Any ideas/big rides

[lifeisogood]

We have gotten a special needs pass in the past for our kids that met our needs well. My kids are autistic we need to pass to be able to enjoy the rides. We did have a problem where one of my sons loves the bigger faster rides but because of his disability he is more verbally anxious then a typical kid. For example on splash mountain where a typical kid would say 'oh, this is going to be scary i don't know about this' and go and have fun my son will say oh no, oh no, i don't want to go, it is so scary but loves the ride from the moment the car leaves to finish. I know from being his parent that he does want to go and will be heartbroken 5 minutes later if he doesn't and we will have to start all over again. He is just more everything in his emotions. We got in to the car and he started saying this and a cast member asked him if he wanted to get out so he did and we had to start the process all over. We were not holding him down, forcing him in the ride or anything like that. He was just doing his expanded verbal thing. Is there any way we can get the cast members to let us as the parents parent rather then them doing this kind of thing? It makes his trip much less fun when someone who does not understand his special needs gets involved like this and he misses out on stuff he wanted to do just because they don't understand him.

 

[LockShockBarrel]

You don't sound livid about it so I'm going to assume you realize the CMs probably just think they're helping. I guess you could almost say "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras" with this, as I think most people on hearing a kid say "No I'm too scared" is going to think they kid shouldn't ride or would suffer by riding, they're not going to think "This child is autistic and is just verbalizing". I don't think there's much else you can do other than tell the CM "He's really fine, he forgets he likes this ride" or something like that.

 

[ratlenhum]

I would say something like "he's been on it before, he's fine, thanks." It's hard when people try to "help" and don't have any clue that they're not. On a flight to CA once, my son was having a hard time. He has vocal tics and they are really bad when he's anxious or upset. If you address them though, they get worse because the more he tries to control them the worse they get, so we ignore them and hope he settles down. To the outsider it appears that we are not addressing my son's shrieking. A stewardess came over with a handful of snacks and in full view of him asked if she could offer him something. My son has multiple food allergies and now on top of his shrieking tic he's screaming for cookies. I had tons of stuff for him but no cookies. The situation got so much worse I thought they were going to land the plane and throw us off!!

Keep an eye as you're loading and if you see a CM approaching you, making eye contact, just wave them off and say "he's fine" before they can even offer