Navigating School and Daily Life: The Role of Mentoring (EP 86)

Join Dr. Regan for her third episode in a series about transitioning back to school while navigating daily life. This episode focuses on the role of mentoring in helping your autistic teen or adult navigate obstacles and challenging life experiences.

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Hello, everyone. This is Dr. Teresa Regan. I'm happy to be joining you for another episode of Autism in the Adult podcast. I'm a neuropsychologist, a certified autism specialist, and mom to a young adult on the autism spectrum. We're continuing our series about transitioning back to school for the autistic student. Now, let's go back to our student, Alyssa. We have talked about her as an example for the first two episodes in the series, and I'd like to continue with her as our illustrative point. She entered ninth grade cautiously optimistic, and she really did quite a good job of preparing for that transition. She knew where her classes were. She practiced opening her locker. She organized her school supplies. And then as she transitioned back, the days accumulated and began to feel like school was really costing her nervous system more than anyone had anticipated. And so by the end of the week, she was becoming quieter. She started sleeping after school. Her stomach started hurting on Sunday evenings. And getting to school just became much more difficult even though there hadn't been a real traumatic thing that had happened. So one of the things that I think is difficult for parents is what is the parent's role at this point? Is it to, you know, grab her and put her in the car and drag her to school? Is it to let her stay home until she feels comfortable enough to go without stress? Where is that balance point? What is the role at that age? So I think that the sweet spot of balance, is something much more interesting and useful that we can do as parents, and that is to begin mentoring our students about how to navigate daily life. And I love the word navigate. I think about the image of sailing or boating. And the reason I like this image is that it's true that we can learn an enormous amount of facts and knowledge by reading a book about sailing or boating. We can learn the names of the sails. We can learn how the rudder works. We can memorize different kinds of knots. We can steady weather patterns. And at the end of all that, we could probably take a test about sailing and get every question correct. Why? Because we can memorize the facts, the knowledge that is written out in this book. But I would still not necessarily want to get into a sailboat with you during a storm. How does this knowledge that we have, this memorization of facts, how do we translate that into actual living and doing and navigating? Knowing about sailing and sailing are not the same skill. And sometimes we treat them like they are. So sailing means taking everything you know and applying it to a particular boat on this particular water with this weather pattern, this wind movement, and this moment. And then something changes unexpectedly. Of course, it always does. The wind changes direction. The water changes pattern. Something about the boat isn't working quite as we expected. And now what? And that's where this ability to navigate, how do we use the knowledge that we've memorized? How do we navigate? How do we live life and turn these factual things we know into actual doing? And that's the incredibly important distinction for any human being, but also particularly for the autistic. Now, the autistic often has a great memorization ability and enormous amounts of knowledge in their brain. And they can often memorize information much better than the typical person. They may understand the rule perfectly. They may even be able to explain to someone else what exactly is supposed to happen. And that's why it can feel so confusing to see this person struggle in daily life. We might say, but this person is so smart, they're full of facts, they're full of knowledge. Why are they struggling with day-to-day things? And that is, though, the most common pattern of strength and struggle for the autistic, that, they have great amounts of knowledge and facts, but this translating and navigating into everyday life may be something that needs more mentoring. sharing. We may say she knows she's supposed to ask her teacher if she doesn't understand something, or he knows how to do laundry. I've explained it before. She knows that she feels better after she takes a walk or reads a book. And that's true. They're filled with knowledge, but knowing is only one part of the process. And the much more complicated question becomes, how do we take what we know, and use it to navigate this particular situation? And that is where mentoring becomes so important. With Alyssa, perhaps we start here. We can see that something isn't quite working, but we don't know what it is. What is the barrier to going to school, to getting through the day, to being in this marathon of school every day, not just sprinting for one day? So we're not starting with this position of you need to go to school, just do it. We are not saying you need to fix your attendance. We're saying, wow, we can see that something