Do you enjoy reading PERSONAL STORIES from our local RDI families? Kristi, one of our RDI moms, wrote a very inspirational article about an experience that her husband had while doing RDI with her nine-year-old son. This is a great example of how to teach a big life lesson through a simple activity.
Connect Four
by: Kristi
Nine-year-old Duncan and my husband sat at the kitchen table this morning playing Connect Four. This is not a challenging game for Duncan. The challenging aspect of any game, for him, is losing a game. My husband purposely plays the same move over and over again. Duncan keeps winning over and over again; as my husband literally drops the “coins” in the same slots. By game number 5 Duncan is onto him. First he asks, “Why are you letting me win?” Then he says he doesn’t want to play anymore because it isn’t a challenge. A few more games of this and Duncan is ready to move on. My husband asks him, “but don’t you like to win? You get upset when you don’t win.” Duncan says, “It isn’t a real win, if there is no challenge.” Then they talk about what challenge really is. Duncan says, “I guess you have to lose sometimes so that you can have a real win. “ Then they play some real games where they each win a few games. Duncan’s wins are more celebrated than before and his loses become no big deal. It isn’t always this quick of a fix, but it is these principles that are teaching Duncan how to deal with uncertainty.
This is one example from our family’s RDI life. The most valuable thing that RDI has taught me is that the connections and “rules of life” need to be learned through experiences. In our home we have 2 autistic children. Even though they both have ASD, they exhibit opposite characteristics of the spectrum. Where one is sensory seeking, the other is avoidant, where one is anxiety/perfectionist driven, the other checks out. But RDI is working for both children because they are learning from actual experiences with natural consequences.
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