around and do stuff, as they visit different places.
 The key is to make it interesting for kids. When kids are interested, even those who dislike and oppose learning will still learn, they won't even realize they are doing it.

COMMENTS on KIDS INTEREST

Here the teacher translates my ideas. Follow a kid’s interest and make that interest beneficial for the kid is the way quiet opposite to the System approach. System teaches to forbid child’s interests in order to put his or her attention to other things around. It brings resistance and negativity in kids  as forbidden fruit does

LEARNING THROUGH DRAWING

Well, that's how we learned a lot of interesting stuff with Kish over the 2.5 years of drawing together and finding out about the world through drawing. There was a period this past school year when Kish got into light bulbs. Well, I found a picture of different light bulbs and we learned different types of light bulbs, while drawing them.
Some days Kish is out of ideas what he wants to draw. Well, I noticed that in those cases if I start drawing something Kish would often imitate me. I would often draw kids favorite characters from books and cartoons, like Peppa pig, Bob Square pants, etc. Also I love taking photos of Kish's drawings or our drawings side-by-side. After finishing drawing Kish usually likes to take home his own drawings as well as mine.

COMMENTS on EXTENDING child’s INTEREST

Adults should help kids to keep and diverse the interest. Adult goes along with the child, followers a child path, but makes it bigger, more diverse -wider and richer. It’s a mutual process. They go that way together and often adults find new own interests their for themselves

TAKING PRIDE of HIS WORK

By the end of last school year I was thinking how could we make Kish be more proud of his drawings,  doing such a great job at being curious about things, drawing, learning new stuff?
I saved some of his drawings and decided to put them up in our classrooms.
 But, like with everything, Kish had his own idea of doing it. He taped them into every child's cubby. I loved the idea! I feel like Kish would really benefit from seeing his own drawings in the classroom, it may give him great feelings.

When I worked with Kish in summer school, naturally, we drew a lot during summer school; it's something he and I enjoy so much. We had a display board behind us and I was waiting to see if Krish would come up with the idea of putting there his drawing. He did! So, by the end of summer school we had a board full of his pictures, well, and some of mine.

COMMENTS on a child’s initiative

Kish got more involved in the process. It’s very important to bring his initiatives up and encourage that process

OUR ART CLUB

I'd like to think of our time together with Kish as an art club. Just a fun way of spending time together doing what we both love to do. Eventually, our cafeteria drawing time spread more and more into the classroom. I noticed how relaxing art could be for Kish, especially if he is given enough freedom. Kish often has interesting ideas in addition to drawing. He would draw something. Then he would cut it out; paste it on a different page.

COMMENT on WORKING with UNWANTED BEHAVIOR

Now, after creating such nice productive connection (rapport) it’s a good time to start  working on unwanted behavior together, letting Kish to create his own ideas to change his own behavior. For that an adult should be creative and inventive, carefully and slowly passing more initiative to a child encouraging and increasing any child’s attempt for improvements. It takes a lot of time at the beginning, but those important traits will pay off later. And that is a very interesting way to work with those kids

KEY to AUTISTIC CHILD'S WORLD

Although autistic kids, as regular ones, share common traits, still individual traits are much more pronounced and important for helping a child to progress. What the teacher learned so far is mostly behavior and interests. However, the important part here is finding a key for a child’s personality in order to make changes, spreading out successful "art club" experience to different areas of life, without hurting a child and develop productive and positive traits of his personality.
My daughter took her story out of internet. She works for the System, where approach is different and different rules exist. Maybe she broke some of them. Good result she got, may not go along with System rules. In the System “initiative is punishable” for the most part. System has its own system, oriented that everybody fitted the description of position, would be able to perform his or her duties. So, hoping on System is not reliable.
Parents here are creators and owners of that Key to a Child, growing together with a child on that path
I’ve read many stories on that topic. Parents who chose to follow child’s path were grateful to a child for new things they discovered in themselves and overall in life