Aggressiveness Problems vs Drawing Pictures

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Story Number One: I was in a group of parents with children on the spectrum. One mother mentioned that her upper-elementary-school child yesterday was aggressive and has caused injury to a young child. The parents in the group then started to brainstorm what could be done to remove the aggressiveness in the autistic child. I sat quietly there.

Quietly, because if people asked me what they needed to do to solve this problem, I would tell them, listen, draw pictures, and parents should have done that since when their autistic children were 2 years old. But then, of course, no one in the group would have been able to understand what drawing picture had anything to do with solving behavioral problems. That was why I stayed quiet.

What can you do? It's like playing chess. While I see 10 moves ahead, other people see only one move down the game. When you see 10 moves ahead, you develop some kind of strategy, some instinct, or sixth sense, on what needs to be done.

See, it's not the first time this child has been aggressive, the problem has existed for years. School people, parents, ABA people, have spent years addressing this problem. Guess what? It all went nowhere.

Are some children born naturally aggressive? Is it a character problem? I don't think so. I think it is a communication problem. Go on YouTube and search for "The Miracle Worker," the story about Helen Keller. Guess what? Before Helen Keller learned to understand hand-spelling, she was rather violent. Tell me, when Helen Keller was violent, what kind of behavioral treatment could have helped? The answer is: NONE. The only thing that could have helped, was for Helen Keller to learn hand-spelling. Now, what does hand-spelling have anything to do with solving behavioral problems? The answer is: everything. Without hand-spelling, Helen Keller had zero way of communicating with the outside world. That was the one and only one channel of communication left for her. Anybody that didn't use that channel to communicate with her, effectively was sending noise to her. And you wonder why she was violent?

Aggressiveness is not the issue in autistic children. Underdevelopment is the issue. The problem is, parents/teacher/ABA people have reversed the priority in the development of autistic children. They constantly aim to solve short-term problems, while forgetting to properly raise these children for the long term. They forget that the most important thing is to build up connections inside these children's brains.

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Story Number Two: the other day I remembered about the story of Sally and Anne. It's a well-known psychological test developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and others. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test. I looked at the picture, and thought it would not be clear to many children on the spectrum. For one thing, Sally and Anne's memories and thoughts were not depicted in the picture. If I showed the picture to my son, I would have had no good way of talking to him about abstract things like people's memories and thoughts. So, I changed the picture by adding in some "thought bubbles." I also added in words like "prank" and "duped." Prank, because my son loved to pull pranks on me. So, it was one of his special interests. And we all know the starting point to teach autistic children is by leveraging their special interests. "Duped," because I was pretty sure he did not know that word, so it would be good to add it to his vocabulary. See, I always tell people I have one and only one tool to develop autistic children, and that is "modulation." You peg what you truly want to teach on the back of a "carrier signal," which in this case was my son's passion for pulling pranks on me.



Then I used the print-out sheet to talk to my son. I was not using it as a test. I wanted to use it as a way to build up more connections inside my son's brain. I made my son read the story, then asked him where Sally would be looking for the marble. He said in the box. Ha ha. Then, I went through the sheet, and pointed to the thought bubbles, and discussed with him what Sally was thinking and what Anne was thinking. I also asked him what "duped" meant. My son said he did not know. Then I explained to him that it meant "tricked." We had a good time going through the story.

The next day, he asked me for the print-out. To my surprise, he added two pages and made it into an assignment. Here are the questions he added:



So, there you go. Now I have proof positive that he understood everything I have discussed with him. So, in the future, whenever I need to talk about people thoughts/memories/perspectives, I can always refer back to the Sally-and-Anne story.

Do people realize something? My son took his time to prepare the question sheets. I took my time to prepare the modified story sheet. We both communicated VISUAL-MANUALLY. To other people, this may all seem a very slow way of learning and communicating. But if you look into it, visual-manual communication actually involves a deeper thought process. All important events/decisions in human history, go through the visual-manual channel. That's what your birth certificate / driver licence / passport / contracts / paychecks are: visual-manual. That's how spaceships are built.

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Parents that look into quick solutions to their children's aggressiveness issues, usually end up not solving the issues after 5, 10 or even 20, 30 years. So, is that any faster than learning to communicate visual-manually?

