Before I had a son with autism and then became a Behavior Analyst, I never imagined how hard it would be to teach a child to blow his nose. Today I’m going to break down the steps and give you some easy strategies to help you teach your client or child with autism to blow their nose.
Andy was about five at the time. He was an intermediate learner on the VB-Mapp. He was talking, but not yet conversational, but he was learning very quickly. I’ve also taught multiple clients with autism to blow their noses. Because of my background with nose blowing, I thought Andy would be a really good candidate to learn this skill.
Before I get started with the steps we used for Andy, let’s talk about some prerequisite skills. I found that children need some basic skills before we can teach a complex skill, such as nose blowing. Some of these skills include the ability to follow directions, to imitate, and to mand, or ask for things they need. Andy had all these basic skills, so the first step to increasing or decreasing any behavior is assessment. Can a child blow his nose at all? Take tissues. Can he just take a tissue and wipe his nose? Can he throw a tissue in the trash can when he’s done?
Once we have these assessment steps done, then we need to make a plan to teach this skill. We should really make a plan to teach for very short periods every day. The problem with nose blowing is that people only think about teaching blowing noses when the child is actually sick. This is a problem because when kids are really congested, they’re not ready to learn. They might be having pain and pressure, and that’s not the time to teach initial nose blowing.
Part of the plan includes gathering some equipment. I found that actually a clipboard is a great idea to start helping your child with autism to blow their nose. Some people recommend just having the child blow things on a table, but the nice thing about a clipboard is that the mouth blowing can be isolated below the clip board. Then, you get something like a cotton ball and you can have the child take a deep breath, close his mouth, and then blow through his nose, and blow the cotton ball. You can even tear the cotton ball into smaller pieces to make it a little easier. You can also blow pencils and bigger objects. Again, kind of make a race with it. You can each have your own clipboard. I mean, there’s just a number of ways to make this kind of fun and measurable, and they can actually see what they’re blowing.
You then can isolate each nostril and close up one nostril, close their mouth and blow. We do also want to teach with a tissue. So, the child can have a tissue and I can have a tissue. We want to teach holding the tissue, squeezing nostrils, squeezing one nostril, and taking a deep breath, and closing your mouth before you attempt to blow. As you can see, this is a lot more complicated than you may have thought.
In summary, teaching a child with autism to blow their nose is a fairly complex skill, but you can break it down.
If you enjoyed this video on how to get your child with autism to blow their nose, I’d love it if you would share this video, leave me a comment, and subscribe to my channel. I’ll see you right here next week.
