Feel you can’t go shopping with your autistic child?

As parents of language impaired children with the kind of behaviors that this brings, I frequently get asked about family activities. We all live in a society that is constantly checking the P’s and Q’s of life, what is acceptable and what is not. Despite all the visits to our local language therapist, occupational therapist and the best schooling we can find: our little Johnny is still likely to throw a wobbly in the most socially awkward situations. It’s like our little bundles of joy wait for the precise moment to strike.

Having said all that, what’s the point in putting all this energy into developing our child’s language if it can’t be used for socialization and building experiences for the child. This is what our speech therapists, teachers and family suggest all the time, right? I remember an occasion when I was out shopping with our twin language disordered boys. It was during a time when we were making little progress in their language skills and they were, to be fair, very frustrated little men. We were in Target shopping and to my utter relief we had successfully whizzed around the supermarket shelves and were entering the line to check out. 

And then it happened. Conor peeled off into the video section of the store. I ran over to get him while Eoin, seeing the confusion just disappeared. They used to do that, run in opposite directions. I grabbed Conor by the hand and intuitively found Eoin pulling at a camera in the TV section. Not too bad I thought, at least we are together and we started back to the shopping cart. I have a long standing rule that I don’t buy DVD’s on a whim , particularly if we already have it at home. 

So I pointed to Conor and told him to put it back. And then it came, he threw himself onto the floor and just screamed the store down. Kicking, screaming and generally bringing the whole store to focus on our little threesome. What did I do? Well nothing. What could I do? I just held onto Eoin and hoped for the storm to pass. Ultimately after several attempts and with Conor now exhausted, he gave up the video. As he did so his voice dropped away. Save the quiet piped music in the background there was total silence in the store.

After what felt like forever the checkout assistant looked straight at me and said: Well I don’t know how everyone else feels, but you can come shopping and check out with me any day! Was that the last tantrum I had to face down? Not a chance. But it did give me confidence and I knew it was only a question of time that before the boys would get the message.