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2 common types of SEN parents:
- Give-up type paying no effort
- Disbelief type paying too much effort and really stressed

Some tips in communicating with SEN parents:
- Firstly, celebrate small improvement
- Then, report the situation honestly
- ask more about their family conditions
- active listening
- show empathy, affirm their emotions and efforts
- give suggestions
- set boundaries: to what extend I should step in (eg domestic violence)
- do not blame or control the parents

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Due to a typhoon, there was only one participant last week, thus I wasn't there.
But this time I could finally join and two participants were here too.
The topic was about hypersensitive and hyposensitive. Although there wasn't enough time to go through all the activities, I saw that the two moms had already learnt the main concept --- to view from their kids' point of views.
Often we observe ASD kids to be extra excited or anxious or frustrated when others are not, so we tend to change their behavior to "normal" without understanding their "abnormal" senses.
By putting hands into box of different stuff (activity 1) and spotting a star within colourful pictures (activity 2), moms experienced over- or under- tactile and visual sensitive respectively.
Samson also gave some examples, like hypersensitive kids may hate the texture of sand but adults may force them to play with it at beach, these help the moms to think if their kids' behaviors are caused by their senses. One mom asked if some of her kid's actions are caused by his visual hyposensitive, Samson encouraged her to observe a clearer pattern of when he would do those actions and try generalise a reason behind. To ease their "strange" actions, we should start from the reason (their pov). It is hard or even impossible to change their senses, so we shouldn't force them to stay in the uncomfortable environment. For hyposensitive kids, we can satisfy their needs at home more so they need less stimuli outside, eg. let them touch different texture at home so they won't touch everything in the street.
This might be the first time the moms knowing their kids' pov to the world, and I saw them brainstorming about possible reasons for their kids' behaviors. I believe that this is a big step for them! One thing to improve might be a better time management, so participants won't be missing fruitful contents!

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This week continued the topic of hypersensitive and hyposensitive children.

One new parent joined in and this time more discussion happened.

They let a feather, some cloth with閃片 to touch their skin as a demonstration of how hypersensitive children may feel like when they wear clothes with tags or socks.

Also, they tried different activities and act as hyper-/hyposensitive children, they need to keep silent or very noisy as they do some tasks, they took longer time than usual when they had to satisfy the rules. This demonstrates how ASD children deal with tasks --- slower or more distracted as they have different sensory needs.

I appreciate Samson a lot for answering parents' questions asked last week, and the parent, also, appreciated that. I guess the act of Samson let the parent felt respected and her question being valued. New questions are asked this week and this implies that parents feel safe and engaged in the conversation.

We also discussed ways to arouse more people's attention towards SEN/ASD children characteristics and needs in the next semester. I hope the society will value our children more in the future through our actions.

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This lesson we shared the topic of low execution ability of ASD children. By disturbing parents while they had to finish a main task, they can experience why ASD children or other SEN children seem to be so careless or "hea" --- they are not intended to be like this, it is because their execution abilities are lower than the majority and they cannot withdraw themselves from the distractions.
At the end of the lesson we invited the parents to have some discussion and some of them can name out some related behaviors of their kids and they have already found out a good way to help them (eg she ask her kid chinese words while he is jumping on the trampoline). Another discovery of mine is that one of the parents had quite a lot questions and ideas to share, another two are a bit quiet. Maybe it will be better if we split into two groups next time, such that everyone can think for questions that they want to ask and learn more from the lesson?

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The first part of this lesson, we watched 2 videos about helping ASD children wear their clothes properly outdoor, and calm them down when they are anxious. The main takeaway is to agree on or lead them speak up about their emotions, and explain the situation to them in our perspective patiently. There wasn't much questions or discussion during this part. The second part is a role-play game where we had to communicate but each of us had a special need (eg one couldn't have eye contact with others, and one mixed up pronouns "I" and "you"). The game was fun but the parents suggested some room to improve: these rules cannot reflect the difficulty when ASD children receive the message wrongly from others (eg they may misunderstand others' emotions or they simply can't understand the question). Maybe we can add one role to act angry or sad randomly to let other participants feels scared or strange to demonstrate ASD's misunderstanding others, and let AI speak in a strange accent to demonstrate the difficulty to understand others' words. Another suggestion of mine is to let parents answer some characteristics of ASD children before showing what rules we are going to role-play. In this way, parents can gain a stronger connection between this game and the real-life feeling of their ASD children.

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This week I visited the RABI lesson of three ASD children of kindergarten age. Two social stories are told by robots. The first one is about "failing to get what you want", then we should stop disturbing others and find alternative ways. Another one taught the emotion - "embarrass", we should not comment on strangers.

Children usually paid attention when the robots are talking, however they may not understand they story enough to own the messages mentioned above. For example, they couldn't recall the plot; answer that we can speak loudly to strangers etc. They gave correct answers when obvious hints are given. And they lost attention easily and disturbed the lesson in different ways. But the teachers responded well and explain the details/reasons for ASD children (i observe that one kid maybe is gifted and kept asking questions until the teacher answered them thoroughly).

In short, maybe the lesson can focus on one social story and repeat the story if they cannot understand. But the patience of the teachers is a big takeaway for me.

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First, we watched a video teaching SEN parents to patiently help their kids to express their thoughts, especially when they repeatedly asking the same question. I agree with this video a lot, as it may annoy others, so parents should teach their kids to evaluate their own thoughts and express properly.

Then, we played a "guess the emotion" game, where we only got to see a part of someone's face and we would easily guess his/her emotion wrongly. This is like how ASD kids have to guess others' emotions. Thus, we should tolerate them more as it is hard for them to "read the air" and act like how we want them to act. We also tried to express a given emotion under restrictions (such as you have to laugh or you have to close your eyes), it is hard for others to guess it right. Thus, we understand that it is also not easy for ASD kids to express their feelings, which corresponds to the video that parents should help ASD kids to sort out their feelings.

The overall experiences are good, maybe we could emphasize more on how these activities relate to their parentings next time.

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Today's lesson includes an interview with the parents. Mainly reviewing the whole program and collecting suggestions for improvements. Three parents all gave positive feedbacks, saying that it is recharging to have a parent group for sharing feelings. Although the parents may have already known much of the information about ASD introduced in these lessons, they still appreciate and learn from interactive activities conducted by us. Because these activities let them experience their kids' needs instead of knowing the theories inside the heads. But the proportion of hypo- and hypersensitivity can be shortened and include more parenting skills throughout the program. Dads can be invited to join too. They suggested this program can serve and teach teachers, social workers and kindergarten parents. The first two groups are easy to understand why, but it is a good point to educate parents earlier such that their awareness and early diagnosis can be increased.