Many people believe that autism and learning difficulty are one and the same thing — but I must tell you, they are different. The reason it so often seems that way is that most children with autism do face this problem. According to Autistica, a charity dedicated to autism research, an IQ (Intelligence Quotient) below 70 is what defines a learning disability.
Learning disability shows itself in many ways, including difficulty adapting to new situations, difficulty controlling one's behaviour, and difficulty interacting with others. Most children with autism will naturally be confronted with these same challenges. Scientists have also found a genetic relatedness between learning disability and autism.
Once I began to observe my daughter more keenly after discovering she was autistic, I noticed that behaviours like self-injury and stereotypies are common among people living with both autism and a learning disability. Coping with the health and behavioural challenges of an autistic child usually increases the stress carried by their parent or caregiver.
The Brains of Autistic Kids Work Differently
I have long been curious to understand why learning difficulty is almost the norm among children with autism. It is true that everybody's brain works differently — but watching my daughter, I couldn't help comparing her with other children her age. I often caught myself asking, "Why can't she do this or that?"
According to psychologists, human beings learn through three channels: touch (kinesthetic), hearing (auditory), and sight (visual). As you grow, your brain begins to favour one or two of these channels over the others. You may well have noticed that you learn better in one form than the rest.
For a child with autism, the brain will usually shut off all the other channels in preference for just one.
For a typically developing child, information arriving through different channels — touch, sound, sight, taste, smell — is easily distilled by the brain into one coherent picture. For a child with autism, however, the brain will usually shut off all the other channels in preference for a single one.
Something else happens frequently, too: when children with autism are presented with information from two or more channels at the same time, they find it difficult to integrate it all — and the result is confusion rather than understanding.
How You Can Help Autistic Children Learn
Autism is a wide neurological disorder with a very broad spectrum. The tip that helped me cope with my daughter may not necessarily work for you; it often takes a great deal of experimenting to find the combination that suits your child. I cannot guarantee that the suggestions below will be effective — but they are absolutely worth a try.
- Create a suitable learning environment: if possible, use a separate room and remove every likely distraction — electronic gadgets, toys, and background sounds included. Autistic children are very sensitive to changes in light, so choose lighting that is consistent and non-aggressive.
- Find the learning channel that best suits your child: as I mentioned above, an autistic child usually has one preferred learning channel — and it is your job, gently and patiently, to discover which one it is.
