How does a change of routine affect the Square Peg?

Most children with autism love routine, so when the usual routine goes out of the window for whatever reason it can become a problem. I, probably quite naively, thought that change of routine didn’t really affect Edward, but on reflection, I was wrong.

When Edward was around 2-3 years old, he didn’t seem bothered by a change of routine. If he moved to a different room in his nursery of his key worker changed, he would just happily go along with it.

Of course I thought ‘well that means he doesn’t have autism because he’s not bothered by change.’ It wasn’t until we were further along the ASD pathway that I found out that not every autistic person has all of the same characteristics. Just because he didn’t mind changes in routine, didn’t mean that he didn’t have autism.

However, during November this year, I discovered that actually Edward might have a problem with changes of routine. He was a really tricky character for a couple of weeks. One thing that he started doing was refusing to eat the food in his already limited diet. I think he survived on yoghurts and Maltesers.

One evening, I was merrily ordering the food shopping, when I found, to my horror, that Edward’s usual fruit slurper pouches had been discontinued by Tesco….mild panic ensues…. I considered writing to the head of Tesco to complain….selling our story to the tabloids etc….what were we to do??

Fortunately, a couple of weeks later, the fruit slurpers reappeared on the Tesco shelves…but the packaging had been redesigned….and for while he refused to eat them because the packet had changed. Much to our relief, after a few weeks or so he eventually began to eat them.

Unfortunately, the knock on effect of Edward not eating his usual baked beans or fruit slurpers is that he now became constipated. This led to him being very agitated and miserable. He ended up with a very sore bottom and the little food that he was eating became less and less. So we ended up having to give him a laxative….it was still a couple of days before that worked…

At parents evening, his teacher had also noted that Edward’s character was out of the norm. It transpired that there had been a change of teaching assistant in his class. So we concluded that a combination of these changes could have led to Edward’s erratic behaviour.

So on reflection, maybe Edward doesn’t like a change of routine after all. However, because he wouldn’t verbalise this to us we didn’t realise. Now I know this, it is something for me to consider in the future.