Environmental Controls

Environmental controls are important when dealing with multiple mental illnesses, or even severe autism.  If you control the environment in situations, is helps keeps stress levels manageable for your child.  In our situation, it helps us keep our son functioning at the highest level possible on a daily basis.

Simple environmental controls are areas such as their bedrooms.  Keeping it in one color, not too busy with patterns, neat and clean, helps my son to function better.  The table where he did homework had to be clean and uncluttered.  These kinds of things are easily done, even if you have to put things in a basket quickly to provide a clean environment.  Other fairly simple environmental controls are things like vehicles. Make sure they are comfortable, have books, favorite things or technology to keep trips and stress at a minimum.  This is still important for my son even at 19.  

Harder environments can be obvious.  They are public places and venues.  Large arenas full of thousands of people is not where we take our son for any reason.  The stress is too much.

Other not so obvious places are extremely large churches full of people, office buildings or just large gatherings of unfamiliar people  The same effect can happen at a small unfamiliar house with too many people crowded together. Remember, an autistic child reads sensory input much differently.  His senses smell colognes, body odor, chemicals, pets and he sees patterns, lights, textures differently.  All of this can be disturbing and create stress. My son also has anxiety in situations with unfamiliar people.  This is why we have people over to our house, where he is familiar and has a place to retreat. 

Now, this doesn't mean that he is never in difficult environments.  We try to expose him to as much as he can take almost every day.   New places in public, new venues, stores, all of these new unfamiliar places can cause stress and slowly but surely, he is learning to overcome.  However, we aren't going to take him to a Titans or a Predators game anytime in the future because we know those are environments we need to control. We also opt out of invites to certain events due to an overload in sensory input, unfamiliarity with locale, and people.  Especially,if he is experiencing any signs of increased anxiety at home.  Basically, we have to manage his stress 24/7 which means we must use environmental controls 24/7.

When your child lives under so much constant bombardment of daily stress, I think it is in their best interest to establish some environmental controls.  In the end, it creates less stress for the child, which in turn creates less stress for you when you get back home! 

Again, not everyone understands this reality. It is what it is.  You do what you have to.  It's called survival. 

From my heart,

Lynne