What is the best way to motivate an Autistic ADHD Child? From the owner of the Autism Clinic and Family Counseling Center.

Find out how inconsistency is the most powerful motivator in behavior management techniques. Being consistent is boring. People respond the most often and intensely when they never know when they will get rewarded, how often, or how big or what the reward will be.

Take a slot machine, for instance. The best science has to offer about human behavior is put to use, maximizing the number of lever pulls, thus the amount of money collected. If you knew it was every 18th, or 37th, pull, that gave the reward, who would ever start putting money in? And then there’s the part where, you know, regardless of the odds, you might get the really huge jackpot? If they never know when the reward will come, or how big it will be, the desired response level remains highest.

Children overcome all kinds of obstacles when properly motivated.

Great, so what are some ways to put this idea into action?

Dot-to-dot: This one is fun. Get yourself some Crayola Changeable markers. Copy some dot-to-dots in the students preferred themes. With the clear end of the changeable marker, make stars over some of the numbered dots, and make them at random intervals- put two or three in a row, skip 7, and so on.
Every time you catch the student meeting their goal, or not having the problem behavior, and you could have a special signal for this, or tap them on the left shoulder, the student connects one more dot with the colored side of the changeable marker. When they make a line through the dot with the star, it will change color. This can mean an instant reward, credit towards a reward, or a chance to draw from a lottery of possible rewards. Hint: The orange one doesn’t change as visibly as the darker markers.

Lottery: Lotteries are great because you can really leverage your rewards and the randomization is automated. Random is much better than predictable when it comes to behavior management. The only thing you want to be consistent with is your expectation. Adult expectations have consistently been shown to have a very powerful effect on kids behavior and learning. Most of us have heard of the study where the teachers were told that the blue eyed students were smarter than the brown eyed students. At the end of the grading period, guess what happened? The blue-eyed students had higher grades and scored higher on their standardized academic testing. Talk about your thoughts being so powerful they create your reality! Whew! If you have one really big prize, it doesn’t matter how slim the odds are of winning, it will motivate human behavior anyway. So then you can mix a bunch of smaller rewards like those on the “praise ways” document or just no-winner drawings. It’s pretty easy for you to “rig” these things, too. Make it look like an accident that the prize got awarded to this certain kid at this particular time when it’s well-deserved and needed.

Credit System: What if you get control over their access to preferred materials and activities, and then sell them time with those things? Then you print off some “money” in different denominations, mostly 1’s and 5’s, but some 20’s, 50’s, and 100’s, and then, when you want to catch them being good, you hand them a bill, or put it in a jar they can see. They have a menu of rewards. You make a list of rules and expectations. Now they never know when you will notice them doing well, or how big the reward will be. The menu of rewards is ever-changing. The behavior is the best it can be.

If you can find the best way to motivate an Autistic ADHD child, they can overcome all kinds of obstacles and give their best.

Diagnosis Autism or Aspergers: Now What?

(Book by Brad Mason, LPC, LSSP, LPA 2018)

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