Ep. 54: Why You Shouldn't Withhold Preferred Items & What To Do Instead
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What is the episode’s main focus on handling children’s preferred items in therapy?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift.
We're an SLP couple from California with three boys and a passion for finding better ways to support autistic kids.
I'm Chris. You might know me as Speech Dude. I'm a neurodivergent high school SLP and the creator of the Dynamic Assessment of Social Emotional Learning and I specialize in crafting neurodiversity affirming IEPs through my online course.
And I'm Jessie, a sensory integration trained SLP, owner of a top-rated clinic in Los Angeles, and the creator of the Inside Out sensory communication programs for parents and therapists. Join us weekly to learn neurodiversity-affirming ways to support social-emotional development and regulation in autistic kids.
Are you ready to make the shift?
Hello and welcome to Making the Shift. Today we are talking about why you should not withhold kids' preferred items and what to do instead. First of all, raise your hand if you have ever had a child walk into your therapy session holding their favorite toy and you thought, you know what, I'm just going to take this toy away so that we can go on with our session, and you do it. Now raise your hand if you immediately regretted that decision because it led to a very big response and now the rest of your session and everything else you wanted to do absolutely went out the window. Okay, I feel like we have all been there. So what we are talking about today is five reasons you should not withhold kids preferred items.
And then don't worry, I will be telling you exactly what you should do instead. So I'm going to give you five reasons you should not withhold their items and then five things to do instead of withholding them or taking them away from them. OK, but imagine you just picked up your favorite cookie from a bakery and you're going over to your friend's house. You go to your friend's house. Your friend reaches and grabs that cookie and just eats it. You're going to be thinking, excuse me, I was going to eat that. What are you doing? Right. And then the next time you go to your friend's house, you're probably going to be thinking, I probably shouldn't bring my favorite snacks to this person's house anymore because I don't trust them.
OK, the first reason I'm giving you that we shouldn't withhold preferred items is that it breaks trust. OK, and maybe the snack isn't as good of an example, but imagine you walk into your friend's house and they just take your cell phone and they're just like, OK, I'm going to hold on to this. And then when we're done hanging out today, I'll give it back to you. You would be thinking, OK, that is mine. First of all, that's not yours. Are you going to ask me before you take it or are you just going to are you just going to take it away from me? Now you don't trust that person anymore. That immediately breaks trust with someone. And the thing about trust is that it is absolutely foundational for building language and learning.
And that is because it is instrumental in building connections and building relationships with people. When we don't feel safe, we cannot move up. You've heard me talk about the language staircase where we start with regulation, engagement, we move up to our language building. When we are not feeling safe, We cannot climb that staircase. We cannot access the logical thinking centers of our brain, okay? Safety is the number one thing that we need in order to build a strong foundation for learning. And that is because that is how our brains work, okay? Our brain has one function that is more important than any other function. What is it? survival, okay? Our brain's number one job is for us to survive. Its job is to protect us.
Its job is to keep us safe. And if we are in a place where we are not feeling that we are safe, whether that's an environment or whether that's a person we're with, we are going to remain kind of locked in that downstairs brain, unable to access the upstairs brain where all the logical thinking happens and where all of the learning happens. Okay, so number one reason is not to withhold is it breaks trust.
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Chapters
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