In this episode, Mike Carr outlines safety for autism, including smart locks with thumbprints or codes, door alarms, surveillance cameras in key rooms, specialized drawer locks, a health monitor for detecting seizures, a bathroom camera for nighttime supervision, and non-stick shower pads. These efforts enhance safety and monitoring for his child’s specific needs.
Keeping Our Kid with Severe Autism Safe: What We’ve Learned
Let me tell you about something that’s always on our minds – keeping our son safe. When you’ve got a kid with severe autism, you’re always on high alert. We’ve had to get pretty creative with our solutions over the years, and honestly, it’s taken a lot of trial and error. But we’ve figured out some things that work pretty well, giving us some peace of mind while still letting our son explore and be himself.
The Wandering Thing: What Keeps Us Up at Night
Our biggest worry? That he’ll wander off. Like a lot of kids with autism, our son doesn’t get that walking away from the house could be dangerous. He just doesn’t see the risks, and sometimes he might try to slip out when we’re not looking. That fear of not knowing where he is – it can make your heart stop.
We had to do something about it fast. The first thing we did was get these smart locks for our front door. They work with fingerprints or a code, which makes it easy for family and caregivers to get in. The best part? The door locks itself after a while. Whether we need one minute or ten to finish what we’re doing, we don’t have to stress about remembering to lock up every single time.
We didn’t stop there though. We added a chain lock too – you know, belt and suspenders. It’s not perfect, but combined with the smart lock, it makes it way harder for our son to sneak out. And if the door does open? Our Ring camera sends an alert right to our phones and sets off an alarm upstairs. Gives us a chance to catch him before anything happens.
Keeping an Eye on Things
Having a kid with severe autism means you’re constantly on high alert. With our son, we literally have to know what he’s up to all the time because, honestly, he can get into some pretty dangerous situations if nobody’s watching. The frustrating part? You can’t be everywhere at once, right?
Thank God for technology – it’s been an absolute game-changer for us. We ended up putting cameras in different parts of the house – there’s one in the ceiling downstairs and another in his bedroom. It sounds intense, I know, but being able to check my phone and see what he’s doing when I’m cooking dinner or folding laundry? That’s priceless. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught him before he’s gotten into something he shouldn’t.
The bedroom camera has been especially huge for us at night. See, he has seizures, and that terrifies us. Before, I’d be up constantly peeking in, which meant neither of us got any sleep. Now, I can actually watch him breathing from my phone, and if anything seems off – maybe his movements change or he makes unusual sounds – we can rush in right away. I mean, those cameras are basically our lifeline. They’ve given us just enough breathing room to function while still keeping him safe. It’s not perfect, but it helps us catch problems before they become emergencies, you know what I mean?
Watching His Health
With profound autism, health stuff can be tricky. Sometimes the signs that something’s wrong are super subtle – like a tiny change in how he’s breathing that might mean a seizure’s coming. But if you’re not watching like a hawk, you might miss it. That’s why we got some gadgets to help us keep tabs on his heart rate and breathing.
Our son won’t wear anything on his wrist or fingers, so we found this cool monitor that doesn’t touch him but still connects to our phones. It lets us know if his heart rate or breathing isn’t normal, which is huge at night when he tends to have seizures. We can catch the warning signs – like weird breathing patterns – and step in before things get bad. The app pings us right away if something’s off.
We’ve also got this portable Ring camera that helps us keep an eye on him at night. We can see and hear what’s going on, and if he gets up and starts wandering, we can actually talk to him through it – tell him to get back in bed or whatever he needs to hear. He doesn’t always listen (shocking, right?), but at least we know what’s happening and can get up if we need to.
Making the Bathroom Safer
Bathroom safety was another big worry for us. Like lots of kids with autism, our son’s balance isn’t great, especially on wet floors. He was slipping in the shower way too often for comfort.
