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If you've ever stood in front of a child who just walked away from your activity or watched a child drop to the floor, the moment you pulled out flashcards or an activity that you had planned or felt that sinking feeling when a child was not engaging or responding and you had administration there giving you your evaluation observation, you might have wondered, what am I doing wrong? Why won't they engage with me? How do I get him to do this? Today I want to gently shift that question. Because so often what looks like resistance is telling us something really important. And when we listen to it, everything can change. Let's dive in. I'm Tara Phillips, and this is the Autism Little Learners podcast, where I share simple neuroaffirming tools to support young autistic children with compassion and confidence. Before we talk about what to do when engagement is low, I want to anchor us in something. Disengagement is not defiance. It's not laziness. It's not a child trying to be difficult. It's information. For us, behavior is information. Not a problem to solve based just on what you're seeing with your eyes. And when the child walks away, drops to the floor, covers their ears, or stares off in the distance, they're telling us something. Our job is not to override that message. Our job is to listen to it. That mindset shift is where the whole conversation begins. Let's talk about what low engagement looks like. A lot of the time, let's get really concrete. Low engagement can show up as walking away, dropping to the floor, refusing, staring off, covering ears or eyes, pushing materials away. Oh my gosh. All these things have happened so much in my years in the classroom. Flapping, eloping from the area, going silent, shutting down. Sometimes it looks like what we might call challenging behaviors. Throwing materials, hitting the table, hitting you, yelling, big emotions. Whatever form it takes, the message is a lot of times the same. Something isn't working for me right now. So what do we do when engagement is low? Here's where I want to be really honest with you, because most of us have been trained to respond to low engagement in a very specific way. When a child disengages, the traditional response or instinct is to increase demands. More prompting, more directives, more hand over hand, more physical prompting. Token boards first, then boards that are used in a way to push through the resistance. If you do this, then you can have that. Withholding preferred items until the child complies. More adult control, more structure around the moment. And I want to be clear if you've done any of These things. I'm not here to shame you. We've all been there. So many educators are navigating real world constraints, and most of us were taught these strategies. Many of us were told, it's what good teaching looks like. You're not doing anything wrong by feeling stuck. But we know better now. And when we know better, we can do better. So why does it backfire when we do these things? Here's the hard truth. The more we push, the more children disengaged or the bigger their stress response becomes. And there's a reason for that. When we add demands to a child who's already dysregulated, their nervous system doesn't say, oh, okay, I'll get back on track now. Their nervous system says, this isn't safe. I need to protect myself. And protection often looks like one of these three things. Fight, flight, or freeze. Fight looks like pushing materials away, knocking things down, yelling. Hitting. Flight looks like running, eloping, or hiding under the table. Freeze looks like going blank or staring off or shutting down completely. And none of those are behavior problems. All of those are nervous system responses. And when we add more pressure to a nervous system that's already overwhelmed, we get more of those responses, not less. So here's a story that I think about all the time. It's another story from my friend Carrie Ebert. And she just talks so well about deep interests, and I love listening to her anytime she speaks about this topic. She was asked to mentor a therapy team supporting a little boy whose deep interest was letters. When Carrie arrived at the clinic, she noticed something. The letter toys were locked in a cabinet. The puzzles with letters, the blocks with letters, all of it. The therapist had locked them away because they said the boy was obsessed with them. They were worried his interest in letters was interfering with his ability to learn other things. So they removed letters entirely. What happened? He wasn't engaging anymore. He wasn't participating. He was resistant. He was having meltdowns. The team kept adding more demands and more structure, and he kept pulling further away. Carrie came in and made one simple unlock the cabinets. They did, and this little boy walked over, pulled out his favorite Alphabet puzzle, and sat down on the floor with it. Carrie didn't place a single demand on him. She just sat with him quietly. He kept looking up at her like he was waiting for her to snatch the letters away. But she didn't. She just stayed present. And slowly, he started playing. He'd pick up a letter and say the letter name, and Carrie would repeat it back. At some point, she said, M is for mom in this child, who the team said was non speaking because that's what he had shown and was not really communicating, jumped up, ran over to his mom and put the M on her lap. Then he came back, picked up the R. Kerry said, r is for rug. He ran over and he put the R on the rug. Then D is for door. Then B is for book. This