Star Reward System for Autistic Kids

Meghan will be coming home today for an entire week stay. As I am running around the house cleaning and doing errands to welcome her home, I’m thinking how happy I am to have her home for her first full week in 4 months, but I am also worried, too. I’m worried that she will get too used to being home for the week that it will be much harder for her to get back on routine. Meghan is profoundly autistic and it is usually very difficult and time consuming to motivate her in doing almost anything: getting her up and dressed; taking a shower; going out on a car trip; eating at a restaurant. I was visiting one of my favorite blogs, Teen Autism, and her most recent post was about "how to motivate autistic kids." Fitting, right? It reminded me that in addition to her visual communication book (or pecs), of which she has one for home and a few for school, we also have instituted a star reward system. Even though we pleasantly set-up her face-board of activities for the day that she must follow using these pictures (simple use of velcro on the face of a three ring binder), she usually takes the pictures off and replaces them with pictures of things that she'd rather do. Hence, our difficulties in motivating Meghan.

Even though this is her little game of obtaining power and being very stubborn, it could still take up to an hour just to get her to fulfill the first activity on the board, like taking a shower. School has developed this star reward program to use to “motivate” her to, not only, to take a shower, but to get to it within a reasonable amount of time.

How it works:

There is a velcro section on the face of her communication notebook for little pictures of stars. (just like for her other communication pictures). Every time we need her to do something, like taking a shower within a certain period of time, then she will get a star velcroed to the face of her communication book. After she earns a certain amount of stars (we have her earning 5), then she will get a reward, like TV time, because she loves to watch TV or a video. It is recommended that you start off with only a few stars—like three, so that the child will see rewards more quickly to understand how the system works.

This is working for us so far, but it is not a guarantee for a long period of time--at least it wasn’t for us. We had actually tried this reward system once before, but after a period of time, it stopped working for her. Meaning that she was no longer motivated to earn her rewards and was content to just sit in her room all day without rewards. But this is just the personality and nature of my daughter, the most stubborn one in our house. But clever too!

So we are trying it again and if it stops working, then we try something else.

My other son, Nick, doesn’t even need a reward system. He does everything I ask him to do: Takes a shower when told, will get dressed when asked, takes out the trash, gets the mail out of the mailbox, cleans his room. He is just a boy who likes to do what he is asked to do to please us. I actually think he likes being told what to do, even though he plays up the whole “doing work” thing with a loud groan, but then does it with a smile on his face. Funny, huh?

You know what psychologists say, most kids like to be put to work as it makes them feel useful contributing to the household … I must say, even Meghan will help with cooking and emptying the dishwasher on occasion w/o even being asked.