Distracted by Sounds - The Autistic Child

Did you ever hear someone scrape their finger nails across a chalk board and shudder from the sound? Can you imagine what it would be like if you not only heard that sound all the time but you had no idea what it was?

Many children on the Autism Spectrum have some sort of sensory integration dysfunction: meaning their brain is not processing what their senses are telling them correctly. If their auditory system is involved they may have an acute awareness to noises.

Sensory integration dysfunction is treatable with therapies and a sensory diet. Sometimes though some of the simple things we can do are forgotten and are not pointed out to us and they probably should be.

All babies come into this world with little knowledge of their surrounding. They learn as they grow through trial and error and also what we teach them. They learn that certain sounds mean something. For example footsteps in the hall could be mommy coming to get you and a rattle shaking is fun play time. Negative sounds also get understood like an alarm going off scares mommy and makes her jump in surprise or yelling makes everyone angry and sad. As they grow we identify many of these noises to our children such as a dog barking. The loud sound may scare a baby but a mom may not want her child to be afraid of dogs so she shows the baby the dog (if she knows it's friendly of course) and identifies the barking sound as coming from the dog. Then she pats the dog and allows the baby to touch it. Soon the baby is not afraid when he hears a dog barking anymore.

What do sounds mean to the young autistic child with auditory sensory dysfunction then, if they are not hearing them as we do? The sound of a dishwasher running might sound like a highway at a busy rush hour to them but we don't hear it that way so often we never identify the sound and it's meaning to the child.

I realized the importance of this after my son was diagnosed with Autism and was struggling with an overactive auditory system. At times he acted as if he was deaf, even though I knew he could hear, and in loud places like a grocery store he would scream. Sensory dysfunction was explained to me by his doctor and I was led to some therapists they thought could help. As we tried to puzzle through this I remembered when I had first noticed his acute awareness to sounds months before he was diagnosed.

He was around a year and a half and had been sleeping through the night since he was about two weeks old but suddenly he started waking at night crying almost inconsolably. Being a very easy baby this was not typical behavior for him. After many exhausting and frustrating nights of this I desperately looked around for a reason why he was waking up. The room was the same as always. As I held him and tried to rock him back to sleep I listened to rain outside. I was suddenly struck by how loud it sounded hitting the roof right above his converted attic bedroom. Spring was coming fast upon us and it had been raining off and on for days. Before that the cold of winter had given us many months of quiet nights. It had not rained since the last fall, before we had moved to our new apartment.

With that in mind, I bundled up my son went down stairs and took him outside on the porch. He was still sobbing quietly on my shoulder. "It's raining" I told him "look at the rain" I said and held my hand out into the stream of water coming from the sky. I had gotten his attention enough to look. I talked to him softly about the rain in easy words I knew he would understand and held his hand out into the water. He was fascinated and turned his hand over and over. He had stopped crying.

We watched quietly for a while until he was sleepy again and I took him back to his room. When we got there I parted the curtains and showed him the rain outside. "It's raining" I said again and pointed to the rain. He looked and seemed to understand. "The rain is loud on the roof" I said, placing my hand on the angled ceiling. He looked up at the ceiling and back outside at the rain.

I put him back in his crib under his blanket. When I checked on him ten minutes later he was fast asleep. The next few nights when it started to rain he let out a small cry, I reassured him and told him about the rain and he went right back to sleep. After that he never woke up again crying in the night.

It was only a few months later that he was diagnosed with Autism. Over the next few years as we tried to understand sensory dysfunction, I never forgot that night in the rain. I also remembered the lesson learned that night; that loud noises can be scary and giving a name to the cause of the scary noise makes it easier for him to understand and makes it not so scary anymore.

What does your child hear? Are you hearing things the same way as him? Have you tried finding the source of sounds and giving them names and talking about sound levels. This is something that we do naturally with our children to sounds that we understand. With the child with Sensory Integration dysfunction we must first understand what they are hearing and then go back to our natural instincts and explain the noise to them and comfort them the best we can.

If you have never done it, the next time you find your child distracted by sound, try giving it a name and talking about the noise level, being open to how loud it may sound to him. Try stopping the noise and starting it again. Be aware of how much noise is in his environment. Is it really necessary to run every machine in the house at the same time?

As my son grew I talked to him about noise in general. When I heard a loud noise like thunder I would put my hand over my ears and say it's loud and encouraged him to identify when something was loud to him. I actively sought out all sources of noise in the house. At one point I made a startling discovery that I was running five machines (washer,dryer,sink, TV, and blender) in the house at the same time while the neighbor was revving his motorcycle outside the window without mercy. It's amazing how noisy we are without realizing it, because it doesn't matter to us.

Children on the Autism Spectrum that have Sensory Integration Dysfunction may not hear, see or even feel the same way that we do. This makes it more challenging for us to foster a young child's development. They may need sensory integration training but we may also need to be retrained to open our ears, eyes and senses to see the world through their prospective. Just think about those nails being scraped across the chalk board without explanation. Wouldn't you want someone to help you understand what that awful noise was and what it meant?