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Lesson

Exclusive and Repetitious Behavior

Exclusive and or repetitious behavior can be quite common in children with autism. How we respond to this in a developmental play therapy setting depends on each child. This module is designed to guide you on what to do during your play sessions when your child becomes exclusive or repetitious.

Instructor Aaron DeLand

Lesson Length 2:29

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Name of play coach*
Your Child or Clients name
Session Date*
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How long was your session?*
How did you feel in your session?*
Pick from the options below
Client Name and Session Summary*
A quick summary of your session including anything of significance. For example, a new word or new motivating game. Anything you may have observed or learned about working with your child.
Goals*
Check the boxes of the goals worked on in your session.
- Joint Attention/Shared Enjoyment
- Sustaining Interactive Attention Span
- Child Initiated ineraction
- Social Referencing/Eye Contact
- Gestures/Non-Verbal Communication
- Symbolic and Imagination Play
- Social Flexibility
- Verbal Communication
- Imitation
Joint Attention
- Little to no interaction. Your child is highly repetitive and/or exclusive in their play. Any interaction is fleeting.
- Your child spends much of their time exclusive or repititious, but will join you for a few preferred highly motivating short interactions.
- Your child bounces back and forth between exclusive and interactive states. Will have a few substantial interactions that appear really fun and enjoyable.
- Your child was interactive for more than 50% of your session. Engages in longer interactions. They are clearly enjoying themselves and relaize that your are enjyoying this with them.
- Your child was interactive for more than 75% of their session, but occassionally seek to be exclusive. When they are interactive they are clearly enjoying themselves and are really eager to engage.
- Your child was interactive 90% or more of the session with little to no exclusivity or repititious time. They are spending 30 minutes or more at a time playing very enjoyable activities with you.
This goal is the primary goal of every play session, all other goals are achieved through the process of sharing enjoyment with your play partner.
Elements of Shared Enjoyment
Shared Enjoyment is THE most important piece of any play program. This is the fuel, without it nothing really works. Sustained periods of shared enjoyment create an Oxytocin response in the brain. Oxytocin is what helps us make social bonds and is foundation to all other social skill development. Use the checklist below to evaluate this element of your play sessions. Note: this could be your only goal and if you're achieving it you will see natural spontaneous development. It's quite common to see improved eye contact, attention spans and increased sponatantous communication.
- Spontaneous Eye Contact and Social Referencing (No Requesting!)
- Secures your attention by looking at you and either talking or using a physical contact gesture (grabbing our arm or turning your face towarsd theirs)
- Eagerly stays in the interaction. You're not having to call them back or do much entertaining them to keep them there.
- They are physically close to you or even climbing on you. This is very common and is a very direct form of initiating interaction. Also a great way of gettgin sensory input.
- They are initiating interaction without prompts or requests. This shows they are particularly excited about what you are offering and are atleast motivated materially but what you're doing.
- They spontaneously imitate you. This tends to come later and is a sign of deep connection and shared enjyoment.
- No challenging behaviors. Generally speaking, you will ot see biting, pinching, scratching when you have a sustained period of shared enjoyment, if you do it is probably just a build of excitment in their sensory system and that's them trying to release it. Not a sugn if frutration or discontent.
Level of engagement
On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest quality. Rate you and your child’s joint attention and shared enjoyment overall for your session. When estimating this, consider the time spent attending to the same activity, did your child appear joyful? were they spontaneously communicative? Did they consistently reference your face and make meaningful eye contact? Were you enjoying yourself in relation to them?
Please enter a number from 1 to 10.
Child Initiated Interaction
Gauge how often your child initiates a game or activity and re-initiates with in that activity. An initiation is any non-requested communication from your child to begin or continue an interaction. Initiations can be verbal AND nonverbal.
- You are doing 90-100% of the initiating to begin and continue the game. using prompts and requests to re-initiate interaction.
- You are doing 80-90% of the initiating and most re-initiating of the games
- You are doing 70-80% of the initiating and some re-initiating of the games.
- You are doing 60-70% of the initiating and less re-initiating of the games.
- You have fairly balanced interactions with your child initiating and reinitiating 40-60% of your social interactions and games in a playroom setting at any given time. There will always be variation.
- Your child is Initiating activities every session and eagerly re-initiates with in activities.
Additional notes for Child Initiated Interaction
Social Referencing and Eye Contact
Rate your child's overall use of social referencing and eye contact during your interactions. Don't consider times when your child was being exclusive.
- My child frequently and consistently references their social partner during interactions. Eye contact is voluntary and never requested.
- My child references or makes eye contact with me at times of high motivation, but will often talk without looking at me.
- Spontaneous eye contact looks strained, forced, glazed over or difficult.
- Any eye contact is fleeting, will look at me but not at my face.
- Eye contact only happens upon request or prompt.
Additional notes for Social Refencing and Eye Contact
Gestures used
Check all that apply to your session. Gesture types are displayed in the order that they typically develop. Check all that you observe your child doing on their own or through spontaneously imitating you.
- Motor-Skill Gesture (ex. Taking you by the hand)
