A Little Halloween Story

Halloween can have different challenges for different children on the autism spectrum. Some children have sensory issues with certain costumes or just don’t like anything on their head. For us, it was something entirely different. Since we moved so much, we often found ourselves in a new area trying to figure out the best/safest place to take our young kids treat-or-treating. We usually ended up at a mall.

One year, again after another move, we found ourselves looking for a place to go and came across a community event near our home where a street was closed down for a Saturday morning for children to go from business to business to get their sweet treats. It was a really nice event and almost all of the businesses in the area participated. I will always remember this particular Halloween for the little communication break through we had with our son. He was 6 years old at the time. We knew he would get fidgety, rock back and forth, or start standing really close to people if he was in a line at the grocery store or other crowded space but it wasn’t until this day that he was able to verbalize to me how he felt in these situations. We had stopped outside one business that was giving out cotton candy but since you had to wait for them to make one at a time a crowd grew pretty quickly as all the cute little treat-or-treaters gathered anxiously awaiting this sweet treat. As the crowd developed around us and we were surrounded by people, he began to lean back and forth into others around us. I told him to stop and he looked up at me with a little fear in his eyes and said “I can’t, I don’t know why”. It was then that I realized he was trying to deal with the anxiety of being surrounded by people but he didn’t know how to deal with this uncomfortable feeling or how to make it go away. His body just decided to deal with his feelings the only was it knew how. I think he was subconsciously trying to make space around him. I felt bad that I didn’t realize he was feeling uncomfortable in that moment but I was so happy that he was able to tell me in his own way that something was wrong so we could remove him from the stressful environment. We immediately got out from the middle of the crowd so he could relax and decided that it wasn’t worth it for this particular treat to be in a space that was so stressful for him. All of the other stops were just a line of kids passing by the treat bucket with a friendly person saying hello as the stream of children passed by and grabbed a favorite goody. Once we selected only single line treat stops, we had a great time and the kids scored plenty of candy to make a successful treat-or-treat experience.

It was just a glimpse into his mind and the struggles he faced of not being able to just say what was going on inside of him. I treasured this gift/experience because it allowed me to keep an eye out for future clues from his body language that something might not be going well for him. Since he most often would instinctively act first rather than telling us something was wrong, I felt that this may be the beginning for us to be more aware of how to interpret his behaviors in a different way. Rather than seeing them as him acting out from boredom, I would see certain body movements and think what may be causing anxiety for him in that moment. This would prove to be very helpful for us as we moved forward in life. Wishing everyone a happy, safe Halloween/treat-or-treating season.