If your child flaps their hands when excited, rocks, spins, repeats words or sounds, or lines up toys, you've seen stimming — short for self-stimulatory behavior. Here's our straightforward stance: stimming is usually a healthy, useful part of how your child experiences the world, and our default is not to stop it.
What stimming does. Stims help with regulation. They can release excitement, ease anxiety, provide comforting sensory input, or help a child focus. Everyone self-regulates — we tap pens, bounce knees, twirl hair. For autistic people, stims are often just more visible.
Why suppression is the wrong goal. Older, compliance-driven approaches sometimes tried to eliminate stimming to make a child "look less autistic." We don't do that. Forcing a child to suppress a stim takes away a coping tool and can increase distress. The autistic community has been clear, and we agree: stimming is not something to be trained away.
When we do step in — and how. There's one exception: a stim that causes harm (like head-banging or biting) or that genuinely blocks something the child wants to do. Even then, the goal isn't to erase the urge — it's to understand what need the stim is meeting and, together with the child, find a safe way to meet that same need. The function matters more than the form. And any safety response follows strict clinical standards: proactive strategies first, the least intrusive support that works, and never physical intervention as a teaching tool.
For parents: you don't need to stop your child from flapping at the playground. A child who's allowed to stim is a child who's allowed to be themselves. If a specific behavior is hurting your child, that's worth a conversation with your BCBA — but the starting point is always respect.
