Preparing for a Successful Trick-or-Treat Night
Now is the perfect time to start preparing for Halloween and trick-or-treat night. If you haven’t already selected your child’s costume, do so as soon as possible. Some children need extra time to become accustomed to wearing their outfit for a long enough period of time to make it through trick or treat night. It may take several days or even a few weeks to teach your child to tolerate that super cute costume of their favorite character.
If you need to teach tolerance, here’s a step by step example of what you might need to do.
1. You may need to just get your child accustomed to the feel of the material at first. Start out just letting your child see and feel the costume. If your child can tolerate the feel of the material, move to wearing the costume. If necessary, your child may need to wear their costume over some other comfortable clothing in order to tolerate the costume being on.
2. Once your child will wear the costume, put it on and start the stopwatch. Plan to reward your child for keeping the outfit on without negative behaviors. Your goal, at first, is to find out how long the costume can be tolerated.
3. Check the length of time your child will tolerate the costume 3-5 separate times over the course of two to three days. Divide the total number of minutes that your child kept the costume on by the number of times you put the costume on to get an average.
4. Let’s say you’ve checked how long they will wear the costume without negative behaviors and it is an average of 5 minutes. So, you could start teaching tolerance with a goal of leaving the costume on for 6 minutes. Set the timer and plan to reward your child for keeping the costume on for 6 minutes without negative behaviors.
5. To build tolerance of wearing the costume for longer periods, you should select a time increment that is appropriate for your child. These time increments can be seconds or even minutes. Remember, you know your child best, so set the goals accordingly. You may need to increase daily by 30 seconds at a time, one minute at a time, or maybe even 15 or 30 minutes.
The goal should be to eventually build up to the amount of time you would like your child to wear the costume. Your child may also need to practice trick-or-treating. Most of the time, you can find people in the neighborhood or even close friends or family who are willing to help out with this. Pre-arrange a time that you will visit their door to practice trick or treating. You should have your child practice the entire routine that you would like them to follow on trick-or-treat night. To do this well, create a task analysis of the entire process. This means breaking the full task of trick-or-treating into small steps.
Steps might include:
1. Walk to door.
2. Knock on door.
3. Wait for an answer.
4. If the door is answered, say, “Trick or treat,” and hold out bag.
*If your child is non-verbal, you can teach your child to hand the person at the door a card that says trick-or-treat. If the door isn’t answered, the child should walk away and go to the next house.
5. The child receives treat and says, “Thank you.”
*If your child is non-verbal, you can teach him or her to hand the person at the door a thank you card, or just wave.
6. Walk away from the door. You can reward each step with a small treat, or with the use of a token board. For your convenience, we have attached a schedule/token board to this blog.
You can prepare your helpers ahead of time that you may need to deal with behaviors or teach something to your child along the way. Be sure to tell them what they should do if a behavior should occur so that they know what to expect. Practicing a few times a week at first is helpful. The week of trick or treating you may want to practice daily to make it more of a routine for your child.
The more preparation you can do, the better trick-or-treat night should go. Whatever happens, remember that this is supposed to be a fun night for you and your child. It’s okay if your child won’t wear their costume and it’s okay if they don’t follow all the steps. Remember, this can be a positive learning and social skill building experience for them. Make sure that they can get some enjoyable social time and that the fun outweighs the stress!
Here are some tools you can use (Click to download):
Free, from Special Learning
The ABCs of Autism — a free starter guide for families
Plain language, no jargon and nothing to buy: what the diagnosis actually means, what ABA is and is not, and the first questions worth asking before you start services.