Thanks for validating my concern.
I definitely concur. I’m not advocating "tough love " as much as asking about how to navigate that line between helping and hindering.
Perhaps the answer lies more in addressing the older child. As they become an adolescent, they can be tasked with more responsibility.
But it makes sense that young kids benefit most from a surplus of support. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
This is a good question, and it’s actually come up in this thread before as well as in other threads, and my short answer is that I don’t think @Spice_Weasel needs to worry about that – but I think it’s a valid concern, and it’s something I have worried about with my kids, especially my older one, who is also on the spectrum.
One thought: My kid had an amazing therapist who basically advocated that my kiddo should be challenged out of her comfort zone, but not so far that she would just shut down. I’ve erred in both directions (and I think it’s OK to err occasionally, as long as it doesn’t become the rule), but I had tended (and still do, when I am not thinking about it) to err more on the “yes, you can keep in your comfort zone” side because it’s much easier… so having the therapist advocate for this was very useful for me. When a kid has to deal with things outside that zone, and is encouraged to constantly do so, then I think it’s harder to maintain a victim-type mentality, even if that comfort zone is significantly smaller for some people than for others. (And in @Spice_Weasel 's specific case, I believe that a large part of the accommodations she’s making for her son are of the sort that allow him to be in the range where he can be challenged but not so far that it’s too much.)
Going along with that is giving the child as much responsibility as they can handle. I’ll admit that my kid’s (private, probably over-supportive) middle school did NOT do that. It was a bit of a wake-up call when kiddo went to public high school with thousands of kids and suddenly she was expected to do a LOT more on her own. I do have a kid with a lot of executive function – if not, I would have had to do things differently – but I could generally trust her to either get the things done or ask for help (even if asking for help often took the form of a meltdown). We’ve been working on how to ask other people (e.g., teachers) for help, and that’s something that yeah, I think I need to start stressing more, as it starts intersecting with her overpowering need for other people not to think she’s stupid (“your teacher is not going to think you’re stupid if you ask about this Spanish thing that your terrible Spanish 1 teacher never taught you!” “But what if he does??”)
We have also always stressed in our family that different people have different strengths. My child has some amazing strengths, but also some decided weaknesses. That doesn’t mean that she can ignore the weaknesses. Kiddo still has to live in this society and take responsibility for doing so.
And as others have said, it’s definitely a different sort of calculation in early childhood than in late childhood/adolescence, though obviously one feeds into the other. In early childhood, my kid did need a lot more explicit scaffolding/support for skills development than practice pushing that comfort zone, and as she got older and gained more emotional/social skills and could do without so much support, exercising those skills and pushing the comfort zone became more important.
But yeah – I’ve definitely seen people who try to claim the victimhood identity, people who don’t take any responsibility for themselves, and it’s a mess.
I do think it’s a valid concern, and something I wrestle with a lot. I have two family members who are dead in part because of enabling parenting behavior. I have to contrast that with my own childhood, which pushed me to independence to the point of neglect. In some ways I’m glad I was raised to be independent. In other ways I just felt abandoned to figure a lot out myself.
What I will say is that the point of this is not to make him comfortable, but to help him build up the skills he needs to cope with a world that is not very accommodating. This school we have chosen heavily emphasizes personal responsibility and independent behaviors (and emotion regulation, self-management, self-awareness, etc.) It starts with highly structured scaffolding but it expects the child to develop independence over time. As he ages up, that scaffolding is slowly pulled away and responsibilities are increased. Our ultimate goal is to transfer him to public school (he will be in a very good public school district after the move) or to a local GATE school. But if the new private school works out, he loves it, we love it, we might keep him there. Hard to say. My husband’s cousin, who I’m 99% sure is autistic, went to this same school because he was floundering in public school. He is now a decorated Marine veteran. This isn’t a place that lets kids phone it in.
The reality is that it’s hard to say at this point what he will be fully capable of in the future. I honestly don’t know if he is going to be able to live independently. I would like for that. I will give him his best shot at that. But I know that, at least right now, he is not at the same level developmentally as his peers. He cannot perform independent behaviors at their level. He does not have the safety awareness, emotion regulation, or social skills of most kids his age. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for his behavior, or that we try to solve all his problems for him. But this is the kind of issue for which intensive early intervention is most recommended.
