Hello. A friend of mine has a son that is 4 and is autistic. Recently he’s been obssessed about skin color in people. She said the slightest change in skin he is screaming out in public calling people “chocolate people.” She has no idea where he even came up with that and has tried so hard to tell him that what he is saying is very hurtful and that everyone is different and that’s okay.
He’s not understanding her and she is getting to a point where she is afraid to take him out because he isn’t quite about it. She’s afraid that the wrong person will take serious offense to this.
She is wondering if there is any books on social situations, any advice that you could give her to help her deal with this? Even if she were to tell people he has autism , they will think that he had learned it from them and that’s not the case at all. We all know how people can take things out of context. She really isn’t sure how to deal with the situation.
Any suggestions would be great that I can pass on to her.
Maybe can suggest her to show a book/video on different ethnics and cultures around the world and explain to him?
Recently I borrow a book on sleep talk, where parent talk to the child before he’s sleeping to help the child to overcome some difficulties/changing bad habits. Maybe you can suggest your friend to read the book and try first?
Sounds to me like he’s highly fascinated by something that is in truth highly fascinating.
I’d be helping him learn the correct terminology so that he doesn’t feel the need to make up his own (as offensive as people find it he’s really very clever - he may have seen that cadbury’s ad where there are people made of chocolate and drawn his own conclusions from there, either way you’ve got to admit he’s drawn what would seem to a four year old as a fairly obvious conclusion).
The more he knows and understands and has proper labels the more he will be able to use the right behaviour. At least he is excited by chocolate people and not fearful as I think that would come across far worse.
Depending on what his conceptual understanding is like she could even go into a little bit of detail about why the different people have evolved differently.
Our instinct when children are obsessed with things (particularly embarrassing things) is to try and stop the behaviour but I firmly believe that helping them pass through it to the other side is the more appropriate response. The obsession comes from a desire to understand.
I hope she can help him through this without too many awkward situations - children can be challenging to say the least
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Perhaps your friend can call them and get advice as to what resources are best for teaching her child, for this issue and any others she may have questions or concerns about.
. . . and this is another excellent book, written by two highly respected psychologists, for teaching social skills to autistic children:
Helping the Child Who Doesn’t Fit in [Paperback]
Stephen Nowicki (Author), Marshall P. Duke (Author)
Reviewer: Allison Martin
The book Helping the Child Who Doesn’t Fit In assists parents in deciphering hidden causes of social rejection their children may face. The authors explain that children who have difficulty in either reading or in sending nonverbal cues signals can have great difficulty in making and keeping friends. This text takes you step by step through a wide variety of nonverbal communication skills that affect how children relate (often intuitively) to one another. They cover important social aspects of communication such as awareness of personal space, unspoken rules about touching, the impact of gestures and posture, style of dress, and more. A description of the importance of these unspoken but influential rules, types of problems that can arise, case examples are provided for each aspect of communication. The book also provides assessment techniques and suggestions for helping children understand the these key issues. This is a very useful book for parents of children who are having difficulty with social situations, including children with high functioning autism, ADHD, LD, and/or nonverbal disorders.
Maybe she could make a home made book & laminate it for him. I’m sure she could find lots of people of different ethnic backgrounds on the internet. If he can read she could make it at his reading level, otherwise, she could just read it too him. She could have a lot of different pictures so he get used to all kinds of different people & use the correct terminology in the story so he hopefully begins using it too.