I’m not a parent, but would it help to let her know that she needs to work at controlling her emotions and ask her what she thinks helps when she starts getting frustrated. Then use that technique purposely when you see something starting to go. Explain to her, “sweetheart, I can see that this is getting to you. Let’s do your calming exercises now before you start making yourself feel really bad”. Modelling is great, kids learn what they see, but getting her involved in her own behavior mod and letting her see that she’s helping herself when she nips that anxiety in the bud teaches her by doing.
I’d also think of it like training a dog. You don’t expect them to be able to sit and stay for 15 minutes right off the bat. You praise then for the 10 seconds (click, treat) and gradually extend that.
But take it with a grain of salt - I don’t have kids.
Both of my kids are that kid. It is really, really wearing. My daughter is in 5th grade, and I am still getting reports like, “She had a really good day - she only hid under the table for about 20 minutes, and she was able to calm herself when I asked if she needed to leave the room.” My son is in first grade, and I am still in terror of potty accidents at school, although it has been about a month and a half since his last one.
ETA: Since you are meeting with the school director anyway, ask about whether she should have a 504 plan. Even if the answer is no, the question may jolt them into thinking “she can’t,” instead of “she won’t,” which will be better for you all.
My son didn’t receive his HFA diagnosis until he was 8. I think 4 may just be too young. But at 4 we were just where you are now, and I was asking the same questions you are.
Obviously I can’t say from a distance what your daughter’s diagnosis is, but I will say to keep pushing for help for your daughter if you are concerned. You might also take a look at some of the HFA/Asperger’s parenting books. There are some good tips in some of them for re-directing meltdowns, helping with social skills, and other things that are useful for anyone with a youngster, HFA or not.
Welcome to the club! The good news is that, if you work with the school well, seem organised, and do everything you can to help, it can not be so bad to be “that parent.” At least you get to know the teachers better. And it means that, if the tantrums recede as your daughter gets older, both you and she will be more tolerant of kids who have longer-term problems.
I also think there’s a huge difference between being “that parent” and being the parent of “that kid”. Kids can be badly behaved no matter what the parents are like. I think you only become “that parent” if you are badly behaved yourself - not caring, insisting that your snowflake is perfect, etc. Most teachers would be thrilled to find out that “that kid” has parents that are concerned, involved, and willing to work with them. That will never reflect badly on you.
A few other points… while it can be extremely embarrassing when your kid has a public meltdown, it helps to remember this: MOST of the other parents seeing our kids are NOT thinking, “What an idiot- can’t they control their little brat?” No, most of them are thinking, “I’ve been there… I’m just glad it’s you and not me this time.”
There are at least as many sympathetic faces as disgusted faces around you. I promise.
Second… YEARS before my son was born, I saw a movie that made little impression on me then but returns to me often now: Steve Martin’s Parenthood. He plays a devoted but exasperated Dad of a boy with Asperger’s. Steve’s biggest problem is that he gets way too high or way too low, depending on how his son seems to be doing at any given moment. In one scene, when things are going well, Steve is shown daydreaming about hsi adult son delivering the valedictory speech at Harvard. Minutes later, there’s anoither crisis, and he envisions his son as the next Charles Whtman, on a shooting rampage.
As the Dad of a kid with major issues, I have to admit… I get that way myself. It’s HARD to accept that there are going to be great days AND horrible days for many years to come. It’s too easy and comforting to think after a good week that the issues are over. It’s also too easy to get in a depressed funk after a bad week, and imagine things will never get better.
My daughter was never a perfectionist - just a control freak who wanted to control other people’s behavior and little things like when the sun went up and down. But the emotionally high strung - yeah, that was her.
I work with all kinds of kids with disabilities and quite frankly, compared to the kids with cancer, missing limbs, massive physical deformities, on breathing machines, on crutches, etc… what your dealing with sounds pretty mild.
Gosh, thanks everyone. I feel like i say this every time I post, but I love the Dope!
