As far as taking guys like mine and Abbie out to places, it does have some therapeutic benefit. It's basically a form of exposure therapy. For instance, in order to get my son to tolerate even going to a grocery store, we had to actually take him to grocery stores. The main idea behind this is for continued safe exposure so that the anxiety lessens each time because he now has these good experiences to draw on. Before this, the way we had to do things like shopping was always leaving one person at home with him, or wait until he was in school, or out with his aide. That was ok when he was in full time school, but when he was homeschooled, this was unsustainable. Plus, life happens and sometimes you just have to run errands. So, our goals during the week became to get him out to places. I took him on every single errand I had to do during this time. He went to the grocery store, the post office, the pharmacy, walmart, home depot, etc. Quick trips that built on success and not epic failure. It worked in the long run, but there were days where we did have some issues. We still have times now where he will be absolutely fine walking into a place, but becomes agitated during the middle of it all for whatever reason. But, since he is now older and has a backlog of these experiences behind him, he knows what to expect. That being said, most of my outings with him are strategically planned. We get the items we intended to, we do lots of talking him through it, and I tend to use a reward at the end if he does well. Eating at a restaurant is no less a planned event for us. We usually scope out the place in some fashion before deciding to try it. If the parking lot looks too full, we avoid it due to a possible long waiting period. If we pull up to a place and upon walking up to it he starts to get agitated-we don't go to that place. We like places with booths. Places that are not crowded or overstimulating. Places with no ceiling fans or have them high up out of his reach. He's consistently done well at Hooter's of all places....lol. Now, he has the added issue of Tourette's, so even when he is in a good mood, he can be loud because of his vocal tics. Tics are highly tied to emotions, so depending on his mood, different tics come out. Is it stressful? Absolutely. Those parents probably just wanted to take their family on a nice outing. Their daughter may have been terrific going into the restaurant and waiting for a time before you arrived. But, suddenly, something set her off. They likely tried to gauge the situation and tried to just wait a little longer. It was all going good....until it wasn't. They likely left feeling defeated yet again. Feeling like autism stole yet another moment from them. Mom may have gone home and just cried. Maybe the meltdown continued on at home. Maybe it got worse in the car because now the plan was suddenly changed and their daughter really did want to eat out-but for whatever reason, everything just went wrong.
The gist of it is that we want to go out to places with our kids, and a life spent indoors 24/7 can be just as hard. Our kids NEED to be able to function out in the world at some point, and the only way to do that is to take them out. That being said, eating out every single day and going to multiple places at once would be very taxing on my boy and would lead to meltdowns. His max is about 3 quick errands and then he is ready for home.
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We can agree that 1994/1995 were good years
