Seven Steps To Organising Your Autistic Child

There are a hundred reasons why you should organise yourself and your autistic child. But it was best put by the US writer, Florynce R Kennedy who said 'Don't agonize, organize.' If you don't organise yourself you are going to be dealing with all kinds of problems such as lost papers, untidiness, being late and many others. So here are seven ways that you can very easily organise yourself so that you can cut the number of problems that you have during the day. 1 - Make a Schedule Don't underestimate the benefits of putting onto paper the things you have to do. This is a very straightforward way of creating a list of the important things you need to do, the time and date you need to do them. If you can keep this up to date and actually use it then it will become one of the most useful sheets of paper in the house. You can also create a schedule for you autistic child. This can list all the things that they need to do such as the morning routine, or the activities that they have during the week. This helps to give them tremendous security in knowing what will be happening from day to day and what will be expected of them. 2 - Organise the Important Stuff Organise all the important things in one easy convenient place. This means all the papers such as school papers or medical papers and everything that is important for caring for your child. It also means all the medication, or medical equipment, all the therapy equipment or toys and so on. If you put them in a single safe place and make sure that whenever you use them they get put back then you will know where it all is. The other benefit to this, especially if you have younger siblings that like to explore important papers, you can find a place to put them and lock it away so they don't get damaged or lost. 3 - Organise the House It is very pleasant to walk down in the morning to a tidy house. If you let everything in the house have a place to go then it becomes a lot easier to actually pout everything away. This means you should get store boxes and tubs for toys, make closet space for items that need to be stored away, throw away items that you really don't use or store them if you aren't going to use them for a while. 4 - Take care of the important stuff If you can take care of all the important things then you don't have to worry about them. A great example of this can be making the house safe so that you don't have to worry so much about accidents or what happens if your child goes into a room they are not supposed to. If you sort all the important things then they you are less likely to have something serious go wrong because you have already sorted it. 5 - Preparation One of the best ways to deal with problems is to be prepared. You would be amazed if you knew how a little information could make an enormous difference in the outcome of a problem. Good preparation starts with knowing what you are going to do, knowing what might go wrong and preparing yourself for whatever may happen. So if you are going on a trip and can find out what the traffic or weather might be like then you may have just saved yourself from being stuck in a 10-mile traffic queue or heavy thunder. If you know the types of things that your autistic child is going to need when you go out then you could save yourself a lot of agony when they get hungry when you are 20 miles from the nearest food outlet. 6 - List the Important Stuff and Stick it in The Most Obvious Place There may be 5 to 100 important things you may need to know, such as you child's Doctor's name and telephone number. If it was stuck somewhere obvious, such as on the refrigerator then every time you needed to know it, there it is. You know all the important numbers, names and items that are really useful to have right there in front of you when you need them. 7 - If You Can't Do it Then Get Somebody Who Can As parents of autistic children, it may seem like we have to multitask and do everything humanly possible but realistically we are not all super human and there are lots of things that we can't do. From fire safety to finding the right clothes for your child, if there is something that you really need to do, but don't really know how, then get someone to help you do it. If you can afford it then get people in to save you time, like cleaners. If you can't afford it then don't be so shy to ask for one of your friends or family members to help you. This will save you time and effort and is bound to pay off in the long term to getting you organised.