Heh, I love the Pit suggestion. If you start seeing Pit threads like “MY LEGOS WON’T FOLLOW MY RULES” …you’ll know what happened!
grude, we were not trying to shield her from frustration on the hypothesis that she needed to learn how to deal with it… but now I’m thinking this is a bad strategy and maybe if it is possible we can shield her from some of it and let her be frustrated a bit at a time.
Her school has been great at introducing calming techniques and exercises. The best seems to be “Pete the Cat.” We can sometimes get her to calm down by asking, “What would Pete the Cat do?” We were just joking that we should get her a WWPtCD bracelet…
Zsofia, ha, exactly!
ddsun, you’re right – when I look at parenting books the ones that seem to be most relevant for us are actually the ones aimed towards Aspergers kids. I’ll keep that in mind that maybe she needs to be retested later. I understand also it can be harder to diagnose girls.
Urbanredneck, my daughter is fabulously healthy and I am thankful for it every day, especially since my second pregnancy had chromosomal and reslting physical problems that were severe enough to cause him to die in the womb. I also know a (thankfully) small number of kids with problems ranging from severe autism to rare serious genetic diseases, and obviously her issues aren’t at all comparable. And like I’ve said my daughter is also extremely sweet and good-natured when she’s not melting down, and I quite frankly am pretty well convinced that I have the most awesome kid in the world (sorry all you other parents!)
That being said, if parenting and watching other super gracious parents have taught me anything, it’s that regardless of what the problems are and how major or minor they are, we are all concerned about our children and want the best for them, and struggle with how to provide that in the best way, and we can all support each other while we’re figuring that out.
You might want to talk to a few people about getting her a label. Labeling isn’t always a great thing in school - it enables a plan and accommodations, but it can also mean an excuse for the school. We are pretty sure with mine we could get an ADHD label - but we were discouraged from doing so by every friend whose ever been a teacher. With the label and the plan, she goes into the room and the teacher has preconceived notions about what she is, and will treat her that way. Without the label, she’s been allowed to be the enthusiastic student in Science, the one that talks a little too much in Math, the one that can pull a topic into interesting directions and add strange facts in Social Studies. Instead of the one whose ADHD makes her disruptive.
I teach English in Taiwan to a wide range of children, including preschool and kindergarten kids. Believe me, you are not THAT parent.
From an educator’s point of view, I really like parents I can deal with calmly and rationally. Some children have limitations. Yes, so how do we deal with it? What things work and what doesn’t? What expectations can we have and how can we work together to meet them?
Just speaking for myself and not for other teachers, I like proactive but not overly pushy parents. I like parents who explain what the doctors, therapists and other teachers have suggested, but who don’t insist that I change the entire structure of my class to meet their child’s needs.
One mother was particularly good. She had a list of issues which tended to trigger her son, and things which tended to help. For example, the boy (who was the same age as yours) responded really well to being told before a vigorous activity starts to stay in control and that frequent reminders would keep things in check better than punishments after the fact. That mother also acknowledged that some things wouldn’t work out and gave the impression that she appreciated my dilemma. She would say things such as “our doctor suggested trying such and such” and not “you must.” We also had a refreshingly candid discussion of discipline. Many parents want to pretend that teachers can solve problems magically, so it was nice being able to discuss it openly.
It sounds like the preschool is handling it really well. That’s good to hear.
I was at my daughter’s gymnastics yesterday, and I saw a boy (same boy as last week) just leave the lesson whenever it was something he didn’t like. The mom didn’t even move, just told him he wasn’t allowed to go off and play; otherwise he was able to keep leaving the lessons whenever he wanted. I heard the mom telling another parent something about picking battles, and how she knew that if she just let him put sprinkles on his ice cream he’d stop crying…
So yeah, SHE’s that parent. Her kid has learned her system: no consequences for not following directions, threatening a meltdown gets you what you want. Of course he’ll act that way. The hardest thing about parenting (for me, anyway) is knowing that sometimes you have to do the thing that’s gonna cause a meltdown, because if you don’t, the kid learns that the threat of a meltdown is effective at manipulating parents. Enduring the resulting meltdown is no fun at all, but it becomes a memory the kid can access in the future when deciding what course to take, and over time they figure out that being in control and being polite and respectful and flexible is the best way to get what they want.
