Shloimy is in 2nd grade. He is rigid and has trouble understanding that people often don’t follow rules completely. He tends to overreact when someone breaks a rule, and it is a source of discomfort for him. He also struggles socially and doesn’t consider the social ramifications of trying to get others to follow the rules. His classmates are likely to get annoyed at him and view him as a tattletale, which may lead to him getting teased or bullied.

When I started working with Shloimy, I noticed that he was rigid in many other areas. When I played a card game with Shloimy, he had his own rules on how to play and wouldn’t consider anything different. Even when I showed him the instructions that came with the game, he still insisted that his way was correct.

At the end of the session, I would drive Shloimy home. He insisted on only taking a certain route home. When I tried challenging him to take a different route, he started crying that we weren’t going to get to his house.

Why Rigid Thinking Develops in Children on the Spectrum

Children like Shloimy often struggle with understanding things that aren’t black and white and concrete. When it comes to rules, they can’t easily grasp that rules sometimes get bent or that kids like to challenge them. This is why it’s difficult for them to understand how their actions affect others, since it isn’t something tangible and concrete that they can easily see. They feel comfort and safety when their life follows a routine they can predict and anticipate, and this often leads to becoming rigid and less tolerant of anything that differs from what they expect.

Why Pushing a Rigid Child to Change Backfires

Surface-level behavioral interventions that just focus on pushing such children to bend and try other ways of doing things, assuming this will build flexibility and tolerance, often have the opposite effect. When these children are forced, they feel threatened, and they dig in and become even more rigid as a self-protection strategy.

Being rigid with Shloimy wasn’t going to help him overcome his rigidity.

How to Help a Rigid Child Consider Other Ways of Doing Things

To help Shloimy, I needed to find a way to challenge his thinking while he felt safe and engaged. Since Shloimy loved card games, I knew they would be the perfect tool for teaching flexibility. Shloimy had an exact way he liked to mix the cards and would carefully distribute them into four separate piles. He would get upset if anyone mixed them differently. I complimented Shloimy on how carefully he mixed the cards and how his method ensured that they were mixed the best. But then I challenged him:

“Is this the only way to mix them? What if someone is in a rush and wants to mix them quickly?”

This is the key: challenging Shloimy to pause and reflect that there are other ways to mix as well, and they may have advantages too. Getting a child to pause and reflect begins the process of them developing and expanding their worldview. If I had just tried enforcing the correct behaviors, Shloimy would have become defensive and insisted on mixing his way, rather than any genuine reflection.

Using this process of engaging Shloimy and then finding ways to challenge his rigid thinking, I worked with Shloimy on his rigidity regarding the rules of playing games. If Shloimy was insistent on playing with a certain rule, I would challenge him and jokingly say, “That’s my worst rule! Can we play without that rule?” By highlighting my feelings in a humorous way, I was challenging Shloimy to think about other ways to play. Making it about my feelings rather than just telling him what to do made it more likely that he would pause and consider my point of view rather than shut down and get stuck in his rigidity.

Despite Shloimy’s progress with playing games, he still refused to allow me to take any other routes driving him home. Instead of making it a struggle about which route to take, I focused on finding something exciting to see along the way. I mentioned there was a construction site a few blocks over. I also told him about a new traffic light on a different street. Shloimy loved traffic lights. He was always asking me about them. By embedding things he genuinely cared about, he actually got curious about trying other ways. With time he forgot about his rigidity and started wanting to go check out different things on the way home.

What Changed for Shloimy

Working with Shloimy taught me something important. Often when a child is rigid, our instinct is to push back and force him to bend. But when we do that, we’re just creating a power struggle they need to win to feel safe. The answer is to keep finding creative ways to challenge them to expand their worldview. As Shloimy opened up to other ways of doing things, he also began considering how others see things, and that began to change things socially for him.

Stories in this series are based on real accounts, but many details have been altered to protect the subjects’ privacy.

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