But of course I ask myself all the time. Am I expecting too much? Am I not expecting enough? I question it daily. I have days where I’m angry at the school for not understanding the issues better and days where I’m angry at my son for apparently deciding he just gets to do whatever he wants all the time. His experience of school is already so radically different from my own, and school is so different than it was when I was a student, that I often feel like I don’t even understand what’s happening at school. Sometimes I want to go full bore authoritative Mom and other days I feel so bad for him, I just want him to have one part of his day without constant stress and expectations.
He asked me today about punishment and what’s the worst punishment he ever got? I said probably two weeks ago when your Dad picked you up for licking everything and you weren’t allowed to have screens that weekend. He said, “What? I don’t remember any of that.” And I believe him. One of the reasons his neuropsych ordered additional testing was his difficulty retaining information. How can you learn from an experience you don’t even remember?
Then he asked me “What’s the worst punishment you ever got?” How do I explain child abuse to a child? My mother’s response to my ADHD symptoms was to go on rampages, slap the shit out of me, and scream insults at me for hours. Naturally I’m going to want to do the opposite of that. I’m always going to have a bias toward being accommodating so that I don’t end up anywhere in the neighborhood of parenting like my mother.
But I want my kid to be independent and follow the freakin’ rules!
Is it worse to expect too little or too much? I don’t know. It’s like walking a tightrope.
There’s a Sanskrit proverb in the medieval compilation Chanakya-niti attributed to an ancient sage and leader that says:
I don’t think that the entitled, irresponsible mindset that @Moriarty is describing is developed in the first several years of life. I think that children/young adults build that attitude over many, many years of poorly supported development.
My guess is (and I’m no child psychologist so my opinion is worth exactly what you’re paying for it, but it’s based on what I’ve read from more knowledgeable people) that it arises not from being “excessively” helped and supported in confronting their challenges, but from being conditioned to believe that they can’t actually accomplish anything, so eventually they build their persona around inability rather than competence.
The conditioning seems to happen either through chronic neglect (the kid gets no guidance or help with how to cope with challenges, so just keeps failing at them until eventually getting permanently discouraged and averse to trying) or chronic undermining of autonomy (the parents never let the kid go through the trying-and-failing-and-learning-and-succeeding process, because “it’s quicker for us just to do shoe-tying/homework/transportation/application forms/etc. ourselves”, so the kid learns to think of these tasks as intrinsically beyond their capabilities).
Neither of those situations sounds at all like @Spice_Weasel’s parenting. Supporting kids is not spoiling them.
I’ll also point out that all of us (more or less) neurotypical people who feel that some degree of “struggling” and “figuring things out for ourselves” and “taking responsibility for our own development” was beneficial to us are kind of in the position of unvaccinated chickenpox survivors, or whatever, who take it for granted that a routine childhood illness is no big deal. Yeah, it seems that way to us because we were among those who happened to make it.
If we hadn’t been lucky enough to be landed with challenges of a size that our juvenile bodies and brains were capable of handling, no amount of “toughing it out” or "soldiering on" would have brought us through them. And we probably wouldn’t be in a position to be having this conversation in this forum in the first place.
Fun week. The boy was suspended for a day from the summer child care program for hitting, kicking, standing on furniture, throwing shit, and messing up kids’ artwork, all while laughing maniacally.
Yesterday I allowed him to experience the utter boredom of staying home with me while I worked. I think his Dad has a tendency to escalate things because when he got home, he went off the rails again. He was supposed to clean up the enormous mess he made in the basement, but he gave Dad a hard time and Dad imposed a time limit to get it cleaned up or he would lose books that night.
Me being me, I thought, this is overwhelming to me as an adult. Having a huge mess and time pressure is a nightmare for my ADHD brain, and my son shares my brain. So I helped him clean up. He started throwing things but my whole thing is to react as little as possible to whatever he does. He obviously feeds off the escalation and reaction. I just kept reminding him, “Hey. I’m trying to help you.”
