Raspberry hunter, google “child find” and your state. There’s a strong chance you are eligible to get speech therapy for her for free through your local public schools. Getting it privately may be more convenient for you or easier somehow, but it’s worth looking into.
Of course it’s not the right way to do it. Here, between the square brackets I’ll put everything I know about how to do it right: [ ]. And all my alternative suggestions I use to deal with similar problems: .
But… there is a reason we don’t send kids to a chair in the corner when they making spelling mistakes, or arithmetic mistakes. Of mistakes with their Latin or Greek. We don’t do it because we send teachers to teaching schools to learn techniques that have been shown to be more effective.
I was amazed at my childs school last year, to see a 6yo child in segregation, wearing a placard, for a disciplinary error. Exactly like the wood-cuts I’ve seen of the child in the corner with the dunces cap. Evidentally, the teacher had not made the connection that teaching behaviour with a chair in the corner and a dunces cap is the same as teaching writing with a chair in the corner and a dunces cap.
I did NOT correct her. I’ve already shown how much I know about alternate methods, and I do no better at home. But I was suprised that her education hadn’t equipped her better than me.
I think Melbourne has a good point about the teaching aspect, but on the other hand, no one, not even an adult, is receptive to learning new concepts (and that is what this is) when they’re in the middle of an emotional crisis. It just doesn’t work. Think about the last time you or someone else were really upset, and that well-meaning someone kept saying “Just calm down, just calm down” - note how that doesn’t really help.
I’m not a teacher, and I’m not a parent. But I am very interested in learning to parent, and have done a lot of research (yeah, I know - it all goes to shit once the rubber hits the road) and most of what is out there agrees with Melbourne that there isn’t a point in punishing or humiliating someone for not knowing something. In fact, it actually is damaging to do that.
However, there is a point in removing someone from an overstimulating situation to give them a chance to recover their equilibrium after they’ve lost their shit. Even adults do that - excuse themselves to the restroom for a moment or retreat to another room, or take a moment or a few deep breaths. That isn’t punishing or trying to teach anything, it’s just trying to recover the situation at hand.
For an actual suggestion to teach kids to deal with frustrations and denied desires, the professional advice I’ve seen most often matches grude and StGermain’s approach - you let them be minorly frustrated little bits at a time and slowly build up a tolerance by letting them “succeed” in holding off frustration (even if it’s just for a moment) and praise them for their efforts regardless.
Kids are hard, and there’s no one right way, but there are general concepts that are pretty universal - it’s just figuring out how to apply the concept to each individual kid that’s the trick.
Yeah, I mean, I am really, really not a fan of the punitive time out (having been scarred by shame-inducing tactics as a child, and feeling that punitive time outs have an element of shame and humiliation to them – for example I really, really hate when people say “Go think about what you’ve done!” – either you realize it’s wrong, in which case why think about it more, or you don’t, in which case how will thinking about it help? The only point seems to be to make them feel shamed about it, which no), and have never done it with my child.
But like Lasciel says, it’s not like she listens to anything I say anyway when she’s in the process of melting down. We (and her teachers) have tried asking her to calm down, deep breaths, trying to fix things in the moment, yoga, relaxation techniques, joking with her – once she’s in the process of the meltdown, there seems to be nothing to do (as far as I can tell) until it runs its course. And she’s loud enough that it’s not really fair to anyone else to have to ask them to put up with her screaming and sobbing – there’s a boundary issue with other people too; I feel like she also needs to realize that other people have wishes about these kinds of things too. So if she does get really loud I do make her go to another area, explicitly for calming down and not for punishment. (The calm-down chair is our favorite chair, actually – really soft and comfy, and usually I give her a nice fluffy blanket and a stuffed animal.) Maybe I need to emphasize more that it’s not a punishment; I’ve never said it is and have never intended it to be (and have never used punitive methods with her in general), but I know kids can get ideas in their brains.
But yes, I think the key here is to hold off her tantrums as much as possible, with a combination of trying to limit her triggers so she doesn’t have to deal with a bunch of them at a time (thank you grude!) and teaching her techniques to cope. She can do it, I’ve seen it, but I don’t always know what exactly worked, and you have to tackle it before she melts down. (In the last week, since I wrote the OP, I have started to think that one of the things is that I’ve emphasized “fixing” things, and maybe instead I should emphasize “making things better,” as a lot of her meltdowns involve art – and you can’t always fix art (e.g., drawing something with marker that didn’t turn out the way you wanted) but you can always take your “mistake” and make it into something more interesting or creative.)
