"Choose Your Battles"

(An Excerpt Taken from 'My Very Own Tool Supply' a book by Sylvia A. Miller)

"No Buzz Buzz!"

 The Hair Cut Battle

One of my biggest fears as a single mom was hair cuts.  I mean, let's face it, if it took dad 4 hours at times to cut one head, how long would it take me?  It's not as if I could take them to the barber shop.  They would never sit still for that, nor would a barber in his right mind put up with the screaming and wrestling that one simple cut always took.  All I kept telling myself was that the huge afro had long gone out of style and the longer I searched for a solution, the more difficult it was going to be.  So I had to come up with something, and fast, especially the way their hair grows.

Sometimes we make things difficult for ourselves by seeing situations as bigger and far more complicated than they really are.  I focused on the noise that the clippers made.  Children with autism have a problem with noise right?  It could also be a combination of the vibration too.  They had sensory issues as well right?  Then of course there is the fact that heads are not cut everyday and so it could just be the unfamiliarity with having their heads touched that way.  They didn't really like having it brushed so it would have to be so very difficult for them to sit still for a buzzing, vibrating and scraping experience.

I searched high and low for a piece of equipment I had seen my father use when I was a child -- a silent hair trimmer -- you know the kind that looks like two small combs stuck together and has a replaceable razor blade in between.  How could I go wrong?  No loud noise and no vibrating! Well, it failed miserably.  You see, it required far too much water to soften the hair, and my guys (with their super sensitive ears) seemed to hear every single strand being snipped (I know because I did too!).  And the last reason?  It didn't make for a very even cut when the heads bobbed like the puppy in the car window. They went to school with many a bad hair day until I decided that all the hair had to go.

So, I tried the beard trimmer.  This had to be it!  Smaller than regular clippers, less noisy and with less vibration.  This just had to be it!  There was a minor glitch though.  You see the only one I could find, that had the particular attachment I would need, was rechargeable, which is not a bad thing if the boys would just stop the bobbing.  They could bob for as long as the thing held a charge.  The solution could be to simply start cutting the hair on a Friday night and finish on a Saturday or Sunday (and hope you didn't have to go out suddenly and take them with you).  And of course, you could always cut one head this weekend and the other on the next.  Okay, this would work for me, but why wasn't it working for them?  

(This is where the simplicity thing comes into play.)  I remembered something very important that I learned in what I like to refer to as "autism 101", and it is so very, very simple.

Not knowing what to expect causes a lot of anxiety in my sons, and this anxiety leads to the behaviors.  Solution, remove the "unknown"!  We got through the teeth and hair brushing, the face washing, and just about everything that would attack their senses, by putting a limit on it.  If they knew exactly how many strokes to expect, they focused on making sure I didn't miscount.  So I made a promise to them that the hair cut would come to an end, no matter how it looked, after the agreed upon number of strokes.  The key thing at that point, was to make every stroke count!  

The long and short of it:  Effortless haircutting, perfect every time. 

This battle was so simple, it blew my mind.

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