Car ride
A belt against the neck, engine noise in the background, motion sickness and a locked sitting position, that is the four-track sensory load a longer car ride puts on a body. The visual support below targets exactly that.
♂Man drives car
A man in a blue car holding the steering wheel and smiling.
♂Ride car
A cartoon boy driving a blue car.
♂Ride car
A man driving a blue car.
♀Ride car
A cartoon person with long dark hair is driving a blue car. The person is smiling.
About this visual support
The odd thing about a car ride is that the body sits still while everything around it keeps moving. The vibrations come up through the seat, the engine sits on a frequency the ears cannot switch off, and the belt cuts against the neck at every turn. For many children, especially sensory sensitive children on the autism spectrum, ten minutes can feel fine and minute twenty suddenly does not.
Visual support helps because it moves the preparation from during the ride to before the ride. When a card has already shown the belt, the water bottle, looking out of the window and a break in twenty minutes, the body knows roughly what is coming, and each discomfort becomes less of a surprise. A concrete tip for car rides in particular: plan a stop every twenty minutes even if the child does not seem to need it. A predictable exit point is calming in itself, because the car becomes a room you may leave, not a room you are stuck in.
In Routined a car journey can be built with start steps, breaks and a destination. The app can be tried free for fourteen days.