When your children's brains are still largely blank, with virtually no useful connections established inside, how do you expect them to understand your message regarding not to be aggressive?

There is just no shortcut. To raise your children, you need to open the right channel of communication. Your refusal to open the visual-manual route of communication, is akin to refusing to teach Helen Keller hand-spelling. You then complain about the aggressiveness of your children, the same aggressiveness observed in Helen Keller before she learned to communicate. You think you can take a shortcut. But there is no shortcut. Your end result is that your children stay underdeveloped, for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, I have moved ahead to teach my son about other people's thinking and perspectives, using the Sally-and-Anne story. When will your children catch up?

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Nowadays everyone takes picture on their smartphones. The problem is, photo images often have unwanted shadows. I have finally figured out a good way of removing the shadows efficiently in GIMP. Here are the before and after pictures:

Before


After


I have placed the instructions at: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-use-GIMP-to-clean-and-render-a-photo-image-of-a-sketch-drawing

ABA is not a good thing and is based on terrible ideas.
"Aggression" comes out of frustration and sensory overload. If this kid is non-verbal, the last thing he needs is ABA, he needs a speech therapist that works with alternate communication. Sensory needs also need to be addressed.
If you talk to that parent again, this is all you need to say. Putting a highly frustrated kid through ABA, which is clearly not working is going to affect him for LIFE.

You are also at fault if you do nothing.

I agree that improving communication will help tremendously with solving aggression issues, but I hope that when you communicate ideas to parents you can refrain from the "should have done since two years old," "ten steps ahead," and "chess master" talk. People turn away from your arrogance and inability to accept the thought process of others, not your ideas.

The amount of "I'm superior to them" message in this narrative is nauseous.

Yes, the simple idea: "communicate with your child in any channel that works (and drawing works fairly often) and you will see enormous behavioral improvement" is right.

When will your children catch up?

There are different types of Autistics. From my perspective Autistic brain development met an impasse along the way and stopped moving up the road of normal childhood development. I am a pattern thinker. But there are some where brain development stopped earlier. They are visual thinkers like Temple Grandin. Your method seem well focused on pulling visual thinkers up a notch towards becoming full fledged Aspies (high functioning autistics) and beyond.

I do not know a great deal about low-functioning and mid-functioning autistics (LFA & MFA), but if your training techniques can successfully target that population, it is of great value. The target audience may not be HFA but what came before them - MFAs and LFAs.

I just made an YouTube video about image background etching with GIMP. The screen capture was done with "OBS Studio." It's the first time I use it, so I probably did not tweak it optimally. Nonetheless, I am happy with the overall outcome. Minor video editing done with Shotcut. Minor audio editing done with Audacity. All the three apps (OBS, Shotcut, Audacity) are free, and all are also cross-platform.



(One could get fancy by vectorizing the final result with Inkscape to obtain an even better outcome. But that step is a bit more involved and is not shown in this video.)

Happy New Year!

All you need to do to record is windows shift g

Thanks. I checked the Windows Game Bar thing about one year ago, but
(1) It's an XBox thing. Not everyone is a gamer. Having the open the XBox app and sign in was a deal breaker for me.
(2) I interact with parents that use MacOS and Windows alike. So I much prefer cross-platform solutions.
(3) It does have a number of limitations. Per this video:



There was also the Icecream screen recorder that was popular, but the newer free version introduced watermark. So, that option was gone as well.

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A side comment.

It's getting pretty hard to fetch information out there via Google. I mean, screen recording is not some advanced app anymore, yet there are way too many misleading links when I google for this type of info. Same thing with smartwatches. Garbage reviews all over places. I was listening to "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel today. The passage about "People talking without speaking. People hearing without listening ..." kind of all makes sense, now. It also reminds me of Bob Dylan's "The Boxer": "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest ..." Those were all visionaries of our modern world. We've accustomed ourselves to the Twitter style of communication. Shallowness everywhere. A lot of chatter, but I guess that's all what Paul Simon would call "The Sound of Silence," or more elaborately as described by Art Garfunkel: "the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other."

You don't actually, it saves the video to your videos file.