lysikan:

lysikan:

That gets REALLY complex depending on lifestyle. And sometimes yes, lifestyle must be changed. The point I am trying to make is that it is extremely important – autistic kids will have more meltdowns without that routine, and meltdowns are unhealthy and dangerous. So parents need to find a way to do it wherever possible, not just convenient. The worst are poor people who have few/no options in cities that provide no support. I don’t know how they can be helped except to continuously pester cities for more support. (Being sheltered and living in a forest far from cities I do not know what is available.)

Children are being harmed by these issues, but it is NOT always the parent’s fault. Poor and marginalized people have autistic children, too, and find services difficult and/or impossible to find at times.

My goal is to help the parents understand how they can help, not hold them to some standard they can’t achieve or make them feel bad.

For example, If you work for fast food then yeah, you CANNOT have a regular schedule because the fast food industry discourages that, and you shouldn’t feel bad for it. There is nothing you can do to change the industry and it is highly unlikely you’re earning enough to pay a carer that can make the “routines” for you. You do what you have to do.

Reblogging myself to add:

Routines do not need to be “by the clock”. Most of mine are not. They are set, predictable orders of doing things. Same with Baby – she doesn’t care when we go to the grocery store, but when we do we must stop at the ice cream place on the way home because that is what happens after shopping.

In my post on routines I pointed out that the trick is to make the routines around the parts of life you CAN control, and intentionally avoid making routines out of things that you cannot control completely.

For example, watching a TV show can become a routine BUT it’s risky because TV stations annoyingly change their schedules. So avoid it becoming a routine by intentionally doing different things before and after the show. The lack of predictability about that show makes it something that an autistic will not use as an “anchor” point in their day that could later get disrupted and cause stress and meltdowns.

Edit: example of bad routines – I leave work at 6pm. If for some reason I must leave earlier or later the stress is very difficult to handle and I have had meltdowns over leaving hours EARLY simply because it broke a routine and on top of other stress I got lost and couldn’t handle it.

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

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Bonus round:

• Your problem’s solution is clearly a radical restructuring of all of our cultural, political and economic institutions, and advocating any less drastic or more immediately fruitful approach represents a cowardly capitulation to the Man and makes you Part Of The Problem™.