How to Stop Autistic Children Self-Harming

Unfortunately autistic children carry out the painfully, distressing and dangerous practice of self-harming. This is often than not a regular occurrence with autistic children. There a normally only a couple of reasons for this and therefore this helps as you only need a few ways of reducing or stopping the practice.

One of the reasons for the self-harming is due to the fact that autistic sufferers cannot communicate like the majority and they tend to get very frustrated. This frustration then results in a level of anger and they then start to harm themselves, sometimes just purely to get attention. The most common and quickest way of getting attention is by them banging their heads against a wall, followed closely by the second method of biting themselves.

The way of curing the need to self harm has been looked at in two ways. The first and most difficult method is to ignore their actions. This means that the family or carers have to do something totally different when the child starts to hurt itself. On the other hand it has been suggested that communication therapy and drugs may help to reduce the problem. One drug theory is the use of nutritional drugs including B6 and Calcium as these have shown some success when tested.

It has been thought that an autistic child will self harm and not stop as they wait for a biochemical called endorphins, called happy hormones, to be released into the body. The endorphins provides a happy release for an autistic child. This helps them to temporarily forget about what has troubled them and caused them to self harm.

With the communication method it is very important that everybody who has a lot of contact with the child learns how to communicate in this different way. When adults talk to children that do not suffer with autism they tend to rely on abbreviations, signals, and body language. All this has been learnt from the basic methods of learning to talk. Autistic children do not have this building block to help them therefore it is far more difficult and as frustrating for the family member as the child.

Well it can be seen that autistic children suffer so much with the lack of understandable communication. It is obviously a major priority for all concerned to remove the need for self harming.

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