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Cutting Hair...and Nails... How To Make The Autistic Child Cope With Necessary Processes... Many autistic children do not like to have their hair cut. This is another issue that is so easily explained by my theory of the role of "the partial" verses "the whole" in the autistic child. If you think about it, when you are cutting hair, you are "removing a part of the child"... taking a "part" from "the whole". This, for the autistic child, creates an extremely stressful situation. Not only is the part being separated from the whole, but in this particular case, that "part" comes from the child himself and thus, the stress created by this simple act is overwhelming for the child as he can sense and see that he is losing "a part of himself" and he just does not know how to cope with this. Only once did I take Zachary to a barber. That experience was described in my first book, Saving Zachary: The Death And Rebirth Of A Family Coping With Autism. That experience had been so stressful for Zachary, I then only cut Zachary's hair while he slept... not always the best job... but, it was certainly the least stressful method for doing this task... for both of us. :o) Once I started to truly understand the issues of order, partiality and labeling in the life of the autistic child, I could explain this task and label it in great detail for Zachary as I also provided a coping mechanism to get him through it. I explained to Zachary that hair can grow to be "too long" and that when it is "too long", you can't see. This was easy enough to explain as I used my own hair and covered my eyes with it. What I found worked in helping tremendously with this issue of cutting hair was to simply find a way to bring order to the process... to show "parts" to cutting hair. I took a plastic bowl and simply asked Zachary to hold the bowl and "count" the clumps of hair as I put them in. That took his stress away from the removal of "the part" and focused him on an ordered process... counting! :o) As he counted, I encouraged him and reinforced his "good counting". Cutting his hair has never been a problem since... he actually enjoys it now! :o) The same concept applies to cutting nails.
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