child was reading. He was hyperlexic, and nobody knew because for months the team had been working so hard to extinguish what they saw as an obsession that interfered with everything else. And they never got to see the competence that was right there the whole time. And there's a lesson from this story. Presumed competence. Always non speaking does not mean non understanding. And when we lock away a child's deep interest and then demand engagement on our terms, we're not building skills. We're creating barriers. And we're missing the very thing that could have opened everything up. Access to what they love. When Carrie unlocked those cabinets, she wasn't lowering the bar. She was removing the wall between that little boy and his ability to show us who he was. And now let's talk about the compliance trap. There's a phrase I want to name here, and it is called the compliance trap. It goes like a child isn't engaging, so we add more pressure. The pressure causes dysregulation. The dysregulation looks more like disengagement or challenging behavior. We respond with more pressure, and the cycle keeps going. Meanwhile, the child's learning something very specific. Adults aren't safe. Learning time is stressful. My body has to fight to protect me. This is not what any of us want children to learn. This isn't about compliance. It's about access. Access to materials that make sense for them. Access to deep interests that motivate them. Access to communication in whatever form they use, access to regulation. Before we expect participation, let's talk specifically about some common token boards, earning systems, or first, then structures that are used to push through resistance. These tools can feel organized. They can feel productive. They can feel like we're teaching delayed gratification. But here's what really happens with a lot of young autistic children. The child doesn't understand why the interest they love has suddenly become a reward that they have to earn. Yesterday they could play with trains whenever they wanted, and today they have to complete a worksheet first. From their perspective, their deep interest has been taken hostage. And the anxiety that that causes actually makes engagement harder, not easier. Support is most effective when it's proactive, not reactive. Regulation is a prerequisite, not a reward. When we ask children to regulate themselves in order to earn access to the thing that regulates them, we've created an impossible lo. So what do we do instead? If we're not going to add demands, add prompts, or use these earning systems, what do we do? Here's what I've learned. First, we pause when engagement is low. Our first instinct should not be to increase pressure. Our first instinct should be to slow down and get curious. What is the child telling me right now? Is this activity too hard? Is the environment too much? Are they tired? Hungry? Dysregulated? Did something happen earlier today? Is this demand mismatched with the support in place? Is it that they just aren't interested in what we're offering them and they don't want to do it? They would maybe like to have some autonomy to make a choice. What looks like resistance is often a mismatch between the demand and the support. Here's a phrase that has changed how I see children. They would if they could. When a child isn't engaging, it is not because they don't want to. It's because something is in the way. Maybe their nervous system's overwhelmed. Maybe the task doesn't make sense to them. Maybe they're tired of that task. Maybe they don't have the tools or the language to participate in the way we're expecting. Maybe the environment's too loud, too bright, too unpredictable that day. Maybe they've had this activity pushed on them before and they're bracing themselves. They would if they could. When we start with that belief, we stop asking, how do I make them? And we start asking, what do they need? That shift changes everything. I'd love to talk about meeting them where they are instead of pulling a child toward our agenda. And honestly, we get stuck on our agenda a lot. We can move toward theirs. This is where deep interests become the doorway. Instead of forcing engagement with a task the child doesn't care about, we can embed their interest into the moment. If they love vehicles, we use vehicles. If they love letters, we use letters. If they love a specific character, we bring that character in. We're not giving up on our goals. We're just changing the vehicle the way we're getting to them. Following a child's lead builds trust, and trust is the foundation for everything when it comes to connection and relationship building. And everything else grows from there. And a piece of this comes back to the idea of honoring multimodal communication. Because let's say I have. This is a true story. A former student who loved. Loved being sung to. And I was trying to get her to maybe start to initiate the song that we were singing. So she was on my lap, and we were going back and forth singing, row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. And I would stop. And I could have been, like, prompting her to say the next word and not doing anything until she said it. But instead, I. I observed her really closely to see if she gave me any way that she was communicating. And all of a sudden, she started moving back and forth really slowly a couple times. I'm like, oh, let's go. You know, you want more. And kept singing the song. So we meet them where they're at. We start there, and I want to come back to something. Support regulation before expecting learning. And this is the sentence I