Freshman year, I was volunteering at the Community School of Music of Art as a tutor for their summer Arts4All program. I was caring for a young girl who had autism, where I watched her individual progress and gave updates regularly to her parents. It was during one of these meetings that her mother mentioned that she was recommended to enroll her daughter in art classes because they would help with her self-expression. She said some believed that the sort of art instruction that took place in our classrooms can be taken to the next step with art therapy, geared specifically for those with autism.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is typically associated with social interaction and communication difficulties. Often, they exhibit restricted or repetitive behaviors. There is no cure available for autism, but often patients seek behavior modification therapy which changes the child’s behavior through a system of rewards and consequences. However, now patients and their families have been searching for alternatives, including art therapy.
Benefits of art therapy:
Promotes emotional and mental growth
- Art serves as a method for self-expression and fosters positive mental health in order to show their individual uniqueness in a comfortable way.
2. Builds life skills such independence
- Often when children with autism leave their family or a strict educational system, they find themselves floundering because our society is not built in a manner that protects them.
- Art helps them develop a project entirely on their own without relying on the help of others, a trait that will come in handy.
3. Serves as an outlet for self-expression, imagination, and creativity
- Since children with autism often struggle with basic communication, they can convey their thoughts and emotions through art and color.
- For children with autism, this is a process that is far less daunting than face to face communication and parents are more likely to get a better sense of what their child is thinking of.
- Children on the spectrum are already more receptive to visual information and art therapy may prove to be a more comfortable process for them and their willingness to engage, especially since it doesn’t rely on words to communicate feelings and thoughts.
4. Important in the improvement of cognition, visual and spatial discrepancies, fine motor skills, and coping.
- Art helps teach autistic children to examine the world around them and to tell the difference between various colors and shapes.
- It helps children with autism develop awareness about relationships between different objects and their functions.
- Art also helps increase a child with autism’s neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to form new connections in order to adjust and react to certain situations.
Art and art therapy is a great alternative therapy option for children on the autism spectrum that find themselves needing a better form of self-expression and learning.
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