The Meaning and Magic of Posting-Boxes

"This Into That", “There and Gone” And "I Can Do It!"

My work with autistic and non-autistic young children has convinced me that the good old posting-box has much more hidden potential than is generally recognised. Normally regarded as an old-fashioned teaching-toy for the cognitive development of shape-recognition in babies, it has in fact unequalled powers to comfort a desperate young child and to help him master some early anxieties. Give a posting-box to an upset young child and help him post one shape at a time and he will usually settle down happily to an activity that gives him a sense of containment. He seems to derive a great sense of satisfaction from the fact that each shape has a ‘home’ it fits into just so, that there is a ‘shape-answer’ to each hole, a clearly organised system of things neatly fitting into each other, of ‘this into that’. With autistic and developmentally delayed children, interest in posting-boxes is often a sign of a major developmental shift and cognitive-emotional progress.

The child who was helped most dramatically by a posting-box was Nancy, screaming inconsolably again one day. I was struck by the image of the gaping hole of her wide open mouth expressing feelings of utter desolation. I thought about what a baby in this state would need and the underlying principle of his search for a sense of containment. I knew that if we gave Nancy her bottle, she would happily plug herself up with it. I wondered what I could give her that would fulfil the same mental-emotional function without involving her mouth, and

I gave her a small posting-box with just one hole in it, that of a star, which I knew from quieter times to be her favorite posting-box shape. Immediately she went quiet, eagerly fitting the yellow and blue star-shapes into the ’gaping hole’. Together we retrieved them, she posted them again, retrieved them, posted them, .... Eventually she hid the box with both shapes inside behind my back, clung to me quietly for some moments, before climbing down to join the others for drinks.

Nancy had been ‘beside herself’ with distress. I believe that it was the experience of the perfect fit between the hole and the shape, of " that's where it goes!", of "this into that", of “it fits just so” (this was my running commentary with which I tried to catch her emotional experience) that had managed to pull her together again like scattered iron filings by a magnet, - a familiar situation with a fractious baby when finally put to the breast:

Carl was 3 months and lying on his back by himself next to his mother who was engrossed in a magazine and not paying attention to him. His nose was blocked and he could not breathe well, which seemed to ‘freak him out’. He grizzled, made vocal sounds, kicked his legs, waved his arms, then ‘lost’ it and began to cry bitterly. Carrying him around, letting him see the world from a different perspective, talking to him and holding him in different positions, helped him a little. But when his mother finally put him to her breast (although he had just had a bottle and could not be hungry), the change was dramatic: suddenly this baby, who had seemed ‘all over the place’, was ‘in one piece’ again. Calm and quiet, sucking in a steady rhythm, Carl’s snuffliness was gone and he was breathing slowly and deeply. After a while, he stopped and tried to make eye-contact with his mother, smiling.

Finding the nipple helped Carl to literally ‘pull himself together’ in such a way that his breathing problems stopped, because all his senses and attention had become focussed by his mother’s breast. Having got himself together again, he tried to make eye-contact with his mother. The experience of finding something that ‘just fits’, like the nipple that fills his mouth and stops his anxious feeling of franticness, must have been such a relief to Carl. It was this scenario I had in mind when thinking how to help Nancy. Whatever it was, it worked. For weeks, the star-posting box went everywhere with us. It seemed to 'fix' her every time she came ‘undone’.

Max’s teacher’s were desperate: several times a day, Max screamed and nothing and no one could comfort him. What could they do? His mother brought him and left. He wandered around screaming, his bottle hanging from his mouth. I watched, as he swept toys to the floor, table after table. His destructive activity felt like a communication about what he was feeling inside: as scattered, uncontained and ‘all over the place’ as he was making his environment look. I searched for a posting-box, put the shapes in a bowl, so they wouldn’t look scattered, and placing it on his lap, I handed him one shape next to its rightful ‘home’: he stopped screaming and pushed it in. “Yes, that’s where it goes: this into that!”, I said offering him another one. He posted this too, trying the first hole first. “No”, I said, “that’s not where it goes. It’s a different one! That’s where it goes!”, pointing to the correct hole. Handing him piece by piece, I encouraged him increasingly with my voice and words, rather than showing him with my fingers, to encourage him to listen and use his own mind. His teachers could not believe seeing Max quietly focussed on a task for such a long time.

Max had just been dropped off by his mother. His behaviour said ‘I am in pieces’. His swiping toys off all the tables made the nursery-room look as if someone had dropped a lego-structure which had shattered into pieces all over the place. Max too seemed ‘all over the place’. When given the posting-box, it was now he himself who initiated the leaving and the finding: making the shapes disappear, just as his mummy had disappeared through the door. But now he could make them also re-appear, just as he wished he could with his mum.

When Fred was struggling to let his father leave without disintegrating into despair, he played ‘there and gone’ by tossing a small red ball. One day, he saw someone with a posting box and grabbed it urgently. The desperate quality with which he pulled it out of the adult's hand, and the absorbed total attention with which he concentrated on doing it over and over, suggested that it meant much more to Fred than just a cognitive activity he had outgrown.

