Have you noticed this in regards to your hold with Autism? Have you noticed how hard they are on themselves? I see this plainly demonstrated every single day in house and today was no exception. 

In my experience, kids on the Autism Spectrum seem to expect nothing less than perfection from themselves and even the slightest hint of even the tiniest mistake can lead to an enormous meltdown.

This morning, Gavin was downstairs cleaning out the litter boxes and he came upstairs tell me that we were out of litter.  I knew we weren’t, so I asked him if he’d walked through the whole basement and so he went back down to look again. 

Once again he came up empty handed and I asked him again if he had actually looked around or walked through the basement.  This time he was visibly upset because he hadn’t yet done what I had suggested.  In fact, his argument for not looking around was why would it be somewhere else in the basement?

I sent him back down and asked him to please follow my instructions to the letter and physically walk through the basement and see if he can find it. 

He went back down and then I heard him getting really upset and start hitting himself. 

When I went to make sure he was okay, he was freaking out because he had found the cat litter but felt stupid because he didn’t see it earlier. 

I explained that he’s not stupid and the reason he didn’t see it had nothing to do with him being an idiot either.  It was simply because he had assumed that the cat little could only ever exist in one place.  If it wasn’t in that one place, it simply didn’t exist and that’s why it’s so important that he both listened to and followed my instructions. 

This kind of thing happened all the time.  If I send one of my kids to their room to get a clean school shirt, they will look in the draw that usually houses these shirts.  If one isn’t there, than they assume they don’t have any, rather than check all their drawers because Daddy is the only one that puts them were they belong.  lol

Each time they get upset because they were wrong.  Each time I tell them to look in all their drawers,  they come back only having checked the one. 

I think this falls into the generalization category and these situations are tough to address because they are so hard on themselves already. Saying anything, even if it’s to reassure them everything’s okay, doesn’t usually go over well. 

I feel it’s important to address this anyways because they have to learn from these types of situations.  Getting super upset serves to overshadow the whole experience and that’s not a good thing. 

Do any of you folks see this kind of thing in your house?.?