One of our members was telling me about this on Saturday and thought it may be useful to other members to know, take a look at the advantages but if you don’t want the lids yourselves could you please bring them into Space4Autism so we can pass them on to Hilary.
We call them “Tappy lids” and we use Carte D’or lids preferably as they are stronger but otherwise Tesco’s similar Ice cream lid or something else with similar qualities.
The qualities are
- Food grade plastic so not toxic if he bites it (which he does+++ especially when stressed)
- soft plastic edges (some plastic lids are made of a more brittle plastic and can be quite sharp at the edges)
- these lids seem to be the right size
Advantages
- stops him picking up items to use for tapping that are not appropriate
- very definitely helps him either keep calm in a stressful situation or calm down when he is stressed
- focuses his attention on what he is doing rather than fiddling with things around him, e.g. when we do a Skype call each week.
- it is not the end of the world if he throws it somewhere where we can’t retrieve it
- helps his reading as he likes to read what it says many times while he is using it
Hope this is helpful to other parents, but if they don’t want them, then can they save them for us, as E gets through loads and we can’t eat ice cream quick enough when D is away!