So we stuck these non-slip pads on the shower floor. They match the tile pretty well – you barely notice them – but they give him something solid to stand on. They work way better than we expected at stopping falls, and unlike those rubber mats that get all gross, these are super easy to clean.
Constant Adaptation and Vigilance
Look, I can’t stress this enough – taking care of a kid with profound autism isn’t something you figure out once and you’re done. It’s constantly changing. All those safety measures we talked about? The smart locks, cameras, health monitors, non-slip pads – they’ve been absolute lifesavers for us. But here’s the thing – what works for our son might be completely useless for your kid.
We’ve gone through so much trial and error. Some fancy gadget that was supposed to be amazing? Totally bombed. Then some simple solution we found online ended up being the thing that prevented a disaster. That’s just how it goes.
I remember talking to another mom at our support group who was frustrated because she’d tried all our recommendations and none of them worked for her daughter. And I had to tell her, ‘That’s totally normal.’ Each of our kids is wired so differently – their triggers, behaviors, sensitivities – they’re all unique.
Safety isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of deal. We’re constantly reassessing. As our son gets older, stronger, and more creative in how he gets into trouble (and believe me, he finds new ways all the time!), we have to stay one step ahead.
For us, having these systems in place means we can actually breathe a little. We can sleep at night knowing we’ve done everything we can think of to keep him safe. If sharing our experiences helps even one family avoid the scary situations we’ve been through, it’s worth it. Hang in there – this journey is tough, but you’re not alone in figuring it out.
Transcript
Mike Carr (00:10):
So today we’re going to talk about safety, how to keep your severely or profoundly autistic son or daughter safe. And part of that is making sure they don’t wander outside. So what we’ve done is we’ve got a smart lock on this door. You can open it with your thumbprint or with a numeric code, a phone number. So as different colleagues come to work with them, access is controlled. When you close it, it will lock automatically based upon how much time you set. So you can set it for a minute, 10 minutes, and it’ll just automatically lock. We also have a chain on the door when he’s down here by himself and we have a ring monitor on the door so when it opens, if we’re not down here, the monitor upstairs will sound an alarm so that we know the door has been opened and it probably shouldn’t have not have been.
(01:03):
We also have a camera up here in the ceiling so we can watch what’s going on with him if he’s playing down here by himself. We’ve also got locks on his puzzle drawer, which he loves to get into, and if he’s down here, he’ll take all his puzzles out and throw ’em all over the floor. While that’s not really safety, it’s more of a mess concern. We do have some puzzles though that have very small pieces, so we have locks to keep those puzzles locked up so he can’t get certain things with small pieces out, which he tends to put in his mouth and eat. So he has to mic up behavior where he’ll just eat anything. We want to move on into his bedroom. We have another camera up here so we can watch ’em at night. We also have a double locks lock here, lock up here on his door.
(01:57):
We have a monitor, so when he’s in bed, he doesn’t want to wear things on his wrist, no rings. This will monitor his respiration, it’ll monitor his heart rate and let us know with an app on our phone if he’s got some issue at night. And since our son has seizures, monitoring heart rate increases, monitoring respiration sometimes is a precursor to a seizure or lets you know if a seizure’s about to occur. We actually have a ring camera in the bathroom and this is really cool. It’s portable battery operated. It has both a camera in it as well as audio. So we can listen to him at night to see if he gets up. And if he gets up we can say, Michael, go to bed. Of course, he won’t pay any attention to the camera and then we have to come down and make him go to bed.
(02:50):
The last thing from a safety standpoint is we have on the shower floor here, these pads that are the same color as the tiles this would prevent. These are non-stick, so these prevent him from slipping and falling, which he did do a couple times before we put these circular adhesive pads. The nice thing about these too is they’re real easy to clean, so mats and whatnot tended to get gross. You have a mess over ’em, but these sticky adhesive pads, which you get on Amazon, turn out to be a really great lifesaver. And that’s it for today. Thank you.
