Behaviour, however, was harder to control. Yet some sort of control was a necessity.
It is not easy to discipline an abnormal child. The difficulty lies not so much in the child itself as in one’s own reluctance to be harsh with the handicapped. It is not easy to punish a child who does not hear what you say for a transgression whose nature you have no reason to believe she can understand. You cannot say that Sara will be sad if Elly tears her book (Elly was six before she began to understand what ‘sad’ meant). You cannot even say that if Elly tears books Mama will have to take the books away. You cannot say that if Elly pours her bathwater on the floor it will soak down and leak through the ceiling below. You cannot say anything, because the child understands only action, and not much of that. She understands only what touches her presently, physically. She sets no store by things, so you cannot discipline her by deprivation or by reward. What remains is the traditional method of discipline — the use of force.
I need not explain to modern readers that for our generation of parents force was not the method of choice. To impose one’s will on a normal child by force is distasteful enough (though at times, as our generation of parents at length found out, quick force is less damaging to all concerned than indulgence or elaborate moral suasion). To use force on an abnormal child seems too brutal to contemplate. I do not know whether I could have contemplated it, and I’m not sure I could have done it. By good luck I did not have to. It happened that the major work of disciplining Elly was done before we knew there was anything the matter.
Until she was twenty-two months old, after all, we thought Elly a normal, though increasingly obtuse and stubborn child. She responded to no prohibitions or commands; when she was doing something anti-social it was almost impossible to get her to stop. She simply paid no attention to what we did or said. Amused at first, I would become irritated, then infuriated at behaviour which looked in every way like wilful disobedience. Why would she go on drenching the floor with bathwater when again and again I asked her not to? The other children hadn’t been like that, even when they were smaller. Why wouldn’t this one listen to her mother?
I grew more angry than I have ever been with a child — so angry that I cannot recall it without shame. In my anger, I slapped my little girl’s naked flesh again and again, until I could see the redness on her skin and she was screaming with pain and shock. I screamed myself. ‘No, no, no, NO!’ I don’t know how often I did this — three or four occasions, perhaps, no more. Then it was no longer necessary. Elly understood nothing else, but she understood ‘no, no’. I rarely had even to slap her hand, never to hit her hard. I did not have to scream. The words were enough.
And of course almost as soon as she understood the words, I came to understand that she might not have been able to help the behaviour for which I had punished her. Everything was different after she came home from the hospital. It was years before I could get really angry with her again. Of course I felt guilt for those rages that only Elly and I had witnessed. (I would have been ashamed for the older children to see me behave so. ) It was a bitter thing for me to reflect that in two years the only verbal contact I had achieved with my baby was the word ‘no’. I am a verbal person; for me, words have tremendous significance. It seemed to me that that no might impose its minus sign upon a whole universe.
I was wrong. That guilt was unnecessary and after a time I ceased to feel it. It was not only a matter of realizing that it was better for Elly herself that she now responded reliably to ‘no, no’. I had known that to begin with. I had to go further, to realize that in a child so out of touch with others, any contact is better than no contact at all. Would that I could have reached Elly first with ‘I love you’, or with ‘yes’ (though to be realistic one should remember that the nature of the world is such that ‘no’ is an essential word and ‘yes’ is not, and that most children learn it first). The important thing was that I reached her. Perhaps nothing less than that storm of force and emotion was necessary to break through the wall. If so, I am glad it came when it did; six months later it would have been impossible for me to feel that anger.
I should have had to fake it, then. I am convinced of that. And that would have been exceedingly difficult, though much less is impossible than one at first believes. [3] Violent anger is better felt than faked. But it is necessary, if it is the only way of conveying to a child that there are limits to what it can do and that someone cares enough to set them. I am no longer sorry that I used force against Elly. Those who know the story of Annie Sullivan know that she had to use more force than I before she could work her miracle and reach the waiting child inside the lonely little wild animal that was Helen Keller. And the little animal, through force as well as love, in some sense knew that this was the first person who cared enough about their relationship to find a way to make it work.
I found that Elly wanted discipline. When she tore a book or pencilled a wall I began to notice that if I overlooked the transgression she would take my hand and use it to slap her own. As she approached three she made a game of it (I need not reemphasize how unusual it was for Elly to invent any kind of game). With no provocation at all she would herself say ‘no, no’, take my hand, make me slap hers, and laugh her head off. This was in contrast to the infrequent occasions when I really slapped her for a real transgression; she did not laugh then, even though it was usually, now, no more than a symbolic tap. The punishment game made me feel better about the real punishments. I came to see that discipline, too, is a kind of communication. Negative though it is, it sets up a relationship of mutual expectation. I was trying to find reciprocal games; Elly showed me that this was one. If you do this, then I do that. A normal child needs this assurance of order and predictability, but it can survive without it. For an abnormal child whose abnormality lies in lack of contact, it is more important.
For a child suffering from the specific autistic syndrome it is essential. All observers of such children have been struck by their extraordinary investment in order, their urge to set objects in arbitrary but exact and recurrent arrangements, their capacity to note and be disturbed by the most minor displacements. An autistic child may carry on inconsolably if its milk is offered before rather than after its dessert, or if a missing block makes completion of a design impossible. It was this interest in order that suggested autism to Dr Blank when he first saw Elly. Such children, then, might be expected to have a more than usual need for an orderly social environment. What will distress them and fill them with anxiety is not the arbitrariness or unfairness of a punishment. For them, since they have no comprehension of social causes, all events are equally arbitrary and fairness has no meaning. What is difficult to bear is, rather, inconsistency, deviation from that expected pattern of events which is their only surety in an incomprehensible world. A normal child can take it if behaviour that yesterday brought punishment today gets off scot-free; it may sense the reason and will very probably enjoy the fact. An autistic child will not; it will suffer, wordlessly, in the same way it suffers when something is out of place. We are told to be consistent with all our children, and we try to be. But laziness or inattention often intervene or special circumstances arise and the expected consequences do not follow. The autistic child cannot appreciate the circumstances or its goodluck, and shows its anxiety by an uncharacteristic turbulence. Many parents who have lived through Dr Spock’s great revolution in child care have seen the results of dogmatic permissiveness and have come to feel, as Dr Spock himself has, that to indulge a child is to do it no special favour. [4] Normal children, however, can survive permissiveness, as they can survive most things. For an autistic child, the indulgence, hesitation, and softness that are so naturally called forth by its condition must be avoided at whatever cost. They will not help the child or its family, but do serious injury to them both.
3
Therapists in California are having their first success in dealing with severely autistic children by treatment in which violence and punishment play an important part. See
4
Those who take the trouble to compare the recent edition of The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care with the first one will discover that Dr Spock has revolutionized his revolution.