- Contact Gesture (ex. Making contact with an object to draw your attention to it)
- Distal Gesture (ex. Pointing, waving, nodding etc)
- Symbolic Gesture (ex. Using your hand as telephone or arms as airplane wings)
Physical Imitation
Did your child use any physical imitation of another person in their session?
- Yes
- No
Describe what your child imitated.
Symbolic and Imaginative Play
Did your child engage in symbolic or imaginative play?
- Yes
- No
Symbolic and Imaginative Play
Choose one of the following to describe your child's level of Symbolic and imagination play in your session.
- Performs simple single symbolic actions, like pretending to eat toy food
- Performs a sequence of simple symbolic actions, like pretending to feed a baby and put them to sleep.
- Performs sequences of 3 or more simple symbolic actions consistently.actions.
- Acts out more sophisticated imagination themes like pretending to be a pirate or going to space. But may be controlling about how or what they play.
- Fluently and flexibly plays all or most imagination games that are presented.
Describe Symbolic/Imaginative play from your session
Describe briefly your game or activity, and what your child's role was, what symbolic play they used or imagination theme they engaged in.
Rate Social Flexibility from 1-10
Rate your child's flexibility during interactive games and activities. A "1" being highly rigid, not open to other's ideas, will only play certain games of their choosing or talk about only their topics, and a 10 being open and curious to their social partners ideas and interests. This doesn't mean that they are interested in doing everything all of the time, but at least they are open to trying it out. No child, autisitic or not will be one way all of the time, use this tool to see an overall trend.
Please enter a number from 1 to 10.
Games and Activities
Please use the 3 spaces below to describe your three most interactive and motivating games or activities that you played with your child
Game/Activity #1
Give your game or activity a brief descriptive title and a short description of how to play it. Be detailed enough that someone else could follow your instructions and play the game as well.
Game/Activity #2
Give your game or activity a brief descriptive title and a short description of how to play it. Be detailed enough that someone else could follow your instructions and play the game as well.
Game/Activity #3
Give your game or activity a brief descriptive title and a short description of how to play it. Be detailed enough that someone else could follow your instructions and play the game as well.
Advanced Conversation Skills
This section is for kids and young adults who are highly communicative either verbally or through a device and are working on conversation skills such as storytelling, sequencing, having affect and expressing emotion, understanding social cues or being flexible within a conversation.
Are you working on advanced conversation skills?
Your child should be able to sustain reciprocal conversations on basic topics of interest for at least a few conversation loops.
During your session was your child able to share a story with a beginning, middle, and end?
To tell a clear story we need a beginning, middle, and end and we need to put things in the correct order. This is called sequencing and is a component of effective storytelling. This can be a simple three-sentence story, doesn't have to be War and Peace!
During your session what best describes your child's affect during conversation?
We're defining affect as facial expression, voice modulation, and body language during a conversation.
Emotional Regulation
This is a place to document any crying, whining, tantrums or meltdowns, what steps you took and whether or not they were useful. Use this to document the outcome of any strategies you're implementing to help evaluate any changes to be made.
Did your child have any sigificant meltdowns or tantrums during your session?
Tantrum defined as simply crying and screaming to get something of value, generally a toy, screen time or food. It can be intense, but relatively short-lived. A meltdown is more intense, can last longer and onclude physical aggression.
Describe your child's meltdown or tantrum
What preceded it? How did you respond to it? How did it finally end or get resolved?
Verbal Communication
Pick the verbal level that currently describes your child
Note this is just a marker to be used to compare down the road.
- Not yet verbal
- Makes one or two different sounds for communication
- Makes word like sounds
- uses 1-10 clear sinlge words consistently
- uses 10+ clear single words and som two to three words phrases
- Uses a larg vocabulary of single words and short phrases to make needs known
- Uses longer sentences to express more complex thoughts, but still has a hard time being fluent often getting stuck or frustrated.
- Can speak fluently, but may have trouble combining with eye contact.
- Fluently speaks and incorporates eye contact, intonation and gestures.
Verbal Language Notes
Use this space to make a list of any new words or sounds used in your session, include words that you've hear but that are still emerging.
Self Evaluation
Answer the questions below to help keep you focused and improving on your play skills session to session.
Social Magnetism
Rate yourself on how effective you were as a Social Magnet for your child. A "1" being "I was tentative and flat" and a "5" being "I deserve an Oscar! I was entertaining, dynamic and user-friendly!"
Please enter a number from 1 to 5.
Rate of Request
Your rate of request is how often you are asking your child questions, making a request or placing a demand on them. During your play sessions, you want to be around 0-1 questions per minute. To accurately figure this out you'll need to watch a 15 minute video clip, count the number of requests/questions and then divide that by 15. You don't have to do this for every session, but it's nice to do every now and then. Otherwise feel free to estimate using the choices below. Understand that while 2 questions per minute don't sound like a lot, in an hour session that's 120 questions! Yikes!
Notes for Next Time
What is at least one thing you want to do differently in your session? This could be working on being more dynamic and magnetic to your child or being more creative, making a game or a theme. Anything, you want to do is fine, review this before your next session as a reminder.

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