If you're considering treatments for your child's autism or Autistic Spectrum Disorder, you've probably often dealt with problem behaviors. Some of them might be unsettling to you, and some might be disruptive or interfere with your child's emotional and social growth. When most parents consider treatments, they do so with the aim of eliminating or at least minimizing these behaviors. Some parents would even consider a child free of the characteristic behaviors of autism to be "cured." While altering a child's behaviors does not change the underlying disorder, it can bring great relief to those around the child and can drastically help the child get by in the world to the fullest extent possible.
It's important for parents, and everyone in an autistic's life, to understand that the behaviors that the child displays are not autism. Instead, they are the child's natural way of reacting to the world. This is altered by the autism. The child can be taught a more socially acceptable way of reacting to the world, to a certain extent, but it is important to remember that doing so is influencing the child to ignore their instincts and react in a way that they've been taught to react.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; we can all agree that a person who can control their meltdowns is a person with an advantage over someone who can't. But the autism is unchanged and the child who controls their meltdown is still experiencing the same overwhelming flood of stimuli and emotion as the child who can not.
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