star charts
Riley stands at my elbow, watching over my shoulder as I peel a gold foil star from a sticker sheet and press it carefully on the grid in front of me. I can feel her t-shirt billowing as she leans, her hair tickling my arm as it slides off her shoulders.
“There goes my star for ‘every thirty minutes of healthy movement,'” she says, reading rigidly from the list of star-earning activities I gave her. What I meant for directional, substantial guidelines, she has, as usual, turned into some sort of law. I stifle a sigh, replacing the sticker sheet on the stack.
I can’t help but feel sour as I finish what has become our transactional ritual; something in my heart rejects using star charts.
Over the years, God has worked to dismantle my performance-driven ideas about love and identity, and in the process of motivating Riley to pursue healthier habits, I do not want to support the false definitions and systems that have often corrupted my own motivations. Even so, in our Autistic household, motivation has long been a prickly problem.
Sensory processing represents such unpredictable, vast, borderless terrain that Riley’s functional conversation skills will not allow for predictive speculation about feelings which will not be realized until much later. In other words, Riley finds no motivation at all in my basic prediction that healthy movement, eating, entertainment, and rest will ultimately make her feel better. What is better? What is stronger? And when is ‘ultimately’? She has trouble, as I often do, with being certain of what she can’t see, with having confidence in hope.
Even when I attach these healthy habits to motivating ideas about the future by making them a direct result, for example by saying, “You can exchange a full chart for a date with Josh,” Riley struggles with the intangibility of an idea not yet concretely applied to a specific day and time. But when? I feel the same way when I read Paul’s encouraging teaching that, “then I will see him face to face…then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.” Add to these challenges Riley’s love for predictable patterns and her obsession with finishing, and without fail, our best motivational plans end up becoming reliant systems without which she feels completely unmoored. Her participation becomes about practicing the letter of the law to receive a reward.
For us, this has gone on for years. I remember the work we put into teaching our young ones how to use anxiety-reducing schedules made of laminated, Velcro-ed pictures to order their daily lives.
“Okay, what’s next on your schedule?” We would ask, directing our tiny, preschool-aged Autistic children to return to their visual schedules and move finished activities off the list, to look for, interpret, and begin whatever came next. Eventually, they fell in love with their schedules and the predictability of that question, with the particular way our voices rose and fell as we spoke the words. Adam began to echo us, trying to match the rhythm and timber or the syllables, and both of our kids became incapable of progressing unless we said those words. They would come to us and wait, putting their sticky little hands on our legs, our arms, sometimes even in our hair. We had to force ourselves to exchange speaking for pointing and then pointing for no acknowledgement at all in order to remove ourselves as links in the habitual chain of motivation and response. I remember looking at the wall, the ceiling, anywhere but at their little faces, waiting while they progressed through an excruciating withdrawal toward independence. We wanted them to grow, and that meant helping them become people who would do the right thing without having to be prompted by us to take every single step.
“No, no, no!” Riley would scream, tears dripping off her cheeks, as she tugged at the bottom of my shirt.
Later, when our children could write, they would practice their favorite memorized phrases of our verbal instructions in large, crooked scrawls across white boards. They would respond to the parts they didn’t like, but with no more enthusiasm for actually doing the things our words directed them to do. No wash dishes, Adam wrote again and again and again, like sentences after class, until no space remained on the white board and the last letters, written one on top of another in the corner, looked like a bold black blot.
Our best plans became routines and rehearsals instead of meaningful, purposeful practice.
I step away from the bar, the stars, the chart, feeling dismayed that in Riley’s young adulthood, I am still creating plans to help her, still teaching her how to use them, and still trying to help her discover the right kind of motivation. But really, do any of us ever stop needing to re-evaluate our why?
Sometimes, I still find myself waiting for a response to a text I sent someone, suddenly wondering when my motivation slipped from encouraging them to hearing them validate me. I want to do good and be kind because it articulates something about Jesus, but it’s hard to persevere when the going gets tough and other people don’t behave the way I expected. I can find myself rehearsing scripture and dismissing the parts I don’t like (no do good to those who hurt you) without really letting the Word change me. When I take these challenges to God in prayer, He patiently digs into the truth, down to the root of what’s really motivating me. He asks a hard question, pressing it into my heart. Is it really love that compels you?
In the beginning, this particular plan produced desirable results for Riley, but she champions any sort of structured plan and almost always starts well. Enthusiastically, she paid attention to what she was eating and how much, even skipping certain unhealthy snacks and desserts when she had exhausted the day’s allowance for them. She intentionally took time to exercise, finishing the routines sweaty and flushed, with stray hairs curling around her ears. She worked puzzles every day and stopped spending hours streaming old episodes of Liv and Maddie. We noticed changes in her, and we gave thanks for them. But ours is rocky soil, and roots develop slowly here.
A few weeks later now, Riley has stopped doing the workouts that challenge her and has substituted a stretching routine, but still expects the same reward. She has added things to the star-earning list along the way, like cleaning up the bathroom after her shower and putting away her clean clothes, and she has gotten a little puffed-up and over-zealous about those.
“Look, I added these,” she said one time, expecting me to praise her.
She spends more and more time now streaming shows on her computer, letting this take priority over the healthy activities I gave her, and she has stopped trying to be intentional about rest. In our morning conversations about sleep, she has developed a habitual shrug, as though the goal itself feels irrelevant to her specific circumstances.
But I barely enter a room before she asks me for a star.
“Do you think, if there were no stars, you’d do this for me? Just because I say it’s good? Just because I love you and you love me?” I ask her, pausing a moment.
She looks at me and blinks, momentarily tripped up by the question.
“I love you too, Mom. Yes I do,” she says brightly, smiling wide as she walks past me to peruse the list on the bar for her next star.