want you to hold onto more than any else from this episode. Because when we try to teach a dysregulated child, we're not actually teaching. We're adding stress. And stress blocks learning. And a child who is regulated, safe, and connected can learn almost anything. Then you add in their deep interests. Boom. That is where the magic happens. So before we ask a child to engage, we check, are they regulated? Do they feel safe? Is the environment supporting them? Is the demand matched to where they're at right now? And if the answer to any of those is no, the first step is not more prompting. The first step is supporting their nervous system. You don't have to overhaul your whole approach tomorrow. Small, consistent shifts matter more than perfection. Here's a few things you might try. Instead of adding a prompt, try a pause. Wait longer than feels comfortable. Let the child initiate. Instead of asking a question, try making a comment. Oh, the truck is going fast. Instead of what color is it? Instead of pushing through resistance, try lowering the demand. Make it smaller, make it easier, make it feel doable. Instead of requiring eye contact, try sitting beside them and just being present. Connection doesn't require looking. And here's a big one. Instead of pulling a child away from their deep interest, try bringing their deep interest into the activity. This one is so powerful, and I want to stay here for a minute. Because when engagement is low, one of the fastest, most respectful ways to shift things is to meet a child inside what they already love. If they love trains, we don't need to wait until after work to let them have trains. We bring trains into the work. Matching can happen with trains. Fine motor can happen with trains. Language can grow with trains. Early literacy can Blossom with trains, the skill doesn't change, the approach does. And this isn't about using their interest as a bribe. It's not. If you do this, you can have your trains. That's still pressure. It's compliance based. What we're doing is different. We're making the activity itself feel like something the child actually wants to do. Because here's the thing. A child's deep interest is where their nervous system feels safest. It's where regulation lives. It's where flow happens. It's where they're most open. Open to connection, to learning, and to us. So when engagement is low, ask yourself one question. Is there a way to bring their deep interest into this moment? Sometimes it's as simple as swapping generic materials for ones tied to ones they love. Sometimes it's weaving in a favorite character into a story you're reading. Sometimes it's joining their play with no agenda at all and letting the interaction itself be the win. Instead of redirecting away from the deep interest, try joining it. See what happens when you enter their world instead of pulling them into yours. Interests are a bridge to connection and learning. And that bridge is available to us every single day, in every single interaction. We just have to choose to walk across it. Our goal isn't to get the child to comply. Our goal is to build a relationship where learning can happen. That relationship is the foundation. Without it, nothing sticks with it. Everything becomes possible. Connection, again is another foundation. And deep interests are one of the most powerful tools we have for building that connection. They are the child's doorway. Our job is to walk through it with them. When the child disengages, we can use this internal script. This is information they would if they could. What is this telling me? What do they need right now? How can I make this feel safer? What do they love, and how can I bring it in? That script doesn't just change what we do. It changes how the child experiences us. We become the adult who pays attention, who listens, who doesn't push past their signals. The adult who makes space for what they love. And that is the adult children open up to the next time you're watching a child disengage from an activity. Pause. Pause. Before adding any of that pressure. Instead, try this. Notice what they just told you. Honor it. Adjust. Meet them where they are, ask yourself what they love, and bring it in. Forcing engagement again does not build learning, it builds resistance. And so we really want to start with connection, curiosity. Time to observe deep interests. And then engagement starts to grow on its own. And not because we demanded it, but because, again, the child felt safe enough to show up. And the good news is, you don't have to change everything at once. You might start by simply noticing. Noticing when a child's regulated. Noticing what helped them feel safe. Noticing what lights them up. Noticing what happens when you add a pause instead of a prompt or a deep interest instead of a demand. That noticing is where it all begins. In the next episode, we're going to talk about how to actually incorporate deep interests inside real learning activities. How to incorporate them into matching fine motor language, reading letters and numbers. But today, I want to leave you with this. This work takes time. Progress often shows up quietly. And the children who seem to be the hardest to reach are many times the ones whose deep interests haven't been honored yet. When we finally meet them where they are, everything changes. They would if they could. And remember, we become that adult they have been waiting for. Thank you for spending this time with me. You're doing important work and the small supports you put into place matters. Keep leading with connection and I'll talk to you again next week.