Many people on the autism spectrum are rule driven. They find comfort in systems, rules, and schedules as it lets them know what to expect. Of course, if it’s a rule for them, then they believe the rules should be the same for everyone. In many ways, this allows them to be very fair, and helps them to get along with people, but in other situations, it can lead to frustration if the other person doesn’t follow that rule, possibly because they don’t know about it.
They are almost compelled to follow the rules no matter what, even if they want to do something else. Now that’s not to say that they won’t find a way to “bend” the rules to do something they want, but they desire the system.
For example, when our oldest was just a little guy we had a rule that once he went to bed for the night that he was supposed to stay in bed until we got up him up the next morning. Many times when it was time for him to go to bed he would lay down in bed, but bounce a ball next to his bed. More than once I went up stairs thinking he was not obeying, to find him following the “letter of the law.” This way he was still following the rules, but he could still play until he was ready to fall asleep.
Because he can follow rules quite literally rules and instructions have to be carefully worded because once he learned something one way it was highly unlikely that he would change what he was doing. He learned a dance number the first time it was presented to him, unfortunately the choreographer messed up on a move. She tried to get him to change it and he never would, so she had to change the dance number to match the moves she showed him that one time.
When rules were explained to our son at school, he would follow them to the letter and expected everyone else to as well. For a while he developed a tattle-tale behavior on his fellow classmates. This caused them to not like him very much, so we had to work with him on this. We told him that it was the teacher’s job to enforce the rules, not him. We also told him that it was okay to tell the teacher if someone was about to get hurt.
Luckily we caught this behavior early on and were able to adjust it by creating a simple rule that he could follow. The key with helping a rule driven child to fit in is to word rules carefully and to work with others who make rules for your child to follow to make sure that the wording is consistent.
We always discuss rules together and look for any way, no matter how small, that our son could possibly misinterpret them. By following this simple plan we hardly ever have a problem and it has helped us with our other children too.
