Chapter 4. How to Motivate by Adding Direction: Wonderful Lessons from a Weird Cat.

There's a famous scene in Alice in Wonderland, where Alice encounters the Cheshire Cat in a tree and asks him for directions. The interchange went something like this.

Alice: I just wanted to ask you about which way I should go.

Cat: Well, that depends on where you want to get to.

Alice: Oh, it really doesn't matter, so long as I get somewhere.

Cat: Then, it really doesn't matter which way you go.

Your child doesn't just need to have enough internal and external resources to do the task at hand. They also need to understand what the task is, and like Alice, understand where it's going to lead to. They need specific encouragement and guidance to show them what it is they're expected to achieve.

Think of it like archery. It's difficult to hit the target if you don't know exactly where it is. As you provide this guidance to your Asperger's child, there is an ideal way to go about it. Believe it or not, the brain has great difficulty processing negative information. When I say, negative, I'm not talking about it in the pessimistic sense, but rather in the mathematical one, information that is missing or taken away.

For example, try to imagine yourself not standing in the forest. You can't do it. You have to replace that "not" with something else. You can imagine yourself standing in the desert, standing at the mall, standing atop an impeccably groomed llama, or even standing in a blank white room. But you can't picture yourself not standing in a forest.

Similarly, your brain has a hard time with words like "don't" and "stop." Don't talk to me like that. Stop playing with your food. Don't be so annoying. As a parent, when you make negative statements like these, your child's brain has to make that additional mental leap towards deciding what to do instead. Not to say that you shouldn't educate your child about common mistakes and the pitfalls to avoid. The don'ts are still needed.

But by themselves, they are insufficient. Your child also needs to hear the positive information, the dos. They need to understand which paths might be working out. When the do's and the don'ts are given together, they balance and complement each other beautifully.

How exactly do you provide the positive information? Give your child less criticism about what they're doing wrong, and include more praise about what they're doing right. Offer clear guidance. Educate them, and give them the tools and knowledge they need to make educated choices and move forward in a good direction. Have brainstorming discussions where you discover together how the task at hand might be completed or how the problem might be solved.

For example, if you say to your child, please don't leave stuff all over the bedroom floor, also make a point of sitting down and having a conversation where you talk about and decide in detail what a clean room looks like. I say, in detail, because people with Asperger's need hyperspecificity. Explore why a clean room is important, both generally and to your child specifically. Share the lessons you've learned through the years about how to best achieve and maintain a clean room. Ask open-ended questions and invite your child to come up with their own ideas for how they would like to keep their room clean.

Unless the task is one that must be done in a very particular way, avoid dictating exactly what your child should do moment by moment. That would diminish your child's feeling of responsibility and destroy the potential for any creativity. As Dr. Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People says, you can't hold someone accountable for results if you supervise their methods.

In instances where there is some room for creativity, keep the main focus on specifying the desired observable results, and perhaps suggest a few best practices to get them started. Then, let them take ownership of the process from there. This specific guidance combined with the important discussions will help both you and your child shift your focus away from the ground at your feet and towards the target down the range that you're trying to hit.

Further reading. If you want to learn more about how to parent with clear positive goals, check out Kids are Worth It! by Barbara Coloroso. It is one of my all time favorite parenting books.

Review. Section one, capability, bullet point recap. Capability is always the first place to start when trying to solve a motivation issue. We all have a limited amount of spoons with which to get through the day. Your child may not have as many spoons as you do. Be sensitive to that fact. When spoons are low, be compassionate. The last thing an emotionally exhausted person needs is a yelling drill sergeant.

Make tasks more manageable by breaking them down into smaller chunks. These little micro commitments will create inertia towards the larger goal. Overcome capability issues by identifying and addressing the blocks that exist in all three areas of capability, personal, third-person, and environmental.

When providing missing resources, be sure to give your child a crutch, not an electric wheelchair. Provide clear direction and understanding by thoroughly describing the dos, positive information, instead of just the don'ts, negative information.