Most parents get an official ASD (autism spectrum disorder) diagnosis from a physician sometime between their child’s first and second birthday. Similar to how you make your home safe for a typical child, you will now have to start thinking about making it safe for your atypical child.
Here are a few areas for consideration when thinking about “autism proofing” your home.
Doors
I’ve spent a ton of time researching and testing a variety of indoor door locks for our autistic child. I’ve also spent a ton of time looking for keys, being locked out of house, and cleaning up rooms that resemble the hotel room of a rock star.
Take some time and think about rooms you’ll want to restrict access to. Unless you enjoy unplugging the toilet on a daily basis, you’ll likely want to protect this room right away. The electrical or furnace room is another one to think about purely for safety reasons.
Other rooms to think about are the master bedroom, and external doors so they can’t easily go for a stroll.
Window Safety
You don’t need to consider this until they can actually reach the window or start to push chairs around. Most atypical kids that I have met begin to do this at a very early age, regardless of their other cognitive impairments.
Most of our windows have built in locks on them, so we at least have some warning if we are around. I’ve also installed sensors on all the windows, but that requires a little more technical know how which I will cover in the smart home technology post.
For the window in his bedroom, the simplest solution was to screw it semi-shut. Within the plastic window track, the window can open approx 4 inches, and then it hits a screw. Not the most elegant of solutions, but at night (when you’re not watching) you don’t want to take any chance that your child will beat a child-proof window lock and do their best impression of Aladdin riding a magic carpet.
Electrical Outlets
I thought this would be a huge problem for us. Turns out it wasn’t. For some reason our little trouble maker wasn’t interested in sticking things into the wall. I still find it a little interesting, so he must get his common sense genetics from Mom.
It’s still a good idea to at least invest in some electrical outlet covers. Amazon has a whole slew of options which are all fairly reasonable.
Floor Registers
This one has been problematic for us. In fact, I really feel sorry for the company that has to come and clean ours. There is probably an entire toy store’s worth of stuff in there. And this isn’t considering all of the food that never found it’s way into the garbage.
There isn’t a simple product to solve this problem. The only way I could successfully outwit my child was to screw them into the floor. Every other solution was just a waste of time, and resulted in many items lost in the abyss that is my furnace system. I replaced my metal floor registers with these pre-drilled ones, or screwed small holes where into the floor register where there was enough space.
Child’s Bedroom
Our son is passionate about rearranging furniture at night. His room used to remind me of a rock star’s hotel room after a night of partying. It was funny at first, but reassembling the mattress, sheets, bed placement, curtains, and closet door got old, really fast. Here are a few things you should think about, for your own sanity and the safety of your kid:
- Portable/Outdoor Toilet – I’ll detail these in a future post, but we’ve research and tried quite a few of these. Bathroom accidents will be common. And no one enjoys cleaning up after that battle. The Reliance Luggable Loo worked out the best for us. It’s a real test of a relationship when there is human poop cleanup involved. Trust me on this.
- Mattress – We got sick of putting the mattress back on the bed, and putting the sheets back on. So I tape the mattress to the bed frame, using packing tape.
- Secure the Bed – Your kid will likely want to push the bed around. It’s a minor annoyance. If you haven’t properly secured the windows, you will want to prevent them from using their bed as a ladder to get to the window. Remove the mattress and screw the bed frame into one or two wall studs.
