What if the school tells me my child's stimming is a problem?

Stimming is shorthand for repetitive, self-stimulatory behaviors. Stimming can take many forms, from hand-flapping to squealing to finger-flicking to head-banging. Many schools want to teach kids to have “quiet hands” to help them regulate and/or cease self-stimulatory behaviors.

Research has shown that “stims are a response to either sensory overload (such as a noisy room) or overpowering thoughts… stimming soothes these intense feelings, helping them regain a sense of control.” Stimming also sometimes helps kids communicate their moods, whether that's joy, anxiety, overwhelm, or boredom. We know that stimming is an essential calming strategy for many kids, but when it really gets in the way and becomes a behavior, what can parents do?

Dr. Burton-Hoyle tells us that stimming begins as a child trying to meet a need. If we don't pay attention to what that need is, we might tell them not to engage in stimming or try to make them compliant. So figuring out what it means, whether it’s involuntary or based on a need, is very important.

Stimming should be approached on an individual basis. If it's not a barrier to their learning and it's not unsafe, then we can enrich the student’s environment to get them involved in lots of different activities to meet their sensory needs.

If stimming is a barrier to learning, or self-injurious, it’s important to understand that the goal shouldn’t be to stop the behavior from occurring as the child will likely engage in another form of stimming that could be much worse. Instead, offer a replacement behavior for the stim behavior. As Stanley Greenspan, author of Engaging Autism and developer of the Floortime method, explains in this article from The Child Mind Institute, “The overall principle is to offer the child experiences that produce the same sort of sensations as the self-stimulatory activity but lead up the developmental ladder of regulation, engagement, and interaction.” Read more about stimming in our article Rethinking Stimming: Perspective.