So I need a little help here.
This is Jonah, today. He can’t stop picking the skin around his mouth.
Many people with ASD will pick their skin the same way some people bite their nails.
Jonah used to peel his lips incessantly. It started on cold days. Jonah would feel his lips get chapped and try to “remove” the dry skin.
It would escalate from there.
I would get calls from the preschool nurse to come pick Jonah up from school because he couldn’t stop peeling his lips and was bleeding everywhere.
You can’t have open bleeding wounds around other kids.
Jonah’s never really “grown out of it.”
Now, instead of directly peeling his skin, he licks his lips repeatedly until the skin around his mouth gets raw. Then he peels the skin.
He doesn’t really realize he’s doing it.
In the past he would let us put chapstick or (more recently) Neosporin on his skin to try to alleviate the need to peel.
But now, he won’t even let us do that.
Do you or your kiddos experience this? What do you do to help?
#ausome