Those Restricted Interests

I already did my rant deep dive on play skills. Tl;dr: Play is not play if it’s just imitating what neurotypical peers are doing. The underlying stream feeding that is pathologizing autistic behaviors and interests. Neurotypical children may have “interests” or “passions,” but autistic children have “perseverations” or “restricted interests.” 

Since we’re too busy pathologizing this, we don’t get to discuss the benefits these hyperfocuses have given society over the years. Take a tour around Silicon Valley, an R&D department, or a maker space, and you will find yourself in a world dominated by neurodivergent people. Behind any innovation in our society, from STEM to humanities, is a neurodivergent community.

Yet too many providers still wish to temper this hyperfocus in the interest of making sure autistic kids appear more neurotypical. Why? 

Well, the whole thought process behind this pathologization is that people might get bored when the autistic child only wants to talk about this one thing for hours on end. Peers might think it’s weird and isolate them. Maybe it’s considered rude to infodump on a neurotypical person without “allowing” them to change the subject to something they want to talk about. 

There’s a discussion here about neurotypical versus neurodivergent communication and culture, but that’s a different post. Today, it’s about the treatment of “restrictive interests.”

Ethical considerations 

Do we need to intervene? This is basically a social script among practitioners whenever we are faced with a behavior of interest, either something we’ve noticed or something someone else in a child’s life points out to us. The correct answer being if of course, it’s not harmful and the learner does not want it to change, then we do not intervene. 

The word harmful sparks a debate though. It’s almost always in the context of an autistic person having to exist in a neurotypical world and make sure the neurotypical inhabitants of said world remain comfortable. See, a lot of people seem to confuse harmful with this might make neurotypical people uncomfortable. It’s funny how quick are to protect neurotypical people from this discomfort while forcing neurodivergent people to endure literal pain in the interest of learning to deal with discomfort. Our standards for tolerance are always higher for disabled people than non-disabled. 

Let’s take your classic, stereotypical example: Trains. Billy the Autistic just loves trains. He will talk about trains for literal hours, regardless of whether or not the other person is interested in them. He will only play with trains, and will find a way to work trains into every other activity from math to art. 

Is this harmful?

Most would say no. He’s not hurting anybody; we can just find a way to work around it. Often there’s a compromise by teaching Billy a time and place to talk about trains and to tolerate activities that don’t involve them. 

Some would say yes because his obsession with trains is isolating him from his peers (read: His non-train-obsessed peers). Perhaps his academic performance suffers if trains aren’t worked into the subject in some way. Perhaps it’s just driving some people crazy because they’re tired of hearing about trains. 

There’s a reason I chose trains of course. The fact that it’s a stereotype implies that there are a great many people on this earth who like to talk about trains at length. Yet, there aren’t enough in Billy’s world, so we need to change this behavior. Why is it not an option to simply help Billy find others who love trains as much as he does? There is actual research showing that people tend to enjoy interacting with others who genuinely share their interests – just in case you needed a source in order to buy into that. You’re welcome. 

The fact of the matter is infodumping is not universally reviled. Neurodivergent people will infodump to each other, even about completely different subjects, and everyone will enjoy themselves. It’s part of autistic culture and neurodivergent communication. 

So what is the goal here? If the only reason to change a behavior is for “social acceptance,” then that’s not an ethical reason to change the behavior. A person need not be friends with every single person around them. Hell, they need not be friends with anyone if they would prefer it that way. There is absolutely someone for everyone. For neurodivergent people, they will usually connect better with other neurodivergent people. That’s OK. If neurotypical people don’t click with them, there is no reason to force it. 

Blaming every social problem or “deficit” on a special interest (SpIn) is our own prejudice at work. We need to dig deeper: What are we really concerned about?

Pros and Cons of expanding interests

Before we consider “treatment options,” let’s do a cost/benefit analysis. What are the pros and cons of teaching someone to expand on their interests? Sometimes people really do benefit from learning to try new things. Though they may not have been keen on the idea at first, but eventually they are genuinely happy they got past that and expanded past their one thing. Sometimes that expansion turns into a whole new SpIn. 

Benefits

• More reinforcers. One of the hardest hurdles to get over is low motivation. It can make it really hard to learn new skills when the motivation isn’t there to do it or practice the skills involved. 
• Finding a new interest. It’s a good feeling to discover something new that you vibe with – a new hobby, a new song, whatever. There’s excitement in that, even if it’s temporary – only for its novelty. 
• Reducing anxiety around new things. This is really the kicker isn’t it? Change is often extremely stressful for the autistic brain; so why would we expect forcing change to go well? If a person is being told to go from the comfortable familiarity of their current hyperfocus to uncharted territory, of course they’re going to resist that. What if there was a way to make it less scary, though?