isn't working and we don't know what it is. So let's mentor, let's partner, let's collaborate about what to do when we hit a point in life where we're not sure what the barrier is. How do we identify what the struggle is when we don't have words for it, we haven't figured it out, but something is not working. Maybe we say, your nervous system doesn't seem to be getting enough recovery during the school day. Or we've noticed that you can get through school, but by Friday you're exhausted, you're sleeping all afternoon. Or maybe we say, you've told us that swinging really helps your body feel calmer, but at school you don't have anything that gives your nervous system that same kind of reset. Or I feel like maybe your teacher doesn't understand why leaving the class for 10 minutes helps you stay for the rest of the day. And when we kind of do this wondering together and we look at clues together and we gather hypotheses, I wonder if this is the case. I wonder if this would help. I wonder how your body feels about this. Next, we then have something we can navigate. So this is actually the first skill. In addition to getting to school, we're actually teaching the skill of identifying what the barrier is and putting it into words. What is the challenge in front of me? And sometimes the young person can identify what it is, and sometimes they just really can't. And that's true for everybody. Sometimes we know that something's difficult, but we haven't really put our finger on what it is. We haven't been able to find words that adequately describe it. And that's okay. That's where the mentoring of the parent or the counselor or the teacher can come in. And we might say, well, what I've noticed is this. what have you noticed? What part of the day feels hardest, or when does your body start to feel different? What happens right before you start wishing you could go home? And these may be very difficult things to answer, and that's why it's part of the journey of learning how to navigate these things. But the point is that this is a specific process where we're gathering clues, we're wondering together about what's happening, and we're trying to find words, and we mentor that together. Once we have helped this individual and partnered with them to say, okay, this seems to be the point of most distress or the most struggle that we have, these are the words we're going to used to it. It seems to be linked to this kind of thing. Then we teach and mentor strategizing. Suppose we figured something out, and Alyssa says that after she gets home, when she goes straight outside to swing, she feels much more settled. And the parent thinks, oh, this makes a lot of sense, because either she comes home and she sits on the couch with a blanket over her head and just sits in that quiet dark, or she goes straight outside and swings. And so having this knowledge is a great place to start. Okay, so swinging helps your nervous system regulate and by regulate we mean stay centered, calm, alert, fully present, not overwhelmed. So great, but then we're not finished. Now comes the life skill of how do we translate factual knowledge, about what regulates your nervous system. This is what I know. How do we translate that into doing something that's helpful, into a strategic choice for how we're going to build the day? Perhaps we say, okay, we know that movement helps your nervous system, and obviously, you know, we can't put a backyard swing in the middle of English class, so, let's think about what might give your nervous system some of the same input at school. So now we're strategizing. This is the life skill you want to teach. Not only how do you get through the school day, but how do you approach a challenge like this? Well, you try to pinpoint it and put words around it and hypothesize, and then you try to use the knowledge that you gained you, by translating it into doing something, and that doing needs to be strategic. So we're talking about strategizing. Could the student walk during her break at school? What about taking the stairs? Does that feel restorative? What about 10 minutes in the gym or using resistant bands? What about carrying something heavy to the office? Could they take a scheduled movement break before the period of the day where their capacity tends to drop? If the swings aren't available, is there a rocking chair in the school that they could use, maybe in the counseling office, because rocking gives a bit of the same movement input that swinging does. So it's not necessarily helpful for mom or dad to immediately announce the solution or to take them out of the environment that is challenging. But this process of mentoring how do I strategize ways to be okay in a really complex environment, so a parent could say what do you think about this what sounds like it might work what definitely wouldn't work, here's something I've seen people try what do you think about that and this is like an apprenticeship kind of model, right? And sometimes, too, we can get stuck in this back and forth where somebody says, well, that's not going to work. And so it is nice to say, well, let's agree that we're going to try it first and gather some data and information and then make a decision about whether it worked or not, just to