At the time, the world’s most dominant therapy was discrete trial training (DTT) - which is a strict and highly structured form of Applied Behavior Analysis or ABA. And I had the opportunity to observe many sessions of this style of therapy.

And believing that therapists and educators try their best, I can, without judgement, describe discrete trial training at that time as serious and controlling. The therapists presented themselves as opposite of playful, believing that they had to signal to their autistic students that it was time to learn, not to play.

Leo Buscaglia points out the irony of this un-playful approach. You see, adults often believe that learning looks a certain way – like sitting still for example. Yet many children learn more easily through body movement. In fact, the part of the brain that controls movement called the motor cortex is connected to the brain’s language center called Broca’s. This connection allows the motor cortex to orchestrate the complex physical movements required to produce speech. Some linguists even believe that one way to promote speech in non-vocal autistic children is to develop motor control (that means, not to sit still all day!)

Adults also often believe that learning looks like following instructions to get to the right answer. And while getting a child to comply with your agenda is an important life-skill, we need to provide equal time for children to experiment.

For example, while it might be a helpful fine motor hand-eye exercise to practice colouring inside the lines of a picture, the rule to colour only inside the lines limits creativity and exploration. The child’s brain becomes focused on controlling the crayon to not cross the lines instead of imagining colorful landscapes and creative new shapes.

There is now substantial amounts of research and common knowledge that children learn most efficiently through play. And happily the ABA field is finally coming to the same conclusion with, their autistic students. They too, usually learn most easily and efficiently with adults who are playful.

Why is play such an important vehicle for learning? Even more ironically, the answer is that while playing, children do the one thing that discrete trial training works hard to avoid: in play, children make mistakes! Since play includes experimentation and exploration, it’s guaranteed that block towers will topple over, toys will break, messes will be made, and crayons won’t stay inside the lines! 

These are good things though, because most children learn from these experiences. And the best part is their attitude.

Most children don’t judge themselves if a toy block doesn’t fit on their pretend block tower. They just try a different way. Sadly, it’s us adults who judge mistakes and teach children to get upset about making what we adults call “mistakes.”

In some extreme therapeutic approaches, unfortunately, some ABA therapists have been taught that they should prevent autistic children from making any mistakes at all. Their teaching procedures don’t allow for much exploration or experimentation. Autistic students are required to complete tasks in very specifically prescribed ways. And when they are about to make a mistake, they are stopped and corrected. The ABA term for this is errorless learning using error correction procedures.

There’s a lot of good research to show that this form of teaching does work to teach very discretely defined goals. But it’s inefficient because the autistic student doesn’t learn to generalize as quickly as they do through play because the autistic tendencies for predictable patterns and sameness are strongly reinforced in errorless discrete trial training, making new learning harder.

I’ve now taught several thousand adults, teachers, parents and therapists, to infuse their parenting and teaching with playfulness. And I’ve observed the two most common blocks that get in the way:

The first is our own self-consciousness and adultness. We’ve forgotten how to play! And we constantly question if we’re doing it right. We don’t want to look silly or be judged by other adults, so we hold back. But if you can get past these mental blocks, I promise you will have fun and will engage your autistic child like never before!

I often remind myself of the line from Wiliam Purkey’s poem “Dance like nobody’s watching.” I encourage parents to “Play like nobody’s judging!”

The second most common block that gets in the way of us being playful is the fear that we will give our autistic child or student permission to be silly during learning time. We fear they might get too silly and lose focus. It’s true that when I’m playful with one of my autistic students, they also tend to get more playful, but I only ever see the opposite of losing focus. Instead, they become more interactive, more participatory, more collaborative, and more compliant. Why? Probably because they are more motivated and interested in what I’m doing, including in my instructions and demands on them.

This week, make your AIM to be more playful with your autistic child or student. At home, be more playful during the mundane daily routines like doing a chore like carrying the laundry to the washer. Maybe sing a dirty clothes song or dance your way to the washer, in a conga line with your child following behind.

Don’t expect your child to immediately smile and join you. Try over several days and let me know in the comment section below how it goes.

Have a FUN week!