When our oldest son was younger he had a hard time understanding personal space. Many children and teenagers on the autism spectrum have this problem. It’s a hard thing to explain to someone on the autism spectrum as it doesn’t bother them, so why should it bother someone else. They also often are big huggers and often are very tactile oriented.
It was more of a challenge, because we’re an affectionate family, and welcome hugs from our kids. However, in public, you cannot always walk up to people and hug them. So this is how we went about teaching this skill to our sons.
Explaining Personal Space
In order to help your child to not invade others’ personal space, you have to teach them about personal space. With our son we explained that most people don’t want someone else really close to them and it makes them nervous. Then he reminded him about something that made him nervous and asked if he liked being nervous. He said no, so we told him that he didn’t want to make someone else feel that way either.
Now we needed to demonstrate how close is too close. He’s a visual learner. So we showed him an appropriate distance using two people so he could see for himself. We told him to pretend one of them was him, so that he could visualize how close he could get. Then we asked him to approach and stop at a good distance. It took a few tries, but he got it. It took a few reminders in social environments, but before long he didn’t need any reminders and could do it on his own.
Hugging
This one is so hard to teach. We all like to hug and be hugged by our kids. Grandparents ask for hugs. At an early age kids are constantly hugged or being hugged so this is a normal thing for them. Now all of the sudden it is time for them to go to school or move out of the nursery at church. These hugs that were normal are now not allowed or frowned upon by some.
Your child is behaving the way they always have, but now the “rules” have changed on them. Not everyone wants to be hugged. They still want to greet others, so what do we do? There are several alternatives – the fist bump, the elbow bump, high fives, waving or simply asking if the other person wants a hug. Most of these are generally accepted by almost everyone, however there can be a problem with several of them so you’ll need to figure out which one/ones work best for your child. Some people who aren’t around kids may not understand fist or elbow bumps since they may never have used them before so they might get confused about what to do or what your child is trying to do. Sometimes kids get overexcited when doing fist bumps/elbow bumps/high fives and do them a little too hard. Waving can be confusing if someone is waving and the wrong person waves back or the correct person doesn’t see them.
On all of these solutions you’ll need to make sure that your child is prepared for if the other person doesn’t want to participate or does it wrong. This used to bug my son to no end. Our middle son was a big time hugger when he was in elementary school. We had trained him to ask if someone wanted a hug, however in one of his classes he saw a student hugging a teacher and went back to trying to hug everyone including his classmates. This didn’t go over very well so we ended up telling him that he had to ask adults if they wanted a hug or a fist bump and classmates if they wanted a fist bump.
Social Stories
If you still can’t get them to understand by talking with them, you may be able to ask their teacher or therapist to write a social story on the topic. Social stories are nice because they are a reminder that your child can come back to if they forget or have a relapse.
Social Environments vs Home Environment
We found that explaining to our kids that some things you do at home you can’t do out in public. You don’t stand as close to people that you don’t know vs people you do know or are related to. Hugging family at home is allowed, but you need to ask other people outside your home if they want a hug. In order to help our kids understand this, we pointed out that outside of the house you have to wear shoes, but you can take them off at home. We also mentioned that at home you can go use the restroom any time, but in other places you need to ask for permission.