see whether we're predicting that correctly or not. Because sometimes it really does end up working and we didn't predict it. It surprises us. An apprentice electrician doesn't simply stand across the room while someone says, you've read the electrical code and you've passed your test. Go rewire this house. When they haven't actually done any rewiring before, they've only passed the test. They've got knowledge, but no mentoring, no practice, no apprenticeship. There's never been the case where somebody works beside them and says, yeah, look at what we're seeing here. Look at what you're noticing. This part's important. That's why I'm choosing this part here. What just happened? What obstacle did we run into? I've never seen this happen before, but I think what we need to do next is this. Let's try this approach that's different. And that's how factual knowledge becomes a life skill the skill of navigating strategizing, and realizing when you need to switch gears oh that's how they teach you in the book but you can see that here that's not going to work, then strategy has to become doing so here's another step that we sometimes miss. We identify the challenge. We develop a strategy, but a strategy in someone's head still isn't behavior. So we have to then make this strategy real. So let's say Alyssa decides that a 10-minute movement break before lunch might be helpful, or it might be at least a strategy worth trying. Great, so now what? Does Alyssa walk into school tomorrow and somehow make that happen? Does she go to the office? Does she talk to teachers independently? Perhaps not quite yet. I think the partnering in the doing is also important, especially for the autistic student, because starting conversations can be difficult. You know, how do I approach someone and start a conversation when they're not expecting this conversation to start? They're going to be surprised that I'm walking up to them, and then they're looking at me, and how do I verbalize when we're in this unexpected conversation? Or thinking about who needs to know about this and what is the school's process. How do the IEPs or 504 plans work? Does the teacher need to know and the counselor? How do we communicate with the right people? And perhaps Alyssa says, I don't know what's supposed to happen. I don't know how to communicate that. And that's good because that's where mentoring needs to continue then. And the parent might say, here is how I have handled something like this before. Usually I start by figuring out who needs the information. Then I decide whether it makes sense to call or email or make an appointment. Now we're making this invisible process visible, and maybe they sit down together to write out an email. And maybe mom does the typing, and Alyssa and mom talk about what should go in the email. Here's what I'm going to put in the subject line. Here's how I'm explaining the problem. Does this look okay to you? I think what we should do next is ask for a specific step. Does this sound like what you're experiencing when I explain it this way, or perhaps if they're writing a second email Alyssa drafts the second one and mom sits there and they talk about it but she's doing the typing, and eventually the goal is that Alyssa can send an email herself and that's called scaffolding. So we're not just teaching facts or knowledge. We're not just saying email your teacher. We are mentoring. We have this apprenticeship, partnering, collaborative model. This is how human beings communicate when something isn't working. This is how you can communicate what you need. This is how you can ask for a strategy or an accommodation. And that this middle part of learning that navigation can really benefit from this mentoring approach because navigation is a bigger skill. Then what happens is this life skill of evaluating how the strategy worked. So suppose the movement break starts on Monday and it helps a little, but not enough. Well, that's not failure, that's information to bring back to the table when we're talking about hypotheses. It's another part of navigation and we're going to mentor this part of navigation, that you start with the strategy, but you're always checking how is it working now? Does it need to be updated? Because usually things that work for a while, maybe they don't work indefinitely, or we have to adjust what's happening over time. So back to the analogy of sailing. You know, did the wind just change? Let's look again. What did you notice? And so for Alyssa did the break help? What part helped? What didn't? Was it at the right time? Was 10 minutes enough? Was leaving the class actually stressful because Alyssa was worried about missing information? How could we change that process or adjust it? And again, we're teaching something incredibly important, that strategies aren't rules or commandments. These are experiments. And we notice, and we gather information, and we choose a strategy, and we communicate, and we try it, and we evaluate, and we adjust, and we try again. And that process is transferable to almost everything in life, whether it's relationships or getting an occupation or navigating household, upkeep, all of these things. We monitor, we get a strategy, we monitor the strategy, and we revise. So laundry