Children with autism often find it hard to recognize and control their emotion and struggle to communicate and express how they feel. And usually, parents misunderstood it as that an autistic child has no emotions or feelings which is actually far away from the truth.
In reality, an autistic child has as many emotions as anyone else. It’s just you need to work more on your child to help him learn how to recognize and process emotions and express his feeling. However, actually doing this is not as easy as it seems. You have to learn a lot about it, spend a whole lot of time with your autistic kid, and sometimes may need the help of experts as well. Our online Autism Social Network JuliasFriends can help you big time in doing so.
Children with autism spectrum disorder often experience difficulty recognizing facial expressions, the tone of voice and body language of other people. Therefore, the first step is to make them learn how to recognize, process and understand emotions then you can work on the communication part. So, here are the three simple real word tips that will help you teach your autistic child how to understand emotions:
Use emotion cards
Emotion cards is a great way of teaching your child basic emotions. These cards contain pictures of images, either real or cartoon, which help children with autism understand and identify basic feelings and emotions. These images are against a plain background and show the upper body and face which depicts the single emotions. You can teach basic emotions to your child using these images. Once your child starts recognizing six basic emotions- happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust, you can proceed one step ahead and start teaching more complex feelings like pride, guilt, embarrassment, shame, and joy. It will help your child develop a thorough understanding of emotions.
Social stories
Social stories program works great for a few children while some seem to be least interested in these stories. Social stories program include narration of a story to an autistic child. Social stories are presented in a book and use photos or illustration to explain emotions. You can also use different tones of voice while narrating a story to a child to make him understand the emotion behind the sentence. You can learn more creative ideas of storytelling on our Autism Social Network, JuliasFriends.
Talk to your child in neutral times
It plays a very important role in teaching a child with autism about emotions. When you actually communicate with your child, he is more likely to learn about emotions and feeling from real life communication. Talk to your child in neutral times and guide them on how to control emotions in extreme situations. Encourage your child to speak and try to interact with your child so that he or she learn and gain experience from communication with you.
So these are the three simple tools to help your autistic child understand emotions. You can learn more about it by joining JuliasFriends, an autism social network for families.