Also, the teacher is already on top of the free verbal therapist services (which we do have in our area). This school is awesome!
That teacher is a hot mess, I agre–but not because the kid is in segregation. It’s the deliberate use of humiliation as a teaching technique that’s beyond the pale.
For me, learning to walk away from kids in the throes of a tantrum has been one of the hardest lessons as a teacher. When a kid is mouthing off to me or shouting or shutting down, it’s phenomenally irritating, and what I really want to do RIGHT THEN is show the kid who’s boss, to get them to fix their behavior RIGHT THEN.
But if I’m gonna show them who’s boss, I have to let it be themselves. I cannot calm a child down; only the child can do that. I have to walk away, or send the kid over to watch the fish in the aquarium for a few minutes, before there’s the slightest chance of a decent conversation during which the kid can learn something about self-control.
Sometimes that lesson consists of learning about brain theory; sometimes it consists of coming up with alternative behaviors to whatever got them in trobule; sometimes it consists of reviewing the rules and the consequences for breaking them; usually it’s some combination of those three. But, while I can teach math or spelling or science at the moment of error, I cannot teach behavior at the moment of error.
Good luck. My son was like that. I hope you have an easier time than we did. (He’s an adult now and doing well.)
If you are looking for a book, I highly recommend “The Explosive Child” by Ross W. Greene. If your child gets teachers that totally don’t understand her issues, you might want to recommend that they read it.
I love The Explosive Child, and it has totally changed our family. But if you’re going to get a teacher to read one book, make it Lost at School, also by Ross Greene, which is about how to address and cope with explosive behaviors at school.
I thought I’d update this with what’s currently going on.
So as several people in the thread recommended, we had her retested for Asperger’s/ASD, and this time she got the diagnosis of high-functioning mild ASD. So… yay. I guess I’m part of the club now, whee. But I’m glad to have a better idea of what’s going on, and resources for it.
(It was… instructive. The psychologist would ask us things like, “Is she inflexible?” and I’d say brightly, “Oh no! She’s very flexible when we have to change schedules!” And then he’d say patiently, “What about inflexible with the way things have to be or turn out, like when she’s drawing a picture?” And… well… that’s what this whole thread has been about! We had a bunch of those moments. So when at the end he told us she had symptoms consistent with ASD, it wasn’t a surprise at all.)
She has a therapist (whom she loves), who is, actually, implementing a lot of the suggestions people already had in this thread (e.g., limiting exposure to triggers and gradually adding it back in); I think the therapist was surprised that we were already working on a lot of these things on our own. Thanks Dopers 
She’s doing better on the meltdowns, although they still happen a lot. Of course, now typical 5-year-old obstreperousness is also starting to rear its head…
I’m glad to hear that you’ve been able to find some answers and adopt some methods that are working for her!
What makes a parent That parent with That kid is how the parent responds to the child’s behavior. We observers want the parent to do something that seems to make rational sense and is not inconsiderate of the rest of us. If you ignore the behavior entirely and let the child scream and carry on loudly, we want you to physically remove the child to a location more appropriate for loud noise. If you make useless pseudo-efforts to soothe it with bribes that don’t work, we get annoyed that the bad behavior is being reinforced and that your kid will be tormenting the public for years to come and probably grow up to be a jerk to people whenever it doesn’t get its way.
It doesn’t sound like you are That parent at all and are trying to actually deal appropriately with the situation. I’m sure your efforts will slowly pay off and your daughter will be more comfortable with herself in the near future.
…my fifteen year old - almost sixteen, finally got her ADHD diagnosis this Summer. She was fine through middle school, but handling advanced coursework in high school without being able to focus had her frustration level way up last year. Finally her math teacher said “if I put her at the board to work problems, she jumps up and down the whole time and is a mathematical genius. Same kid in a chair at her desk working quietly gets a B on the test. Get her tested so you don’t limit her.”
We’ll see how the meds go with school this year.