hi it's Lynn your adulting coach.
Seth Perler is the founder of the executive function online Summit (TEFOS) where he brings together the best minds who are helping alternative Learners make the most out of their lives.
This video is a quick summary of the 12 great ideas that he presented at one of those Summits. I found it so helpful because it gave me a wonderful overview of what I needed to always keep in mind with my autistic graduates. Here are his 12 ideas. I'm going to go through each one of them.
Let's start with the first one: the root of educate is EduCare in Latin. It means to raise up, to bring forth, to to bring up, to bring forth. That's what we are doing with our kids. We are still in an educator's role. I think, as I have kids that are in their 50s, it feels like I'm going to be in that role for the rest of my life.
So I just want to make sure that I'm warning them and giving them the best thoughts that I can possibly come up with. That I've done the research to be to act and practice the things that really make me the best guide for them.
He suggests that our kids need a resistant mindset because of their executive functioning challenges. Here is a list of all the aspects of executive functioning. I'm not going to read it but it probably means that if something isn't working in their lives it's related to the resistant mindset from executive function challenges.
We need to help them move their mindset to a growth mindset where they are willing to take on a little bit to expand their comfort zone and get better at life.
Seth says that their mindset for things they like is fine but for executing on uncomfortable but important tasks, it's not so good. That's where we need to break things down and give them the encouragement they need to take things one step at a time at their own pace.
He argues often that there's no quick fixes or Magic Bullets in the the challenges that they face. We have to keep working at it from many angles and it takes time and patience and persistence but everything is figure-out-able. We'll just take it one step at a time.
The thing to keep in mind when we see that resistance is that when something triggers us the brain is activated in two ways. It sends a signal to the body to fight, flight, freeze, or Fawn.
Then it sends another signal at the same time to try to figure out. to predict. if we are threatened. Our predictions come from the stories that we tell ourselves. So it's an immediate hit to the body when we have something that triggers us and then our brain tries to figure out whether or not it really is something we need to spend our energy, our resources on ,if we're safe or not. and if it threatens our belonging to our tribe.
Good to keep in mind that it's a biological process and the poly vagal theory suggests that we want to explore the link between what's happening in our brain and how it it flows down to our body and then back up again to our brain. That we want to alleviate much of the anxiety as we can teach our kids that that it's mostly from the stories that we tell ourselves and that there are ways to use our body to re-regulate our brain so that we can it can come back online in that problem solving connection mode instead of staying in the protection mode.
So our kids get lots of labels and one of Seth's ideas is that we need to know the the definition of these next three.
1 An asynchronous learner refers to the fact that we don't all grow synchronously. In other words sometimes parts of our skills are ahead of other parts and we want to notice that. Sometimes this begets that term "high functioning" autism which means that they're really able to handle learning but sometimes social thinking and other skills like flexible thinking can lag. That's just what asynchrony means that they're not all happening at the same time.
2 Atypical Learners or alternative Learners are just not typical in any way that they learn. They just do not appear successful in the ways that they're measured in schools. Sometimes that sends our kids a signal that they are not good enough. We want to make sure that we help them process those signals.
Sometimes they don't really come out though until they have graduated and now they're trying to get into the work world and they realize oh I am different enough. I need to pay attention to how I can best manage some of the impacts of having an autistic brain so I get what I want.
here's the difference though here are the big problems that they face:
1. They appear unsuccessful
2. They start out really strong on something and then they dip. Seth sees us in school in the semester you know as it progresses we often see it when they are excited about a new job and they the honeymoon period starts to wane and they kind of go into that dip where they're dealing with all of the differences that they have to handle between life before and life after after this job. Then sometimes they can catastrophize how it's just going to be awful in the future and ourkids spend a lot of time in the future worrying about what might go wrong it's just the kind of brain that tends to be extra sensitive to any stimulus.
Here's Seth's answer to systems habits and routines he calls it Franken-study. He wants to emphasize that we have to customize the way that our kids solve problems. They have to be personalized to their preferences learning style and executive function needs. They may need scaffolding longer than we'd like, but we need to keep providing it until they don't really don't need it anymore. Often we take the kinds of supports that they we've given them that have made them be successful often and we take them away a little bit too soon.
The whole idea though is that we're just practicing, just start somewhere. Take a baby step when we're trying to increase independence skills. We want to take those mindsets systems and habits and practice them until they're "good enough." We're not looking for perfection. "Good enough" will work for our kids and of course we want to get them good enough and then hope that they will continually improve and up level their own independence skills.
The Iceberg Theory is very helpful to explain that what we see at the top, the behavior, is only an indication of what's going on inside. The invisible struggles that our kids experience are hard for us to understand, hard for others to understand so what we want to do is to really pause to ponder that's something that's happening. We may have already decided it's annoying or whatever or sad or whatever story we want to assign to it. But what's happening what's really going on underneath the surface?
I know you've heard this concept before and the last is that attachment theory is the 12th and most important concept to pay attention to. It's our relationship above all else. We can only influence our kids if they know, like, and trust us. They know that we are on their side. They can trust that we will be there to support them. They like us enough to be in our presence.
It's important that that we don't pander to them in any way shape or form, but that we are compassionate, not only with ourselves but also with them. We recognize that this world that we're in has at least 3% autistic brains which you know in the 8 billion people is 240 million which is a sizable population. What's happening in their lives is often quite normal for that population just atypical. it doesn't fit into the bell-shaped curve. It's just another way of living and we have got to help them figure out how they want to accommodate the the non-autistic world and how they can expect the non-autistic world to accommodate them and advocate for those accommodations.
So those are 12 great ideas um we want to keep in mind. if you'd like a copy of the PDF summarizing them, click on the link in the notes. Bye for now!
