A mom asks, “What can I do when the teacher doesn’t use the supports my son needs?” – A question all parents probably have rummaging around in the back of their brains. But in this case, she is talking about her son’s need to have “the list”. Apparently, in order for her child to do his work he must have all the work (in order) on a list. All the work. If anything is “off”, if anything needs to be switched around, or worst of all, if there is no list, her son has no idea what to do. He literally gets stuck, and becomes distressed.

The behavioral specialists in the room listen but they can offer very little. After all, they are not in the business of policing teachers. Their business is something else. They are in the business of telling us that they have the evidence-based answers on how to help kids with autism. But what to do for a kid who becomes distressed without a list?

So I took a risk, and I asked the Mom, “What’s going to happen when he is out and about in the world and he has no list?” Before Mom could even think it over, the behavioral specialist jumped in, “It’s called a list and I keep mine on my phone!” If I had the guts to push back in that moment, I would have said, “But WHO made your list?” Instead, Mom and I locked eyes. She knew what I was asking; what was behind the question. Mom, in exasperation exclaimed, “But you can’t put EVERYTHING on a list.”

This is the problem with looking through a “behavioral” lens. It is not a question of whether or not to have a list, or how lists are used. The question needs to be, what are lists for? I doubt anyone would say we need a list because (without one) we’d have no idea what to do next. That’s how computers think. Not human beings. It seems so silly to ask the question, what is a list for? But I have to ask it, because clearly the behavioral specialist is making a gross false equivalency. Is she really suggesting that what a list is in her experience is the same as this child’s?

Of course what is so sad is the child is learning dependency. In essence, he is experiencing that he is not capable of knowing what to do because everyone else is figuring that out for him. Without those prompts he is lost. For this soon to be young man, how will he ever experience what lists are FOR? How will he come to know the feelings of forgetting and the motivation to “write things down” and feel the satisfaction of “remembering”? How will he determine what is “list worthy”, and at what point his list is complete?