Infantile Autism and Autistic Spectrum disorder
SSLD and Infantile Autism
Ka Tat Tsang, Ph.D.
2006
“Autistic symptoms” are actually functional, in that they are driven by bio-psychological needs of these children and can bring more predictable or pleasurable stimulation to them.
Content: SSLD Understanding of Autism | What Happens in SSLD? | Special Features of SSLD | Related Documents
SSLD Understanding of Autism
- The child is unable to process information effectively due to neurological impairment, especially complex and multi-modal interpersonal signals. (biology and cognition)
- Inability to decipher and process information leads to feeling overwhelmed, perplexed, confused, and anxious (emotion)
- Withdrawal or disengagement as strategies for avoiding negative emotional experience (motivation and behavior)
- While other children can gratify various needs through social interaction, children with autism have to use other means such as auto-stimulation, control and manipulating objects, maintaining rigid order/pattern (motivation, behavior, environment)
What Happens in SSLD?
- Through systematic learning, the child can master effective agentive, interpersonal and social strategies and skills. These will lead to need gratification, displacing the original symptoms.
- In SSLD, the child does not only learn specific skills (e.g., eye contact, verbal requests) but also learns how to learn – imitation, observation learning, and symbolically mediated learning
- SSLD learning is grounded in real life, involving people in the child’s life world (parents, siblings, peers)
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Special Features of SSLD
- Learning how to learn: emphasis on observation learning (including symbolic mediation) as the most important mode of human learning
- Focus on behavior, yet connecting it with the key domains of human experience and environmental realities
- Individualized and systematic learning of adaptive skills and strategies
- The child comes before the structure or system, which is used to facilitate the child’s learning. We modify the structure to suit the child, not the other way around.
- Multiple contingency thinking: Program design takes into consideration of the child’s circumstances and needs, developmental status,
- Comprehensive attention to all domains: biology, motivation, emotion, cognition, behavior, and environment
- Maximize opportunity, time, and space for learning
- Mobilizes family and people in the child’s life,
- Empowering parents through parallel learning program
- Grounded in real life – minimizes the difficulty of learning transfer
- Pragmatism: Eclectic inclusion of other methods
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Related Documents
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