isn't really about laundry. This is why when I talk about preparing an autistic teenager for greater independence, I'm not really interested only in whether they can get laundry done. That is a good thing to know. Clean clothes are useful, but developmentally something much bigger is happening. So laundry requires someone to notice, oh, I'm running out of clean clothes. And then I need to do something about that. Well what am I going to do what's my plan they have to initiate the task, and they might need a strategy for initiating that gathering the clothes sorting them if that's how you do your laundry choosing the settings, remembering that the clothes are in the washing machine might need a strategy for that moving them to the dryer remembering that they're in the dryer taking them out, putting them somewhere. Somehow fitting all of that into a day where they're also balancing school or homework, meals, transportation, maybe sports activity after school or their recovery time. So if I simply say, do your laundry, and the laundry doesn't happen, I haven't really discovered that my teenager is lazy or dependent or stubborn. I may have only discovered that there are several pieces to task navigation that still need mentoring. Where did this process break down? Did they forget? Did they have trouble starting? Were there too many steps? Did they start but forget to return and finish the task? Does laundry compete with every other demand until they're just exhausted? Well, that's All these things are good to know. These are clues. This is what we gather this information before we strategize because then we have something to work with. Perhaps we set a repeating calendar reminder. Perhaps laundry happens every Wednesday. Maybe we attach it to something already established. When you get home Wednesday and you change out of your school clothes. The hamper goes downstairs. Now let's try it. How can you remember? Then we come back. How did it work? Oh, it didn't work. Okay. Why? That's the important part. Not, well, obviously you can't do laundry independently and not, I already told you what to do. Instead, it's interesting. Something about our strategy didn't work. Let's figure out what it was. And that's kind of more in line with our mentoring model, our navigating model. So we're teaching the how. I think adults spend an enormous amount of time teaching young people what to do. They should study, clean their rooms, make friends, be nice, ask your teacher, get organized, manage your time, and advocate for yourself. Get up on time. These are really destinations, they're not directions, and so mentoring teaches the how. How do I start? How do I know what the problem is, why I'm not being successful here? How do I decide what strategy to use? What do I do when a strategy no longer works? How do I know when to ask for help and who to ask? How do I ask them? That's the navigation system that we're trying to build. So the life skill that sometimes gets missed is this system, this line of thinking. So when I'm mentoring a young person, I'm not merely helping them accomplish the task. I'm trying to make their own thinking visible. Here's what I'm noticing. Here's what I would try. Or have you considered this? What are you noticing? What do you think? Which part do you think you need partnering with? which part do you think you can try by yourself what happened here what did we learn the last time we tried this strategy what should we try next time. And over time, my voice becomes less necessary as far as scaffolding and structure, and context because the young person begins asking these questions themselves. What is the task? What is the barrier? What do I know about myself in this situation? And therefore, what strategy could I try? What resources or people might help me? what happened when I tried it last time, and what should I adjust. And this is a much bigger learning journey than just learning how to do laundry. So it's much bigger than emailing a teacher or getting yourself out of bed for school. We are mentoring a way of moving through the world. We're teaching someone how to take knowledge and turn it into a life skill, a strategy. How to take strategy and then turn it into action and how to take the results of that action and turn it back into new knowledge. There's this whole feedback loop and that's why I come back to the image of navigation. We can't give our children a map that anticipates every stretch of water they'll ever encounter. The weather is going to change. The boat is gonna change. People traveling with them will change. And eventually we won't be standing there next to them. But we can spend these years sailing with them as they prepare for adulthood, not steering all the time and not standing on the shore shouting instructions, but just sitting beside them, showing them how we read the weather, letting them take the wheel, talking about what happened when we drifted off course, and gradually helping them learn. You know, now I know how to navigate. I know this life skill of living. And when I don't know how, I know how to find someone who can navigate with me. I hope you continue to join us for the next episode. And until then, check out my website at adultandgeriatricautism.com. See you then.