Costs

• Faulty measurement. This is where it goes wrong. We like to think we’ve taught an autistic person to expand their interests, but what have we really taught? Likely a series of behaviors in which an autistic person participates in a certain activity and mimics the behaviors of those around them who are enjoying it. That’s not play or expanding an interest, that’s imitation, and not benefitting the person the way the actual skill would. 
• Your interests are wrong. When working to reduce the amount someone discusses and engages with their SpIn, what we’re really teaching is that their own interests are wrong. That is a slippery slope on which there could be a whole other article. Although we can’t measure thoughts, this behavior can rapidly generalize into dangerous situations. A person is taught that their own thoughts and judgements cannot be trusted and that they must rely on the people around them for how to behave. It’s not mentalism to say that is psychologically damaging and setting someone up for abuse; that is a fact.
• Masking. Ultimately, reducing SpIns is just teaching a person to mask and does nothing to teach them to grow and get to know themselves as their own person. This lack of understanding can affect a person’s agency, self-advocacy, and ability to communicate their needs and have meaningful input in their own goals. 

Now let’s try some actual skills

With this in mind, let’s return to Billy, our hypothetical autistic child. Is the concern really that he’s into trains? No. He can be into whatever he wants to be into. The concerns are really:

Drops in academic performance

Maybe some emotional reactions to activities that don’t involve trains

He’s attempting to connect with peers and failing.

We behavior analysts love to break things down. Let’s keep going:

Drops in academic performance

So Billy doesn’t perform as well when academic tasks don’t involve trains. So, how can we work trains? No, really, it’s more realistic than it might seem. If we just pay some attention to what it is about trains that Billy actually likes. As studies in play have shown, child-led means seeing things from the child’s perspective, not yours. If you really watch a child play and join them in their world, you will learn the real details of what it is they like. For Billy, maybe it’s the wheels and the way they all move in unison. The longer the train, the more wheels, the more satisfying. 

How can we work such an image into a discussion of, say, photosynthesis. The cycle is round, easily portrayed as a circle. It’s a cycle, so it repeats, perhaps like multiple, connected, spinning wheels? 

Or maybe we could just doodle a little train in the corner of the worksheet to make it more fun to look at. Sometimes that’s really all it takes, and that is hardly an unrealistic thing to work into life both inside and outside of a school environment. How to ADHD gives some very applicable advice here.  

When we stop pathologizing and start just getting to know a person for who they are, it’s amazing what gets revealed and how crucial those revelations are. 

Emotional reactions to change

Has it occurred to you that maybe some things are scary to others that aren’t scary to you? BCBAs ironically struggle with perspective-taking sometimes and fail to consider the autistic experience might be different from allistic ones. It’s made to be all about learning how to tolerate not getting our way until we consider that maybe their emotions around the topic are valid. Maybe their brain is releasing the scary chemicals. 

… which isn’t operant, by the way, it’s the other one. Remember that one? The involuntary one. 

What if we paired the act of trying new things with comfort? 

What is comfort? 

Well, you won’t find much about that in JABA and JEAB because we can’t measure that, so we like to ignore it. Hanley et al. took a stab at it with the concept of HRE (happy, relaxed, and engaged), but it’s still not well defined. Basically, it’s that private event where the brain is releasing the relax chemicals instead of the scary ones. We need to make it do that when we introduce something new.

Unfortunately, the best place for insight on that is research in clinical psychology. So what do those no-good, stupid psychologists say about such a thing? Well, one really great way to make the stress chemicals happen is a lack of control over one’s environment. We know the word control. Some have even tried to make it a whole function. The inconvenient fact is people generally experience less stress when they have more control over their environment. This includes children. There’s a tendency to focus on compliance, especially neurodivergent kids who may engage in behaviors that are particularly inconvenient or uncomfortable for the neurotypical adults in their lives. If you never get a say in anything in your environment though, your brain is going to start dumping out those scary chemicals. 

Billy wants friends, but is failing

The main point here is that Billy is showing interest in peers. He wants to connect with them, but no one wants to engage with trains as much as he does. So the problem is the trains, right?

Wrong. 

The problem is the social navigation, and there’s 2 sides of that street. Maybe no one is as interested in trains, but remember that part about really understanding the interest? It’s the same way as connecting it across academic tasks. Find the similar interests and help all of the children learn to connect with each other. Neurotypical kids can be hesitant to try new things too. Maybe they’ve just never given trains a chance. Maybe they’ve never considered some of the things about trains that Billy finds so fascinating. Maybe they think Billy is weird because the adults in their lives keep talking about how weird he is with his train obsession. 

Especially with young children: If you don’t make it a problem, it won’t be a problem. 

So far, the only organization I know of that focuses on teaching neurotypical kids to socialize with neurodivergent ones instead of the other way around is The Nora Project. The focus is on finding connection and similarity instead of focusing on the differences between them and their disabled peers. Seriously, I say this in probably every other post: Get The Nora Project into your schools. 

