Is free choice a good thing for AS kids?

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i can comment on what worked fo rme.
i was an undiagnosed child. now an adult and there was no consideration for my behviour.

I am AS adult now and i can work out the balance with my son, to know what he is struggling with and what he is trying to get away with.

and being hard can be usefull.

i know because i am AS

I think the lesson to be learned from all these posts is that everyone is different .. find out what works best for your child. Perhaps look at the balance of downtime vs scheduled time, and consider giving choices within the scheduled time.

I would suggest that you try to draw up a schedule together ( your son and you) to help him recognise there is a need for some things to be done, but offer choices within that, also I think making sure you have lots of praise for a job well done.

There is always a danger with a child on the spectrum of " blaming " everything on the ASD.. rather than looking at what is he genuinely struggling with because of the ASD, vs 8 year old boy.

I think it is important to mention a couple of things here. First, "freedom of choice", is never free. But you cannot teach this to someone who lives by that "creed". What I mean is that you must be very careful not to confuse what is trying to be taught. This is unfortunately a fine line.
The structure, is important for several reasons.
1. It teaches a child discipline. To do thing because they need to be done, not because they want to, or because they like it. This is something that they HAVE to learn in order to make it later in the real world with little/no support.
2. It helps them, depending upon severity of the ASD, with the concept of time. My son learns using a picture schedule. He didnt like it at first, but now he understand that the rules are rules, and they are there to help him stay with the other kids, or the other kids to stay with him, so, "no child is left behind". From the childs point of view, they soon understand that this means that they "belong", at least in some way, to the world around them. In this case, it is their classroom.
However, if too rigid, it can backfire. In your situation, I would ask for an IEP meeting to discuss what you feel, and voice your concerns. Hopefully, you have a good IEP team, who really wants to see your child succeed. I wish I could say that no IEP teams acted like nothing more than "special-ed babysitters for the unfortunate."
I think its important to remember, that, in the end, the world will prolly do very little changing for the sake of your childs disability. Therefore, it is up to you as a parent, to try to help your child adapt as best as he/she can to the world around them.

Exactly.

When he is in an environment where he must go with the flow and function a certain way or do as he is told, like at school, then it's helpful for him to have a structure so that he knows what to expect and can be prepared for it. Those are circumstances where structure can help a lot.

When he is not in such an environment there is no need to enforce a rigid schedule. It's good to give him some freedom and let him create his own routines and structures. I think it's good to tell him what needs to be done and by what time it must be done, but to let him decide in what order he does those things. Scheduling all of his time is a very bad idea and will just cause him stress and make him feel restricted. AS kids, like all other kids, need a certain amount of freedom.

Hi annie, I can give you an answer first hand.

There isn't really any straight-forward way to deal with every kid of a certain dissablity. So all I can do is tell you what worked for me.

Throughout elementary school and middle school I had a person called an aide who is kind of like a mix between a bodyguard and a security camera. By which I mean they are a professional supervisor that keeps bullies away from the child and also monitors their social behavior and their attitude. The benifits of this style of help is that a student gets one-on-one assistance from an adult. It can be a good way to try and teach social skills. It also allows protection from most open and obvious sources of bullying. Some of the downsides however are that what happens in elementary school is dragged into high school. Even if the child comes to mature to the point where he or she does not need an aide anymore, like I did, the other students cling on to the memory of when he or she did and they use it as an excuse to isolate the child. Jocks and cheerleaders LOVE to do this to special-needs kids. The other downside is that The student observes others without any aide support and may end up feeling inferior and lose confidence in their social interaction.

Another way of doing it is through private social skill improvement sessions. I got a lot of this too. It was hard get me to want to go to the session because I was under the dillusion that I didn't need it. I think what would have worked better for me is if I had someone closer to my age than the person who I had working with me in the session. It wasn't easy, but I will say that going to the session where I got most of the skills I needed to function the way I do today.

Another way is classic discipline. Myself and most students with AS had this dillusion that we are the center of the universe and that there are no rules in life for us, because we are dissabled. Kids with AS need to know that they do have to follow the rules and accept athourity to function in society. I onced had such an embarassing melt down that my father threatened me with military school; no he never sent me, my father is a good man. That is still something that shocks me to this day, but it was probably the first reality check I got that really gave me the message that I needed to change my behavior. It's not fun, but all kids need a sense of discipline.

Many people will tell you that obsessions in AS are a problem. I would argue that the problem is that they cannot maintain social contact and have trouble making friends due to their obsessions. But I would encourage your child to further explore their passionate interests, rather than trying to pry them away from them. My elementary school obsession with cartoons pushed me to be who I am today. I draw a comic in my school newspaper that is rapidly growing in popularity. I am also majoring in animation and had made Dean's last year.

Well I hope this was helpful to your questions. Don't just take my word for it though, I'm sure other people on the forum have some good answers too.

I NEVER had free choice as a kid. Just an empty choice once in a blue moon. Everything was decided for me. What to wear, what to eat, what I could do, etc. I was always wanting to do art projects but my mom was paranoid of messes. I wanted to explore the woods behind our house (the only fun thing to do in the boonies), but my mom was too overprotective. I hated being a child because I felt like a slave or somene's minnion.

Quite understandable. It's hard for a kid when they want to explore and the parents box them in. Yeah, a little bit of discipline is needed but that's too strict.

There are so many good ideas in these posts - thanks everyone. I especially found it helpful to hear about the need for (some) AS people to have freedom to make their own choices within structure, and there was a good point about teaching children to structure themselves. I guess this means that I need to find the fine line between giving freedom and choices within a structure.

It was also really helpful to have some input from AS adults on needing to keep discipline and not thinking that you have to relax all the rules just because a child has AS and finds it harder to cope. I tend to favour positive behaviour support approaches. My AS son still gets the same consequences for bad behaviour as his NT siblings, but I tend to coach him through the process more with more of a "how can we make this better for next time" attitude.