What I am about share is that this article blog can work with other children with special needs also not just for Autistics. Bear in mind that I usually speak mainly about Autism and Mental Health. The best approach to solving this problem is to figure out what is causing it in the first place. A good place to start is with this assumption: if a child won’t do something, there’s a reason. If they won’t, it’s because they can’t — but figuring out “why not” takes some detective work for parents and teachers that are teaching children on and off the spectrum or with special needs.                       Could it be something in their learning environment that is affecting their behavior?   As I shared in one of my videos that with many of us autistics, we tend to struggle with a few sensory outputs and inputs that are going on. For example, if we were in a classroom with a huge amount of students in class – that it could be the lighting or heating in the room -either too hot or cold or it could be due to the lighting in the room being too strong and bright. As you start, please ask yourself if your expectations are meeting your child at their developmental age. While the lack of motivation issue has nothing to do with intelligence: the social-emotional age of our bright, verbal autistic children can fall well behind their biological age by about one-third. There’s not enough research to give exact stats, but this lag is a common experience among individuals and is widely reported by parents. They may also just move much slower as they cycle through their tasks — this rule of thumb is that they may do half the work twice the time. It may look as if they aren’t motivated to do a task, but it is critical to understand what slower processing speed means before jumping to conclusions about intent. Just as a keynote or reminder here that not all Autistics are the same when you meet one, that doesn’t mean that they’ll show similar traits or characteristics. With that in the back of your mind, let’s take a look at some of the factors that may contribute to what looks like a lack of motivation. If you can address the underlying issues, you may be able to help your child to peel himself or herself away from Fortnite, put down the graphic novels, or stop watching unboxing videos and focus on important chores, responsibilities, and opportunities as well. Autism is just another way of being human, so the reasons can vary widely, but here are some common autism-related issues that can impact motivation. Our children are wired differently and I can’t stress this enough! Brain-based skills called executive functions allow us to achieve any goal-oriented tasks, and autistic children — regardless of how bright or verbal they are — often have problems with executive functions. You can watch this video called An Autistic Perspective of Autism & Executive Function along with EF Hacks [2019] here to understand more of how I would work as an Autistic myself.         This can affect their ability to:   • Start anything.   • Plan, sequence steps, and manage time.     • Be flexible in our thinking.   • Transition from one task or step to the next.   • Remember what they were just asked to do.   • Manage our emotions or control our responses.         • Organize anything — desks, backpacks, notebooks, rooms, wallets.   • Maintain focus and attention.   The majority of people with ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder) do have significant executive functioning challenges, and one of the most common issues is difficulty initiating tasks that are given. This means even when your son or daughter knows how to do their work, they may not know how to start. Thus, when autistic children refuse to do a seemingly reasonable task, consider that they might be communicating, “I don’t know how to start this.” If we understand this, we can find some strategies that may help the child get started and get through what we are asking them to do.   Just as importantly, maybe we can get teachers to stop editorializing the behavior (lazy, difficult, weird, zoned out, inattentive, won’t focus, rude, oppositional). Perhaps we can also get them to stop suggesting solutions or posing questions that are both offensive and outside of their areas of expertise (“You should be more consistent at home. Can you take him to the doctor to get medication for attention? What’s going on in your home?”)   Fortunately, challenges in executive functioning can be addressed in your child’s Individual Education Plan. Once you know what you’re dealing with, the school can help you identify strategies that may help your child to find ways to be successful. The book called Smart But Scattered is a fantastic read, I suggest that you read this to help better understand your child.   Children and teens with autism often seem to have performance anxiety. Since autism is a pervasive developmental disorder, they may develop skills differently than a typical person in every area of functioning across a lifespan. Our child’s communication skills, social skills, and life skills, as well as how they experience the physical world, may not develop or be learned in the same way as your typical child acquires the knowledge — or at the same pace.     The way a person with ASD learns things isn’t “wrong,” but it is outside of what we commonly see. There’s not a lot of patience for “different” in our society. We “talk the talk” but don’t uniformly “walk the walk.”   What does this mean for your child? Often, it means that he is corrected in every area of functioning, in every setting, by everyone, from the time he is