Unstructured Time "Boredom" and acting out

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Momsparky,

I have a plastic bin in my closet where I stuff things my daughter has never seen. They can be cheap things like fidgets or cheap color by numbers or sticker mosaics. In a pinch, sometimes it works to pull one out. For us, it has to very simple because if it is complicated it will just cause a meltdown. But sometimes for those "I am irritated and bored!" states perhaps you could stash away some comic books or some things he's never seen before?

For me, the solution seems to be to do nothing and wait for the boredom to pass, aka my brain to reset itself.

It might be helpful to think of it like this:
During special interest happy time, your brain gets into special interest mode and spends a lot of time attending to that one thing. Doing this causes the little blobs in your brain to refine themselves into specific shapes that grow more and more like each other, until all the blobs have become the same specific shape that can only respond to a specific aspect of the special interest, like lock to key, or one specific piece of information about special interest topic. Everything else is automatically rejected, so you can't glom onto anything to do, because none of the keys fit. Meanwhile, you are not allowed to use the key that does fit, maybe because you don't want to use it again (even autistic children have limits of repetition), maybe because you want to find a new key that fits and is as awesome as the old key (even autistic children seek novelty), but nothing around fits, so you are searching for something and failing to find it and unsettled in your "in-between" state. The feeling is similar to the short-term in-between transitioning uncomfortable feeling you would get if you had to stop your special interest to take a shower, except it lasts longer. It's like blah meh clutter blah. Over time, if you do nothing, then the specific shapes will relax and collapse back into random shape-shifting blobs, and at that point, you are ready to glom onto the next thing, because the blobs are flexible and will accept whatever happens to be around as keys. Once you have found another key, the transitional period will be over, and you will feel happily settled again. Maybe this is why your son is spending time in the bathroom doing nothing and rejecting things that you suggest? Because incoming stuff is very uncomfortable to deal with during this "in-between" time, and it is better to have nothing than something impinging upon the shapes that just need to reset themselves.

Unfortunately, for school-age children, they have to conform to school activities and do their homework and take tests and such, i.e. a rigid schedule. It's ironic that autistic children are known for being rigid, but many actually require extra flexibility at school. It's like there's a time when the kid needs lots of structure (happy state), and there's another time when he needs flexible do-nothing time (crappy transition), but schools are not flexible enough to accommodate these needs. It's like an overarching biggest-picture flexibility is missing, so the kids and parents and teachers struggle with these natural swings between states of mind for autism.

Good call. I will try that.