A great many parents worry about Disney animation overstimulating their autistic child.

Without question an unsupervised autistic child can become over stimulated watching Disney animation. I remember Conor as a young child glued to his favorite Disney animation and becoming totally over stimulated.

It was clear to me that Conor enjoyed the experience of watching Disney animation. But I could also see that I needed to create structures to protect against over stimulation. Also, passively watching Disney animation was little more that a baby sitting. It was not a good use of  his time. These were the early days of our journey through autism with Conor and Eoin. It was easy to see we needed structure. But also we needed an understanding of what we expected to gain from the “Disney animation experience”.

One of the first pointers to this was an occasion in the TV section of Best Buy. Disney’s Toy Story was playing and I noticed the boys glued to the fight scene which was playing. Minutes later, they were rolling around the floor in peels of laughter pretending to be Buzz and Woody. The boys were engaged in a simple form of pretend play, copying what they had seen on the TV!

This among a great many signals from the boys told us volumes. With the right mix of video and physical activity we could grow the boys out of what was otherwise a very isolated existence. These experiences were the first steps toward the teaching of concepts visually to be acted out physically later. We learned how to attach images (somewhat like PECS) and the written word (early literacy) to these concepts. For the first time in our role as parents were able to make ourselves understood to the boys.

Much of what was to become the boys language system grew this way. And with it the fundamental learning of core life concepts.