Stimming & Self-Regulation: The Good, The Misconceptions, The
Life is full of stressful situations. To survive and thrive, we have to learn how to cope. In other words, we have to learn how to self-regulate our emotions as well as our behaviors. We have to find ways to manage the stress in a healthy way.
While we might go for a walk to calm ourselves or try to control our breathing, self-regulation for children with autism can often look quite different. In fact, it has it’s own name. It’s called stimming. Hand flapping, rocking back and forth, pacing, humming, and tapping fingers are common forms of stimming or self-regulation strategies for kiddos, especially those on the spectrum. It’s their way of dealing with stressful situations.
This article offers a short primer on stimming and self-regulation for parents who want to understand their children better and provide them with the very best support for a happy life.
Self-regulation challenges for children with autism
Here’s how Harvard Health defines self-regulation:
“Self-regulation is the act of controlling your behaviors, thoughts, emotions, choices, and impulses. Self-regulation skills help you keep negative emotions in check and think before you react. In essence, it’s a type of self-control or emotion regulation.
Negative emotions are disruptive. They can interfere with your happiness, productivity, and relationships. While you can’t always avoid negative feelings, you can change the way you react to them.”
Self-regulation can be a struggle for anyone. It’s even harder for children with autism because they haven’t developed the social and behavior skills that are required to manage and control their emotional reactions.
For example, many children on the spectrum aren’t able to recognize emotions in themselves or in others. Not being able to recognize how they feel means children can also have trouble controlling their feelings. It can look like they have a short temper, suffering emotional outbursts or reacting to situations in an unreasonable manner. When it reality, they’re having difficulty processing what is happening around them.
Another factor that can make self-regulation difficult is the way children with autism process sensory information, such as loud sounds and bright lights. The different way they process what they see, hear, touch, feel, taste, and smell can lead to emotional responses that seem delayed or mismatched for the situation.
The bottom line is challenges arise when children with autism lack appropriate strategies for regulating their energy and the intensity of their emotions.
Self-regulation matters at a young age
Research tells us how important self-regulation is for a child’s future. Results from this study indicate that developing self-regulation during a child’s preschool years is an early life marker for later life success – in school, in making a living, and when it comes to their health.
Similar conclusions are found in another study focused solely on children with autism. It says the ability to self-regulate in children with autism predicts later social skills and less social impairment. Plus, it promotes companionship and children’s development of meaningful peer relationships.
In other words, ensuring children have the strategies and tools to successfully self-regulate their emotions is the key to a happier, healthier future!
The natural self-regulation strategy for kiddos with autism
Despite the misunderstanding that surrounds it, stimming is a natural way children with autism manage stressful situations and regulate their emotions. It may surprise you that stimming is also used by neurotypical kiddos in the same way.
Stimming is short for self-stimulatory behaviors characterized by repetitive movements, sounds, or sensory actions used by children to regulate their internal experience with external environments. It’s their way of processing, communicating, and coping. The difference in children with autism is the frequency, intensity, and purpose behind the stimming they do.
There are many types of stimming, from hand flapping and humming to smelling markers and spinning toys, that benefit children in all kinds of ways. It helps them:
- Manage sensory sensitivities and overload
- Express and deal with they’re feelings
- Communicate what they need without using words
- Process their thoughts and new information
So, with all these benefits, why can stimming have a negative connotation? It stems from extreme situations when stimming becomes disruptive or even harmful to a child. Head banging, hand biting, running into dangerous situations. These are all very upsetting situations and have put stimming in a bad light when the opposite is true. In most situations, when stimming is understood and accepted, stimming results in better self-regulation, higher self-esteem, and greater emotional resilience for children with autism.
Early intervention ABA therapy promotes self-regulation
ABA therapy is the gold standard autism intervention because it has proven to benefit all areas of a child’s development, especially and most importantly helping children develop social skills that are a prerequisite for self-regulation.
ABA therapy has the greatest impact early in a child’s life up 5 years of age, when their brains are like sponges and making connections with the world around them at a faster rate than at any other time of their life.
Here at The Behavior Exchange, our fun and experienced team can help your kiddo learn strategies for regulating their emotions in the most beneficial and least disruptive ways, incorporating their chosen types of stimming as well as their likes and dislikes. Everything we do is highly individualized for each wonderfully unique child.
To learn more about our Behavioral Health Center of Excellence®, please start here. We’ll try to contain our excitement at the possibility of helping you along your autism journey!