Posted under: Education, Psychology

Stressors are those things that push the child from optimal arousal with high levels of performance and learning to distress and decreasing performance. Optimal arousal is the state in which the child’s alertness and focus are such that learning is more effective and efficient. Distress is the state at which the child becomes over-stimulated and/or overwhelmed.

For people with Introversion-Sensing-Thinking-Judging (ISTJ) preferences, like children with autism, stressors tend to be those things that violate their need for clarity, precision, planfulness, logical decision-making and time to warm up to a situation. Strikingly, the stressors Quenk found for ISTJs parallel what I have observed repeatedly in children with autism.

Once the child with autism has gone beyond an optimal level of stimulation and has begun to experience stress and anxiety, it is usually not a long way to a ‘distress’ reaction.

Again, the distress reactions found by Quenk are remarkably similar to those found in children with autism. The child’s first response is often overdoing sensing where he mouths or chews objects, spins or paces, flaps his hands, or becomes over focused on small details. The thinking preference may take a downturn and feelings, often in their rawest forms, emerge with the child’s melting down, becoming increasingly rigid and extremely fearful.

Individual children will vary in their distress reactions. Observe the child in different settings to determine how he typically reacts to the stressors identified earlier.