Posting the shapes helped Fred work through some of his difficulties with letting go. It mirrored his emotional experience, and allowed him to develop mental structures to deal with the idea in his mind that dad still exists even when Fred cannot see him, and that he will be able to ‘retrieve’ him again, as with the shapes (i.e. object-permanence).

With a posting-box it is the child who decides when to make something disappear, to go ‘in’ or ‘come back’, whether triangle, star, round shape, or in Fred’s case: daddy. Posting-boxes play with the theme of ‘there and gone, - and there again!’, the greatest developmental issue to deal with for a child at the mental age of around 1 year. The issues that pre-occupy a very young child are, above all, whether or not his most important people, and things, disappear, where to, whether or not they will come back, what he can do about it and how to deal with his feelings of anxiety and rage. Seeing mummy, or daddy, disappear is a painful and frightening experience. If he could do something about it, if he could somehow feel he had some control over it, it would make him feel better. With a posting-box he can! He can post a shape and make it be gone. But when he opens the lid, it is there again. He can take it out, make it go away, find it and post it again! He can control it to come and to go as he likes. It gives him the very important sense of ‘I can do it!’, ‘I am someone!’.

Linked with the concern over where oneself, and other things, go and belong, there is the desire to have things ‘fit just so’. Will it fit nicely? Will it be a fit that gives him the snug comforting sense of ‘just right’? Or will it jar and jam and feel uncomfortable? A shape that fits its supposed hole beautifully must evoke deep memories of a satisfying feed, when the baby felt that the teat or nipple fitted just right, just what he had needed and wanted. Young children may see the hole of a posting-box, or indeed any hole, as some kind of gaping mouth that needs feeding or filling. This was my idea with Nancy, who had found weaning very difficult and still demanded her bottle in her mouth all the time when she was 4 years old. With the posting-box discovery it was possible to wean her off her bottle. To everyone’s surprise and relief Nancy happily accepted a posting-box where in the past she would have demanded a bottle to stop her screaming.

Another familiar baby-‘posting’-game in the wider sense, of ‘in and out’ and ‘there and gone’ is his feeding mummy. It means the child understands that mummy has a mouth and that he can put food into it:

Fred did not seem to consider food offered to him at nursery to be eatable, and used it for some kind of messy play. But when his key-worker ate some of this food, making exaggerated noises of how much she was enjoying it, he looked up at her with interest. She held up some food on a fork to show him. He looked horrified, and then guided her hand firmly into her mouth as if saying ‘You want that eaten? Then eat it yourself!’ From then on Fred was interested in the food as something she could eat and spent many lunch-times feeding her, - like a human posting-box for food-stuff. Occasionally he also tasted a spoonful himself. Eventually, feeling that this game had become stuck, that he was ready to move on, his key-worker said to him firmly though casually “ You eat it!”, - and he did!

By being allowed to play with putting food into his key-worker, Fred was able to work through some of his anxieties about unfamiliar food. His keyworker’s responsiveness encouraged him to develop a playful, less anxiety-driven attitude to the eating-situation, which made the food feel safer for Fred. Needless to say, this ‘eating-game’ also involved the all-important ‘shared attention’ and genuine eye-contact.

Play with posting-boxes also helps with turn-taking. Initially we give him one shape at a time, later we actually take turns. It can easily be made to support speech and communication by naming the different shapes. Being aware of the far-ranging underlying principles means that the imaginative adult will be able to think of other creative ways of helping the autistic child develop the mental concepts and structures he needs for his cognitive, emotional, communicative and social development. The described principles can, for example, be transferred to tidying up, when this involves putting things into a toy-box with the adult pointing out each toy, or lego-piece, that is to be picked up to help the child keep his mind on the task. Some children enjoy taking all the Lego out of its box themselves, not doing anything else with it: taking it all out - putting it all back in, - that is the activity at this level of development. It is important for the adults to suppress their well-meaning impulse to tip the box out for him. Instead the game of Lego may need to be adapted into a game of "In and Out", e.g. "Lets take it all out! - This one, and another one, - ... and, look!, there are some more! ...Well done! All out! - Now lets put them all back! This one, and that one, and another one, and ..." Although not very creative, such a cooperative purposeful activity of ‘Lego out - Lego back in’ is still an interactive activity!

If you can manage the jump to regarding tidying up, or emptying Lego out of its container as a very basic version of a posting box, then you will agree that lots of things can be posted: almost anything that is around in the house, or nursery, can be made into the most simple pre-posting-box activity: he could post potatoes, onions, apples, lemons, corks, spoons, cups. The crucial principle in all this is that the container must be higher than it is wide (otherwise the disappearance-trick does not work), so a cup, shallow container or open carton usually do not work. But a bucket, a clean waste-paper basket or a cardboeard box that can be closed would do fine. A clean old oil-can, or other tall metal container, of course has the advantage that every cork, potato, spoon or shoe (why not!?) will make a satisfying clanking sound, as if acknowledging what it has received.



Email: info@reachingautism.org