Critical Conversations: Importance of Safety

Why is instruction on safety important, even for adolescents with autism? Well, hygiene and safety for our guys, or for individuals with autism is difficult for a lot of people to address. Again, when we get into some more of the personal areas, our children, depending on their functioning level, some of our more profoundly affected children, the biggest problem we have is they may not have these skills as late as 14, 15, 18. And who's going to be in charge of helping them to still learn hygiene at the age of 18? Who's in charge of that? So it gets to be a difficult task and a difficult conversation to have with families about who's now in charge of some of these skills. When it comes to the safety area that we talk about, predominantly, we're really looking at what we call joint attention. So our children with autism don't have what we call joint attention, and that is looking to others for the cues of what happens when you're in a situation where you might be in danger. So many of our children could walk right out into the street and get hit by a car, because they don't understand that when mom or dad are sort of frightened by something, that they should also be frightened by it. That's how many of us learn appropriate safety and staying away from danger, and how some of us have even learned unreasonable, be afraid of thunder. You learn that because somebody else showed it to. You it's not an innate thing to be afraid of thunder. But our children never really look to their families, their teachers, or their parents for that advice. So we have to teach every one of those steps to them specifically.