Safety advice for children with autism

845. Welcome back. Right now we want to talk more about a tragedy that happened in Daytona Beach. Police say two young brothers snuck outside while their mom was napping and later drowned in a nearby pond. Officers say Elijah and Cash, just five and three years old, had just been fed lunch by their mom when she laid down to take a nap. And then the children somehow got out and ended up in the water. And we have learned the five year old had autism. So let's talk to an autism expert, Katiba Davis. She is the chief clinical officer at ABA Centers of America. Katiba, thank you so much for being with us. How are you this morning? I'm doing well, Danielle. Thank you for having me once again. I really do hate to talk to you under these kinds of circumstances. This is such a sad story. And here's the thing, Katiba, we've heard several stories, right, about autistic children in the past. They've wandered off, always been drawn to bodies of water. And sadly, that does appear to be what happened here. Talk to me a little bit about why autistic children love the water. So autistic children are attracted to water because of sensory stimulation. We have something, we look at functions when we look at their behaviors and what they do. And so that is an automatic function. And what that function serves is the movement of the water, the sounds of the water, the reflection of the water. It's so relaxing and it feels good when they touch it. So the attraction does vary, though, by child and it feels good to them. However, they are not aware or they're unaware of the depth of the water. All they know is they want that stimulation and it feels good to them. So they're unaware of the depth that obviously they likely are also unaware of the danger. Yes. Yes. So most individuals with autism, They can't understand the risk of some activities that they engage in. So what's truly important is that we protect them and we make sure that their homes have locks, but not only locks, because I do understand these boys, their mom did have a safety lock on the door. We want to ensure that the lock is not reachable to them. They cannot reach it. However, we do want to make sure we're not compromising any emergency exits. But we also want to include an alarm on that lock. So when exits happen, the sound will go off and mom, dad, or any caregiver in the home is aware that the child has exited the home. So in applied behavior analysis, in my experience, we call that elopement. And so what we do for most elopement behaviors is we incorporate different visuals in their treatment. So things like stop, like a stop sign. So if that's in front of the home or near any nearby bodies of water in the home, they can start to generalize that sign and they will stop before they enter the water. But of course, that comes with training as well. You know, research has also found that children on the spectrum are more likely to wander away from safe environments, which puts them at even greater risk of getting lost and of even drowning, as unfortunately we saw in this particular case. So you talked about mentioning kind of maybe having a stop sign, right? Maybe even right outside your house or in your yard or something like that. What else can be done to protect them? So we want multiple layers of protection. So we want to make sure locks are out of reach. Like I said, you have a safety lock in the home and it's out of reach. You want to make sure you're supervising your children at all times. But you also, if you turn away for one second and they learn to undo that lock, you want to make sure an alarm is connected to the lock. Again, once that sound goes off, it'll alert you that someone is exiting the homes. You also want to make sure, or if you can, get swim lessons for your children and then start emergency planning once they're in the water. We utilize something called first then strategies and applied behavior analysis. And we call that a premack principle. Like what do you do first and then what happens next? So safety measures evolve as children evolve. So individuals with autism, they may learn to unlock that lock at times. So you want to make sure their skill set matches your prevention method. So training is ongoing as you put these safety measures in place. But then also knowing how to swim is important. I do want people to understand, though, that knowing how to swim does not make your child drown-proof. So you still have to put all these other measures in place. And when a child goes missing, the first places you want to check is nearby bodies of water immediately. All right. Good information. Katiba, thank you so much for being with us this morning. No problem. Thank you, Danielle.