P.U.C.K.
As I reminisce about the three months I spent in this Autism Support classroom, I think about the qualities that all adults and peer helpers in the room needed day to day. I can come up with four things that were essential: patience, understanding, compassion, and knowledge.
1. Patience: The absolute most important quality is patience, yet it sometimes was the most difficult to maintain at times. Patience is needed in all aspects of people with ASD lives. Academically, it may take three months for a student to learn how to read one word, but when they do, the patience that sometimes turned into frustration for them was well worth it and at times an overexaggerated celebration may be in order! Socially, patience is required when working with a person with ASD for example on getting a person's attention properly. Rather than throwing an object in their direction, or hitting them on the arm, they will, with time and patience, learn to say their name, raise their hand (in school), position themselves closer to that person to gain their attention and then their actions are more socially accepted. Behaviorally patience is needed everyday. Since people with ASD often times have limited communication skills, somewhat unacceptable behaviors may arise in order to gain for example a desired activity such as being chased. Instead of saying, "Hey Mr. Charles come chase me", someone might perhaps just start running away. It takes that patience to teach that person some communication (verbal, sign, or with communicative devices and technology) or more socially acceptable behavior to gain what they want. These are just some situations that give you some idea of why patience is of the utmost importance when having people with ASD in your life!
2. Understanding: Understanding is important as well and often times goes hand in hand with patience. One needs this quality to make sense of the situations in which the person with ASD perhaps cannot. You need understanding in order to work with the families, relatives, guardians, and friends in their lives because they often times have an abundance of understanding.
3. Compassion: Compassion is an emotion that one feels for someone who is in pain or who is suffering in one way or another. Though people with ASD are not usually in physical pain, they often seem to experience some sort of emotional or mental suffering as they just do not always have the skill set to "fit in" socially and with their communication skills or strategies. It takes that innate emotion to want to help people with ASD have the skills and strategies so that they do not suffer or experience emotional pain because they cannot just say "My belly hurts today", or "I want to eat fruit snacks for snack today". Compassion is helpful day to day whether you are an educator, parent, sibling, relative, social worker, or store clerk and have some sort of relationship with people with ASD.
*Though these first three qualities are less controllable by us as humans, the last one is the one that you should give yourself credit for because you do have control over it, and you are exercising that control right now. If the first three are not quite as natural to you as they are to some people, they will develop as you learn about ASD and are involved with people and families with ASD.
4. Knowledge: Knowledge and the desire to always learn more about ASD is the only quality that you can truly control because it involves your brain in addition to your heart and emotions. It takes the desire from your heart to want to build the knowledge about ASD in your brain. Knowledge can include building your experiences with people and families with ASD, knowing the facts and statistics about it, attending speeches, forums, or visiting websites written by people or family members with experiences with people with ASD. In the case of this, not disability, but uniqueness in a growing number of people, knowledge truly is POWER!
**Though my experiences with Autism are currently focused on and derived from my time teaching in a classroom, I feel that these qualities can be helpful to being involved with people with ASD at any age or level. My examples are perhaps from my classroom, but can be applied to the "real world" outside of education as well.**
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