The Change Entity - for Growth, Direction and Wellbeing

06/02/2025

Shared from PTSD The war within

05/02/2025

16/02/2023

16/02/2023

If your child is going through Autistic Burnout, they will need your support. They will need understanding, an increase in sensory regulation time and a decrease in demands (family and school).

16/02/2023

27/01/2023

A quick message about regulation.

Regulated does not mean calm.

People yelling and screaming at a sports event- that energy is ok for that setting.

Someone quiet and still when meditating- that energy is ok for that setting.

All emotions are fine and we do feel them all at one time or another.

For me personally, it’s whether I can come down from those intense emotions after the fact. Can I get back to feeling calm after I’ve had an unpleasant interaction with someone? Can I get back to calm after my kids have been screeching at each other for 5 hours? Can I return to a neutral energy state after I’ve been somewhere super exciting? I usually can’t. That energy consumes me. I feel it for the rest of the day, or even several days. This dysregulation is made worse by sensory overload, stress, and exhaustion.

The answer? Try and reduce those things as best I can. And Stimming. For me, singing and dancing is the most effective.

For more info on regulation, go check out these fine accounts:
Greg Santucci, Occupational Therapist
Perth Children's Occupational Therapy
The Well-Balanced OT
(instagram)autisticot (instagram)
The ND OT

Em ☺️✌️🌈
AuDHD SLP

ID: Image is artwork that says “Regulated means your energy levels match the task. It does not mean ‘calm’.” There’s a drawing of a kid running through the grass with a kite.

26/01/2023

18/01/2023

We love the quote below, taken from Dr Ross Greene's book, "The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children."

Dr Greene is a leading authority in neurodivergent-friendly parenting and educational strategies. He has pioneered the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions model, which sees parents and teachers learning to reframe a 'difficult' child's behaviour from a perspective of unmet needs; giving strategies to work *with* the child to mutually achieve goals, adjust expectations and develop self-regulation.

We're thrilled that Dr Greene will be joining us as a keynote speaker at our (fast approaching!) 2023 Conference on Innovations in Autism Education: Neuroinclusive, neuroaffirming schooling. This event will be held on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 February, 2023 in an online platform to allow us to bring together presenters and delegates from around Australia and the globe. Click here for more info & tickets: https://gems.eventsair.com/2023-reframing-autism/

[Image description: A rainbow background features the Reframing Autism logo at bottom center. A text box above features a quote from Dr Ross Greene, which reads: ""If you respond to a child who is having difficulty putting his emotions aside so as to think through solutions by imposing your will more intensively and "teaching him who's boss," you probably won't help him manage his emotions. Quite the opposite, in fact."

Image source: Reframing Autism]

18/01/2023

*Edited to add: Autistic adults often experience the same challenges with unmet needs.

A bit about behaviour today.

If you have an Autistic child who you find ‘so hard’, ‘so challenging’, and you ‘don’t know what to do with them’- this is for you.

Your child’s behaviour is a signal that they have unmet needs. Kids do well when they can (Dr Ross Greene). If your kid isn’t doing well, you need to dig deeper into WHY they aren’t.

A neurodiversity-affirming team (speech therapist, OT, psychologist) will be able to help you dig.

A behaviour management approach will simply cut those spiky branches. The many possible causes underneath will still be there, and that means those spikes will keep growing back.

This is from my instagram

Em 😊🌈✌️
AuDHD SLP

18/01/2023

Raise your hand if you’re an Autistic Person with a hyper fixation on Autism.

18/01/2023

If your child is using a rude tone because they feel dysregulated, your job, as their parent is to co-regulate, not correct their tone.

If you don’t know how to co-regulated or even self-regulate, start there. When we correct tone instead of responding to it, we teach our child that we don’t have the emotional capacity for their feelings and they should try to hide them from us, so their tone doesn’t cause us to get dysregulated.

We’re not actually teaching them how to speak to people kindly, because we do that by speaking to them kindly. We’re teaching them to hide their emotions, in our presence.

Learn more about co-regulation and self-regulation in my latest book 👇👇👇

Finding Your Calm: A Responsive Parents Guide to Self-Regulation and Co-Regulation⁣⁣
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Link: https://responsiveparentinginspirations.com/products/finding-your-calm-paperback-version