Masking vs. Adapting
As a BCBA, I spend a lot of my practice asking myself one question: am I preserving this child? In other words, while I teach social skills and work to reduce behaviors that get in the way of a child’s life, am I making sure the person underneath stays intact?
Here’s the distinction I keep coming back to: masking asks a child to change who they are. Adapting asks them to adjust how much energy they’re putting out in a given moment — without touching their behavior at all. Masking is exhausting and isolating. Adapting is a skill, and it’s one we can actually teach without asking anyone to disappear.
That distinction sounds simple. In practice, it’s one of the hardest lines to walk in this field.
Is ABA the enemy?
There is, unfortunately, a stereotype which casts BCBAs as heartless scientists who aim to create robots out of autistic people. And as a result, most of us consciously push back at this with every case we are assigned.
It is a really tricky thing to think about. We want–and more importantly, our clients and the families of our clients want–our clients to find success in the world. We want them to learn and to grow and to love and to experience the world in the most positive way possible. In short, we want for them what everyone wants.
So of course, this is the basis of our treatment plans.
But if we are not autistic ourselves, and we are not in the minds of the person we are working with, how can we really find the line between masking and adapting?
Robots
As a special education teacher in an Autism classroom, I once told my paraprofessionals something that surprised them.
“If a typical kid would get away with it, its okay to just let it go.” Honestly, at the time that I said this, I was young and still new to the position, so it was more based on gut feeling than anything, but now I can confidently say I feel the same way.
Autistic kids, especially those who are paired with a 1:1 aide rarely get any leeway. Anything and everything they do is under scrutiny all the time. This is important, of course, if you have a biter, or a student who puts objects in their mouth.
But I’ve also observed kids being micromanaged about behaviors that are causing no one any harm. I remember little Khalil’s aide telling him to have “quiet hands” because he was flapping at an assembly. All around him other kids were talking, wiggling around, squealing…showing excitement. His emotional expression looked different, and so, he was corrected.
Needless to say, I spoke with Khalil’s aide about that later.
Years later, in a middle school, Brody, a boy with autism came up to me and said, “I’m going to fly my kite at recess.” His aide approached quickly, apologized to me, and then said, “What do you say first?” “Hi,” he said, in a totally new, unenthusiastic tone. “How are you?”
I wasn’t this child’s teacher, or this aide’s supervisor. I’m not sure about the programs that he was working on, but what I do know is that a child attempted to engage with me, and he was corrected, which has got to be a horrible feeling. This kind of correction leads to masking, not adapting.
I include these stories not to criticize the aides. They are doing their jobs, and they are doing them with kindness and compassion. I include these stories to illustrate my point that we should use our corrections sparingly.
We should remind ourselves that the goal is not to take someone and get rid of all of their autistic traits. Our goal is to remove the barriers that autism creates so that that individual meets their full potential (and some of that involves tapping into those uniquely autistic gifts!).
Room for Growth
I’ve heard a lot of people say that autistic people don’t have empathy, and this has always made me feel angry.
I’ve known a lot of people with autism, and all I can tell you is that each of them had their own way of expressing their love and care and concern for others. I can also tell you that there were a lot of things (sensory needs, deficits in emotional regulation, etc.) that, at times, impeded their ability to do so.
One of my clients who demonstrated incredible growth in the area of identifying his own emotions and responding to them. His mother was thrilled to share that, not only had he been identifying his own emotions in her time with him, but that he also began to identify emotions in his siblings, and offer them some of his simple strategies. Although he might not be able to tell me that he appreciates learning these skills, he has spent less time engaging in fights with his siblings, and more time engaging in positive interactions with them (so, objectively, I’d say that’s a win!).
The point is that there are areas that autistic people can improve in (as there are areas that I can improve in) that will enhance their lives without tearing apart the characteristics that make them who they are.
Being a chameleon
I worked with a client, recently, who struggled with reacting to others’ emotions. Most worrisome was his laughter when his little sister was crying. This is common among individuals with autism. It doesn’t have to do with a lack of care or concern, but rather a lack of understanding about how to respond, and it can also point to a level of discomfort about the situation.
Watch this video below for more information.
Laughing after seeing his sister upset is not a personality trait for this client. It is not a part of who this client is. And, in fact, this behavior impedes the client’s ability to live a full life with positive relationships with others because it is an isolating behavior. (If I am crying and you are laughing at me, I am not going to have positive thoughts about you. I am not going to trust you or want to have a deeper relationship with you.)
To target this behavior, and other, similar behaviors, I worked with the client on becoming a chameleon.
I know how this sounds. It sounds like I’m asking the client to engage in masking to “fit in” with others. But that is not the purpose at all.
Being a chameleon means being able to read a social situation and adjust your energy level (notice, not your behavior, but just your energy level) to the situation.
In action
Let’s look at my earlier example of Khalil at the assembly. The energy level was high. Music was bumping, the presenter was bopping on the stage, there are balloons and lots of people all around. In being a chameleon, my client didn’t need to blend in to the situation, he just needed to match the energy.
And he did: he was sitting appropriately. He was flapping his hands. (And for anyone who says that we should stop him from flapping because the other kids are going to think he’s weird, let me politely but firmly disagree. That is not his problem. It is not his job to sacrifice his comfort for the comfort of others. I talk more about that in my post on stimming.)
This is actually a really useful tool for paraprofessionals as it helps them to identify when they should intervene and when they should just let the child do their thing.
How to teach it
The best teaching tools are ones that make the teacher obsolete. While paraprofessionals and teachers are really valuable in teaching the skills and making sure that they are utilized at the appropriate time, our ultimate goal is for the student to be able to handle the skill on their own.
I’d begin by providing the student with a framework for “reading the room.”
Next, I’d have the student consider different situations and identify whether they are high or low energy situations.
Next, I’d examine some different scenarios and have the student identify the best way to respond in those specific scenarios.
A Final Thought
None of this works if we skip the first step: teaching kids to actually notice the room they’re in before we ask them to adjust to it. That’s the whole point of the chameleon framework — it doesn’t ask a child to hide who they are, it just gives them a tool to navigating a world that wasn’t built with their sensory and social experience in mind.
The line between masking and adapting isn’t always obvious, and I don’t think any of us get it right every time. But if we keep asking the question — is the child matching the energy of the situation in their own way? — we help preserve the child as they truly are, and teach them to feel comfortable with themselves.
If you’re looking for ready-to-use scenarios for teaching kids to Be Like a Chameleon, check out my Be a Social Chameleon social skills activity.