It doesn’t sound like you’re caving to meltdown threats; it doesn’t sound like you’re training your kid in negative behaviors. If you’re not doing that, you’re not That Parent.
Oh good, I really don’t want to be Special Snowflake parent… those are some good suggestions. We’re meeting later this week and I’ll try to update the thread afterwards.
And yes, consequences are a Big Thing for us, and mostly work very well when the consequence doesn’t intersect with a meltdown trigger – which they mostly don’t, as the meltdown triggers have more to do with things she’s trying to do herself (“I didn’t draw the picture the way I wanted!”) or things no one can really change (“I didn’t see the RV on the road that Daddy saw!”) – I’m a big fan of them!
I think people are misusing the term meltdown, when they mean tantrum.
When an autistic kid has a meltdown they have been frustrated to the point of insanity almost, they are NOT doing it to manipulate anyone. In fact you could give them something they love dearly and it won’t help at all, it won’t bring them out of the meltdown. There is no way to distract or calm them, they will hurt themself or others and won’t show any sign of it and are basically out of conscious control.
My son has oddly had the worst ones in reaction to nightmares, we just move him to a foam mattress we set up and let him scream and kick and hit and flail until he resolves himself after 10-20 minutes, there is nothing we can do to stop it and we have tried.
A tantrum is designed to manipulate the caregivers, if you give in it stops instantly. Or offer something else the kid loves or distract them and it stops instantly.
No–while the distinction you’re making is fine, and while I vaguely understand in the autism community “meltdown” is a term of art, in general parlance I hear folks all the time using it to refer to a child losing their shit, and that’s what it means. Also I don’t like pedantry :).
Yep, grude, you’re probably not surprised (given how similar our kids seem to be) that I’m using meltdown in (mostly) the same sense you are. I mean, my daughter has had plenty of tantrums, mostly when she was 3 or so, that were her being bratty and wanting something that I had said she couldn’t have, or something, but she’s pretty much over those now – I can’t remember the last time she got upset over something like that.
(The difference from your kid is that even her bratty tantrums, if they went on for long enough she would lose control of herself and no one would be able to stop them.)
I didn’t know this was an autistic thing I just dislike using the word “tantrum” because there’s such a connotation of “it’s because I can’t get my way and I’m trying to manipulate my caregiver into something” – well, unless that’s actually what’s going on. When the Medium One was 3 I used the word “tantrum” all the time!
OK, update: we had the meeting with the teacher and preschool head this afternoon. They were really, really nice about everything and we had a good discussion about potential things we could do to help her and what we’ve been trying and what they’ve been trying. (Well, I probably got a little overemotional, but what else is new.) This thread helped me in the discussion – we discussed trying to remove some of her triggers where that’s possible (since we can’t remove all of them, this would let us concentrate on the ones that are left) and keeping cross-referenced records to try to rule out any physical/medical component, among other things.
They didn’t even hint at trying to get rid of her, which was reassuring. I had been worried as to why the preschool head was there, and in fact her only role seemed to be as a, I don’t know, moderator capacity, in that every so often she would ask questions to move the discussion along. From this thread and another discussion I had offline, I now wonder whether she was there in case we turned out to be bratty about the whole thing, to protect the teacher from our putative wrath. (We didn’t have any wrath, of course – the school is being really great about everything – and it never occurred to me before you guys brought it up that it could be a potential response to the situation… because… that’s ridiculous.)
One interesting thing that came up was that she has a speech issue (all her voiceless consonants come out as “t”; we don’t notice it anymore because we’re so used to it), which is not helping because sometimes her meltdowns happen because people can’t understand what she’s saying. The teacher asked whether we were willing for her to do speech therapy to help with this. Well, of course we are! The teacher looked extremely relieved. Apparently that is not the answer she was expecting?
I just dislike using the word “tantrum” because there’s such a connotation of “it’s because I can’t get my way and I’m trying to manipulate my caregiver into something” – well, unless that’s actually what’s going on. When the Medium One was 3 I used the word “tantrum” all the time!