I spent so many hours Googling videos of stimming when Chipmunk was two. I’m serious. Hours. It was so scary seeing him seemingly possessed by these unfamiliar, repetitive movements. Every single day–during play, during mealtime, in the bath–he’d stim. He’d squeeze and arrange. Squeeze and arrange. The most upsetting thing was that I couldn’t find any kids online doing the exact same thing. It would be similar sometimes, but not similar enough to soothe my upset (hormonal, pregnant) brain. When his first 15 minute appointment with a developmental pediatrician ended in a curt non-diagnosis of, “No, he doesn’t have autism,” it was even scarier to me. Then what was it, if not stimming?
Four years later, we know that’s exactly what it was. And I understand now that stims can take many forms. While hand flapping is one that nearly everyone recognizes as a sign of children on the autism spectrum, stims can be much more subtle that that. They can be vocal, they can involve movement, then can be an imperceptible tensing of a muscle. My son stims with his toys and obsessions, almost as if he’s playing. It started with cars and French fries (admirable obsessions), and progressed to dinosaurs and other small toys, and then to Legos, and then went a little freestyle with his hands alone. His Star Wars hands.
We know not to worry about his stims, and the only time they’re “controlled” at all is at school, when he’s told that his Star Wars hands have to be quiet so they don’t bother his friends. He can move his hands and squeeze things and do what he needs to do as long as he doesn’t growl and whoosh loudly. (It’s pretty damn loud.)
If you think you’re observing stimming behavior in your child and you haven’t had an evaluation or gotten a diagnosis yet, my advice is to film your child whenever you can. Try not to draw too much attention to it or make a big spectacle out of it. Just grab a small camera (your phone is fine) and save those videos. I uploaded them to a private account that I could link doctors to. Every doctor we’ve seen over the past few years has been very grateful for visual documentation of behaviors that have continued from 18 months to now, at almost six-years-old.
I took this video today, when I was really surprised to see a lot of stimming crop up while we waited in the waiting room at the immunologist. Chipmunk is severely allergic to oak and it’s oak season in a major, ugly way around here. I’ve noticed that when he’s itchy and uncomfortable and his allergies get bad, he stims more often. In this video, you can see a subtle, body-clenching, breath-holding stim (every time the Angry Birds hit the pigs.) Looks like we have another stem-obsession correlation on deck.
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