Join Dr. Regan for her third episode in a series about transitioning back to school while navigating daily life. This episode focuses on the role of mentoring in helping your autistic teen or adult navigate obstacles and challenging life experiences. Understanding Autism Book Series Autism in the Adult website Hello, everyone. This is Dr. Teresa Regan. I'm happy to be joining you for another episode of Autism in the Adult podcast. I'm a neuropsychologist, a certified autism specialist, and mom to a young adult on the autism spectrum. We're continuing our series about transitioning back to school for the autistic student. Now, let's go back to our student, Alyssa. We have talked about her as an example for the first two episodes in the series, and I'd like to continue with her as our illustrative point. She entered ninth grade cautiously optimistic, and she really did quite a good job of preparing for that transition. She knew where her classes were. She practiced opening her locker. She organized her school supplies. And then as she transitioned back, the days accumulated and began to feel like school was really costing her nervous system more than anyone had anticipated. And so by the end of the week, she was becoming quieter. She started sleeping after school. Her stomach started hurting on Sunday evenings. And getting to school just became much more difficult even though there hadn't been a real traumatic thing that had happened. So one of the things that I think is difficult for parents is what is the parent's role at this point? Is it to, you know, grab her and put her in the car and drag her to school? Is it to let her stay home until she feels comfortable enough to go without stress? Where is that balance point? What is the role at that age? So I think that the sweet spot of balance, is something much more interesting and useful that we can do as parents, and that is to begin mentoring our students about how to navigate daily life. And I love the word navigate. I think about the image of sailing or boating. And the reason I like this image is that it's true that we can learn an enormous amount of facts and knowledge by reading a book about sailing or boating. We can learn the names of the sails. We can learn how the rudder works. We can memorize different kinds of knots. We can steady weather patterns. And at the end of all that, we could probably take a test about sailing and get every question correct. Why? Because we can memorize the facts, the knowledge that is written out in this book. But I would still not necessarily want to get into a sailboat with you during a storm. How does this knowledge that we have, this memorization of facts, how do we translate that into actual living and doing and navigating? Knowing about sailing and sailing are not the same skill. And sometimes we treat them like they are. So sailing means taking everything you know and applying it to a particular boat on this particular water with this weather pattern, this wind movement, and this moment. And then something changes unexpectedly. Of course, it always does. The wind changes direction. The water changes pattern. Something about the boat isn't working quite as we expected. And now what? And that's where this ability to navigate, how do we use the knowledge that we've memorized? How do we navigate? How do we live life and turn these factual things we know into actual doing? And that's the incredibly important distinction for any human being, but also particularly for the autistic. Now, the autistic often has a great memorization ability and enormous amounts of knowledge in their brain. And they can often memorize information much better than the typical person. They may understand the rule perfectly. They may even be able to explain to someone else what exactly is supposed to happen. And that's why it can feel so confusing to see this person struggle in daily life. We might say, but this person is so smart, they're full of facts, they're full of knowledge. Why are they struggling with day-to-day things? And that is, though, the most common pattern of strength and struggle for the autistic, that, they have great amounts of knowledge and facts, but this translating and navigating into everyday life may be something that needs more mentoring. sharing. We may say she knows she's supposed to ask her teacher if she doesn't understand something, or he knows how to do laundry. I've explained it before. She knows that she feels better after she takes a walk or reads a book. And that's true. They're filled with knowledge, but knowing is only one part of the process. And the much more complicated question becomes, how do we take what we know, and use it to navigate this particular situation? And that is where mentoring becomes so important. With Alyssa, perhaps we start here. We can see that something isn't quite working, but we don't know what it is. What is the barrier to going to school, to getting through the day, to being in this marathon of school every day, not just sprinting for one day? So we're not starting with this position of you need to go to school, just do it. We are not saying you need to fix your attendance. We're saying, wow, we can see that something isn't working and we don't know what it is. So let's mentor, let's partner, let's collaborate about what to do when we hit a point in life where we're not sure what the barrier is. How do we identify what the struggle is when we don't have words for it, we haven't figured it out, but something is not working. Maybe we say, your nervous system doesn't seem to be getting enough recovery during the school day. Or we've noticed that you can get through school, but by Friday you're exhausted, you're sleeping all afternoon. Or maybe we say, you've told us that swinging really helps your body feel calmer, but at school you don't have anything that gives your nervous system that same kind of reset. Or I feel like maybe your teacher doesn't understand why leaving the class for 10 minutes helps you stay for the rest of the day. And when we kind of do this wondering together and we look at clues together and we gather hypotheses, I wonder if this is the case. I wonder if this would help. I wonder how your body feels about this. Next, we then have something we can navigate. So this is actually the first skill. In addition to getting to school, we're actually teaching the skill of identifying what the barrier is and putting it into words. What is the challenge in front of me? And sometimes the young person can identify what it is, and sometimes they just really can't. And that's true for everybody. Sometimes we know that something's difficult, but we haven't really put our finger on what it is. We haven't been able to find words that adequately describe it. And that's okay. That's where the mentoring of the parent or the counselor or the teacher can come in. And we might say, well, what I've noticed is this. what have you noticed? What part of the day feels hardest, or when does your body start to feel different? What happens right before you start wishing you could go home? And these may be very difficult things to answer, and that's why it's part of the journey of learning how to navigate these things. But the point is that this is a specific process where we're gathering clues, we're wondering together about what's happening, and we're trying to find words, and we mentor that together. Once we have helped this individual and partnered with them to say, okay, this seems to be the point of most distress or the most struggle that we have, these are the words we're going to used to it. It seems to be linked to this kind of thing. Then we teach and mentor strategizing. Suppose we figured something out, and Alyssa says that after she gets home, when she goes straight outside to swing, she feels much more settled. And the parent thinks, oh, this makes a lot of sense, because either she comes home and she sits on the couch with a blanket over her head and just sits in that quiet dark, or she goes straight outside and swings. And so having this knowledge is a great place to start. Okay, so swinging helps your nervous system regulate and by regulate we mean stay centered, calm, alert, fully present, not overwhelmed. So great, but then we're not finished. Now comes the life skill of how do we translate factual knowledge, about what regulates your nervous system. This is what I know. How do we translate that into doing something that's helpful, into a strategic choice for how we're going to build the day? Perhaps we say, okay, we know that movement helps your nervous system, and obviously, you know, we can't put a backyard swing in the middle of English class, so, let's think about what might give your nervous system some of the same input at school. So now we're strategizing. This is the life skill you want to teach. Not only how do you get through the school day, but how do you approach a challenge like this? Well, you try to pinpoint it and put words around it and hypothesize, and then you try to use the knowledge that you gained you, by translating it into doing something, and that doing needs to be strategic. So we're talking about strategizing. Could the student walk during her break at school? What about taking the stairs? Does that feel restorative? What about 10 minutes in the gym or using resistant bands? What about carrying something heavy to the office? Could they take a scheduled movement break before the period of the day where their capacity tends to drop? If the swings aren't available, is there a rocking chair in the school that they could use, maybe in the counseling office, because rocking gives a bit of the same movement input that swinging does. So it's not necessarily helpful for mom or dad to immediately announce the solution or to take them out of the environment that is challenging. But this process of mentoring how do I strategize ways to be okay in
