Understimulated children

Post Reply New Topic

I told the father of my son this:

"Also, promise me that you're not going to teach Finn to sit still and behave himself. And definitely don't teach him that there will be negative consequences if he doesn't sit still. I never want him to be understimulated. Encourage him to eat a lot and move around a lot and do a lot and talk a lot."

Don't overdo it, sitting still and concentrating are very useful life skills. When he's older and has coursework, exams or a desk job he'll be glad he knows how.

What is interesting to me is that you and I have a totally different understanding of "understimulated."

I tend to use the terms overstimulated and understimulated to refer to the what external factors are doing to the child. Here, you are using it to refer to internal stimulation. I am going to guess that your type of usuage is a totally Aspie thought process. So I want to caution you on how you use it. If you tell a teacher that "you never want your child understimulated" she likely is going to think that you want interesting things to be constantly thrown at him. She's not going to jump to assuming you want your child to be able to move and stimulate himself.

As a parent to an AS child, I have learned that my son needs motion to keep his mind engaged, and we've shared that with his teachers and others, and they understand it and allow for it. But when my son complained about his religion teacher, who is a volunteer, not allowing him to have his feet up on his chair like all his school teachers do, I realized that one hour a week of practicing sitting still, feet on the floor, wasn't going to hurt him, and I told him so. There will be times in life that one needs to be able to do this, and he understood. I think he learned more about sitting still than religion that year, but so it goes.