One the neurotypical children have learned to give Billy’s interests a chance and try the trains, we can then work on making trying new things less scary for Billy. Now, everyone is willing to try new things. The skills are compromise, turn-taking, communication – none of which need to involve tamping down Billy’s passions. 

Teaching only the good lessons

It’s so easy to teach the wrong things. Autistics especially can be prone to people-pleasing, and may have a lifetime of learning history telling them not to trust their own thoughts and feelings. There needs to be encouragement and validation the whole way. Expanding on interests doesn’t have to mean giving up or limiting the ones you have. There needs to be time devoted  to reinforcing their SpIns. Let the child lead. Learn all you can about what Billy sees in those trains. Build that trust and that mutual interest in getting to know each other. 

It’s not your thing is wrong, mine is right. It’s I had a lot of fun doing your thing, I’d like to invite you to try my thing now. Don’t like it? That’s OK. Maybe we take some time apart now. I’ll do my thing, you do yours. We’re still friends. Oh look! You caught a wild social skill! 

Here’s the thing: In order to get used to trying new things, you’re going to have to try the thing eventually. What is try? Try is join in for just long enough to get a taste of it. This could be a literal taste if it’s food – maybe you give it a lick. It could be picking up the new item and seeing what you can do with it, even if it’s just watching someone else do something fun with it. Maybe it’s playing 1 round of a new game. You see everyone get 1 turn and then you take yours. Once you’ve gotten the taste, you can leave and go back to the comfortable space. There’s no expectation of continuing, there’s no mysterious time minimum or  visual timer that gets progressively longer. Just a quick little compromise and the ability to abort at any time. 

I like the 3 Times rule. Try it 3 times. If you don’t like it, you never have to do it again. Why 3 times? Because the first time, you’re not going to know what to expect. Especially for brains who release the scary chemical when something is different, that makes for an extremely low chance you’re going to like the thing the first time. 

The second time you try the thing, you’re going to have an idea of what to expect, but part of that was a bad feeling: Discomfort, anxiety, all the things the scary chemicals do. So, it’s unlikely you’re going to enjoy it. 

The third time you try the thing, you will likely know exactly what to expect. It won’t be as new, so the brain won’t feel as compelled to release the scary chemicals. The lack of scary chemicals allows a person to really engage with the thing and have a chance to see if they will enjoy it. At that point, you’ll probably see one of 2 reactions: This is pretty good, I’d like to do this again, or meh, not my thing. What you probably won’t see is an emotional reaction driven by scary brain chemicals, because they’ve learned they can control the experience and the people around them will respect their boundaries. 

There’s an exception here though: If there’s an extreme reaction to the first try, there is no second or third (unless the individual themselves wants to). If you try the food and you literally gag, that food is out of the equation. If you try the game and the sound causes you pain, that game is gone forever. 

Not everything is going to fly. That needs to be OK. Just like neurotypical people can try new things and decide to never do it again, so can autistic people, and they are the final say on that decision. 

Another script BCBAs have is “building on those interests.” Often we think, this kid likes trains. Trains are vehicles. Let’s try other vehicles. But if you haven’t taken the time to really get to know what it is they like about trains, you can still miss the mark. It might seem related to you, but it’s not related to them. At that point, you may as well pick from a random bank of activities neurotypical kids do and slap it into a treatment plan. Consider that it might not be about the train as a whole. It might be the lines, or the patterns, or the wheels, or the way it interacts with the tracks. Pay attention first, find the related activities second. 

There’s also some fucking around and finding out that is perfectly acceptable. Parallel play, try different things with their toys or similar ones, but without that pressure for them to imitate you. If they show interest, encourage that without pushing. Want to play with me? Awesome! Want to just watch? That’s cool too. Not interested at all? No problem. If it doesn’t land, just move on. Back up and pay attention to the learner’s body language.

Ideally, unless you’re autistic, your insight is going to be limited. Without being argumentative, try listening to other autistics about what would work for them in these situations. Obviously, autistics are not a monolith, but if you keep listening, you’ll at least gather ideas, possibilities, and general things to watch out for to make sure you’re teaching actual skills that benefit that person.

And for the love of all that is holy, learn a thing or two about what your kids are interested in so you don’t sound like a cringey old person completely out of touch with their generation. In the age of the internet, there’s no reason you can’t take a few minutes to learn enough about their interests to be able to connect with them and have a conversation. 

Seriously, if you work with 8-12 year-olds (as of this article) and you’re not an expert in Roblox, you’re doing it wrong.  

Resources

How to ADHD: www.youtube.com/howtoadhd

Koegel, R.L., & Koegel, L.K. (2006). Pivotal response treatments for autism: Communication, social, & academic development. Paul H Brookes Publishing.

The Nora Project. https://thenoraproject.ngo/