🌟 How Can We Help Autistic Children Be More Attentive to Their Environment? 🌟
One of the common characteristics of autistic children is over-selectivity to stimuli, meaning they tend to focus on irrelevant details while ignoring important information.
For example, when shown a picture of animals, instead of recognizing and focusing on the animals themselves, they might fixate on a small wrinkle or fold in the paper, completely overlooking the central image.
A similar situation occurs when someone calls their name, and they simply do not respond—not necessarily due to a lack of understanding, but because they do not perceive the stimulus as relevant.
👈 Why is this important?
When children miss key stimuli, they lose valuable learning opportunities, may struggle with social communication, and can face challenges in language development.
👈 How can we help?
Through focused practice, we can teach children to pay attention to multiple relevant features in their environment.
For instance, asking them to "bring the green shirt" from a selection of shirts in different colors helps them learn to focus on the relevant characteristic.
As their skills develop, we can increase the level of difficulty by incorporating multiple features into a single task, such as: "Take the marker, grab a sheet of paper, sit on the chair, and write the letter A."
🔹 Studies show that as children improve their ability to recognize multiple features, their responsiveness to social environments also improves—they begin applying this skill beyond the structured learning setting.
👨👩👧 How can you practice this with children?
You can integrate these exercises into games at home, activities in preschool, school lessons, and everyday interactions in the community. This will help them develop broader attention and become more engaged with their surroundings. 💙✨
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