Aug 22, 2026 · 1 min · 1 segments
Giving children a healthy sense of choice can be an important part of helping them build confidence, independence, and trust. It can be beneficial to let children—autistic or not—have an appropriate…
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In a sense, we are helping kids when we're saying, okay, it's time to do your homework.
It's time to have dinner and do all these things.
But when we are telling them like, oh, we're going to have dinner soon, we often say, are you ready to have dinner? Are you ready to do your homework? Can you clean up your room? Can you do this and that? And we're asking these yes, no questions, and we're expecting them to do the task or the activity that we're talking about, whether they say yes or no, right? But we're not actually listening to their no.
So oftentimes if people...
When a kid says, oh, I'm not ready to do my homework.
They're like, well, you're going to do it anyway.
Or, you know, it's time.
Are you ready to have dinner? Like, no.
Well, we're going to eat anyway.
You know, are you ready to go to bed? No.
Well, you're going to go to sleep anyway.
You know, we're asking all these questions and we're guiding them throughout their day, but we're actually not honoring what their response is.
So I think in a sense, we really need to step back from asking yes, no questions unless we're actually ready to honor the no.