Socially Acceptable Strategies
You've identified your child's most pressing sensory integration- related problems. You've looked at the unacceptable ways she adjusts for these. You've strategized, in the abstract, about other people and other situations. Now, lead your child to apply her newfound skills to solving her own pressing problems.
You'll want to be a resource for your child. You have years of observation to share, and years of changing the environment and manipulating circumstances to contribute to this project. You can help your child examine his ideas thoughtfully and rule out ones that either don't improve the situation or make it worse. But the ideas need to come from your child. He will know best what works for him, and he will be less resistant to strategies that are not being imposed on him from the outside.
Using Words
One strategy your child can concentrate on is finding ways to use words instead of behavior to express discomfort and upset. This can be hard for your child with sensory integration disorder because her responses are sometimes spontaneous and impulsive, and she may not be able to stop and think during times of stress and distress.
However, if she knows ahead of time that something may happen that will upset her, she can ask beforehand for a change in her environment. And if a bad and disruptive reaction does occur, she may be able to explain what happened and smooth over potential behavioral conflicts.
It will help if you can practice this strategy with your child so that he has plenty of opportunity to build a “word bank” in his head well before he needs to use it outside the home. Play-act situations where he may become upset and have him rehearse what he could say before or after. Enact the role of a teacher, friend, or other person your child might have a behavioral flare-up with, and give him a variety of reactions to respond to.
Your child will likely still have meltdowns from time to time, even as you're discussing and strategizing and learning together. When this happens, use it as a teaching opportunity. Describe what you see her doing and what you see her reacting to. Afterward, brainstorm on things she could have done instead.
Avoiding Conflict
Walking away from something that bothers or upsets you may seem like an obvious solution, but your child may feel that he doesn't have that option. Sometimes he's right — he can't just get up and walk out of class, or out of the house, or off the playing field. There are times, though, when he will be able to politely avoid something he knows will cause his sensory system to overload. Encourage him to think of situations when avoidance might be a better choice than aggression or overreaction.
As you encourage your child to politely avoid things that bother him, allow him to use those techniques around the house. Let him choose things like what to wear and what to eat. As long as he expresses his preferences appropriately and doesn't cause more work for somebody else, honor his efforts to stay away from overstimulating things.
If your child has been successfully avoiding things that cause her sensory distress, it's likely been by misbehaving — getting sent to the principal so she doesn't have to deal with something in the classroom, dropping a plate on the floor so she doesn't have to eat what's on it, hitting a classmate to keep from being touched, spilling something on clothes she doesn't like, dawdling and arguing to avoid an unwanted activity.
Talk with your child about how ineffective those strategies are. Most of the time, she still winds up having to do the hated thing, and she does it under more stress and tension. Have her think of other ways she could reach the same goal. Role-play and practice, using your responses to discourage ways you think would be ineffective and encourage ones that are.
Organization
Your child with sensory integration disorder and motor planning problems may find putting together an organized plan for a particular activity or a particular day to be nearly impossible. He can't find where he put things or remember what he's supposed to do because his brain is as disorganized as his room, notebook, and locker. Your child may not understand that there's a more organized way to be, and if he does understand, he may not think that he can do it. Patterns of organization that look clear-cut and much easier to you may seem inscrutable and unhelpful to him.
Urge your child to focus on one small area that is as annoying to her as it is to others. She may be perfectly comfortable with her messy room and her loaded backpack and her trash-strewn locker. But maybe she wishes she could find things more easily in her closet or her purse or her notebook. Maybe she's frustrated at getting no credit for homework she worked hard on but couldn't find to turn in. Maybe she would like to participate in an activity or help with something around the house but can't put the steps together to do it. Finding something she's highly motivated to do will make it more likely that she'll do what she needs to be successful.
Motivation that comes from your child's own wants and needs will be more successful than motivation you provide from the outside. That doesn't mean that your goals for your child aren't important. The more practice she gets in managing sensory needs, the more she will be able to extend them to things that are important to others.
Project Break Down
As you learned to break motor tasks down into small, small steps for your child, teach him now how to do this for himself. Have him practice with situations in books or on television. Cook with him and break down with him what's involved in each step in the recipe — it's rarely just one activity. Even heating the oven involves walking to the oven, finding the right dial, and turning it with just the right amount of force to reach the right number. You can do the same with anything that has steps, from fixing a car to installing computer software to setting up a video game.
Once your child is adept at breaking things down, have her apply that new skill to a small organizational challenge of her own. If it's an activity that needs to be organized, have her concentrate on doing one small broken-down piece at a time. If it's a space that needs to be organized, try to use categories and containers to break a big mess into smaller messes and reduce the amount of decision-making that has to be done. The enormity of an entire task may be too daunting for your child to find her way through, but one small thing a day, or one small thing at a time, may be a challenge she can meet.
