Saturday morning and it’s still fairly quiet here. Two boys are out running under blue skies.
I relish quiet moments. My noise tolerance is low. I’ve just closed the door but I can hear the radio faintly from the kitchen and talking. I find it hard to concentrate and write with any background noise at all. Occasionally I wear noise cancelling headphones as a last resort. If I find noise a distraction and hindrance, how much more must it affect my boys?
When the boys were first diagnosed and non verbal, the advice was to restrict background noise so they didn’t have to ‘filter’ what they heard. You know, that ability, not to listen into what the couple on the next table are talking about or to hold a conversation while someone is talking on the radio?
They needed to hear single, clearly spoken words over and over, untainted by other noises.
I never played music again in the house. No radio. Luckily, I’m not a big watcher of TV and have never had any desire to watch daytime TV so that wasn’t hard but not having any music took some getting used to. In our house now, it’s the norm.
The only time I played music was in the car. Always. I don’t think I can drive without it. A paradox that I cannot concentrate to write with music playing yet I cannot concentrate to drive without it. It influenced Benjamin’s love of retro music from decades before he was born. He’s still a huge fan of the Carpenters, Beatles etc. Being in the car was not an opportunity to listen to speech or learn it, it was downtime, sing along time. We didn’t play children’s music in the car, they didn’t know it existed so I figured they wouldn’t miss what they didn’t know!
Thomas finds it hard to process speech when more than one person talks at a time, particularly if he is being given two or more instructions simultaneously eg ‘can you lay the table’ ‘don’t forget the glasses’ ‘oh and we need chutney too’ . It overwhelms him. He is now verbal and will remind us that we’re all talking at once and he can’t process . But how did he cope when he was young and couldn’t tell us?
We did a ‘noise programme’ when the boys were small and needed to be able to tolerate noise in places like the classrooms at mainstream school where they went part time with their one to one tutors. At home, we could keep their environment as quiet as possible, what is often called low arousal, which enabled them to learn. But we also wanted them to be able to integrate into everyday life which means unfiltered noise. The boys didn’t have noise cancelling headphones so we did a programme to help them. One action was to turn a radio on so low as to be almost imperceptible in the background and very very slowly increase the sound.
At school, they managed a very slow process so the boys could tolerate lunch time in a noisy hall. To begin with, just opening the door for two seconds to look in, then standing just inside the hall, then sitting to eat one very small item like a biscuit and leaving swiftly, then slowly increasing the time they spent in the hall but always being aware of their comfort so that the experience was associated with being a positive one.
These days, the boys are probably more noise tolerant than I am. We’ve managed to decrease their sensitivity, helped by their desire to be in certain environments like the cinema and theatre.
I think the ability to ‘filter’ will always be an issue so in learning situations, a quiet environment remains a necessity but in order for the boys to access mainstream life, being able to tolerate noise is a skill that was worth the time it took to acquire.
Sarah Ziegel - Author 