Generally the kids who have high functioning autism have difficulty with working memory, impulse control and organization. And there’s a pretty good research to back that up, but in terms of daily functioning, what we tend to see is dis-organization and inflexibility. So the kids tend to be rigid, they have trouble problem solving in the moment. If they are disappointed or things don’t go the way they expect them to, the way they did yesterday they have trouble problem solving for what they do instead.
They have trouble problem solving about their own emotions. So that need to step back and think about your own feelings and decide what you’re going to do in relation to what you feel is often surely out of whack for these kids. So we need to teach them better flexibility and then they’re often very disorganized and so we need to help them to learn habits and routines that foster better organization.
Early in their development, folks who are high functioning tend to have problems with impulse control. That seems to get better over time and the kids, the teens, the young adults tend to be less impulsive, better able to manage impulsiveness.
What we do about that problem with flexibility, the problems with organization, they’re not that much different than what we do for any child because the interventions are not diagnosis-specific, it’s only the combination of problems that can sometimes be diagnosis-specific. And there’s so much overlap. There is no way that we can go into brains at this point and change them, and so what we’re doing is we are teaching them how to manage these tasks in life better at the same time that we’re supporting them until they can learn those strategies and until their brain develops.
