the master/apprentice relationship

I haven't talked about this aspect of the RDI program yet, so I figured it's high time. Actually, I'm not sure they are calling it master/apprentice anymore. I think they decided they didn't like the term "master", as it was giving folks the impression that they needed to be domineering over their kids, ordering them around and making them do stuff for them. More like master/slave.

I happen to like "master". It implies someone who possesses a great skill or knowledge. It also has a serene quality to it. I can just envision myself sitting high on a Tibetan mountain with my legs crossed, quietly murmuring out bits of wisdom, "referencing is the key to higher learning, Grasshopper". Hey, anything that puts me and "serene"into the same thought works for me!

In any case, Master or Teacher or Guide or Guru, whatever you want to call it, that would be us, the parents, the ones who have something of value to teach to our little apprentices.

The trick being, the little apprentices need to THINK like little apprentices. In other words, they need to WANT to learn what we have to teach them. They need to want to be with us to learn it. And they need to be able to learn with our assistance. This is where most parents run into a stumbling block when they start RDI, as most kids on the spectrum work pretty hard to control their environments, which also includes trying to control their interactions with their parents. The reason is because they want to keep everything static and predictable (see those core deficits of Autism!). And let's face it, kids don't make good masters. So a big part of starting out with RDI for most folks has to do with establishing a proper master/apprentice relationship. Without it, there can be no learning.

This is actually an area where we didn't have much trouble. Once Jacob had mastered Stage 1 and was able to attend to us during activities, his desire to follow our lead came pretty naturally to him (so long as we kept things scaffolded so he could be successful). In fact, a little too naturally. So while we sort of breezed through the whole master/apprentice thing during the course of Stage 1, his over-compliance came back to bite us in the butt later when, stripping away all of his inflexibility in Stage 4, we discovered that he was left with no basis to make any decisions (appraisal), and almost no signs of any self-awareness. At least a kid with an opinion, even if it's an opposing opinion, HAS an opinion. Jacob had none.

Ok, ok, I know, I can just feel you all rolling your eyes. Poor me, my kid is compliant. Well, just wait! You'll see how it's just as hard (maybe harder!) to have a child that is too compliant as it is to have one that wants to rule the household with an iron fist. It might take the family with master-apprentice issues longer to get through the first few RDI stages than it took us, but trust me, while you're all chugging along with the next several stages, we'll still be working on trying to get Jacob to make a simple choice like what color crayon to use to color in a circle....

But we're getting a little ahead of oursleves in the sequence of things -- at the end of Stage 1, Jacob was a willing little apprentice, and Stage 2 seemed like a completely conquerable task.