We were able to turn it around, and he did well at camp today.
Monday is The Surgery. I asked him if he was nervous and he said he was excited. Well, he wouldn’t feel that way if he knew how he would feel after (I’ve tried to explain it) but I’ll take it. He’s also getting a shiny new Beep after surgery. Dear Lord let it make a difference for him to get some sleep! He falls asleep every day on the 20 minute car ride home. I know he’s tired.
I know I am!
What I taught my daughter is how to be solution-oriented. I always praised her for staying in the solution, and never put much effort or interest into discussions about blame.
The opposite of victimhood is not headstrong independence or suffering in silence, it is proactively seeking solutions, and equally supportive relationships.
Thinking about you and the kid–hope it goes well today!
Also thinking of you!
I’m glad he was able to turn it around, and hope the surgery all goes well. My kiddos always liked getting special treats after medical things like that. Ice cream goes a long way to making anything better…
Hope it went well!
It went well!
His behavior was out of control this past weekend so I know he was stressing about it at least unconsciously. We were stressed mainly about food because he won’t eat popsicles, ice cream, liquid other than water, or anything mushy.
The hospital staff were fantastic. The hardest part was coming out of anesthesia, it took about 30 minutes and he was screaming and writhing the whole time. But this is typical - you could hear kids screaming everywhere.
I was begging him to take his medication, and he said, “If you say please one more time, I’m going to leave this hospital without you!”
We gave him a brand new Beep when he woke up and he hugged that thing for dear life.
Once he took the meds and drank some water he was fine. The doctor said he could eat nuggets and cranberries which surprised the hell out of me. The big fight was medication, that’s been a 15 minute ordeal every 3 hours.
But he slept without pain meds last night and this morning rated his pain as a 0.1/10, with 3/10 when swallowing - with no meds in his system. We’ve decided to monitor his pain hourly and only give meds if the pain increases.
He ate 14 nuggets this morning. He’s been downstairs watching TV and I have to keep reminding him to quit running around.
I guess this is the difference between partial (95% tissue removal) and full tonsillectomy. I’m blown away. This went so much better than I had feared. I understand the pain may increase, but so far you wouldn’t even know the kid had surgery. They said 5-7 days for recovery so I’m keeping him home this week.
I am tired as hell today though and I checked my work email and I think that’s gonna be it for today. We are all just taking it easy.
Ah that’s great! So so glad it went well <3 I feel like sometimes these kiddos can bounce back so quickly, in a way that it’s much harder to do as an adult.
(Also, that seems so him to rate pain as 0.1/10, that’s so cute!)
Oh, thank goodness. Surgery can be scary. I hope you are well
and rested too!
Yesterday he rated his pain at 10^10^-95.
That’s my boy. He’s reporting negative numbers today.
Only one screaming meltdown this week (today) and I presume he’s as tired of staring at the TV as I am of hearing it. Hoping for some good quality time this weekend.
Glad to hear the surgery and recovery went well! Will they redo his sleep study to ensure the issue is resolved, or is it pretty much a guarantee fix?
They will probably do a follow up in a few months to make sure the tonsil isn’t growing back. There’s a 1-3% chance that it will - the only real downside to this less invasive surgery. I think we may have another sleep study down the road to make sure it took, but if his behavior does improve, I think we’ll have our answer there.
Fingers crossed!! Yeah, I’d take the 1-3% chance, that seems like a reasonable gamble.
Does Wee Weasel (I get a little dose of joy when I read that name) return to school soon? My son starts 8th grade in a couple of weeks. Is this a new year for him, too? Isn’t this the new school?
Yes, indeed. He starts school the final week of August, at the private school we found that specializes in neurodiverse kids. Technically he isn’t officially let in until after that week, but odds are very high. Our next thing is a school orientation sometime in August.
It’s interesting, we know another little boy who is Level 2 autistic and gifted, whose parents recently applied to that same school. They said their son was conditionally accepted but told he would probably need 1:1. Which surprised me because he seemed more or less like Miles.
I don’t know if the other boy is going to end up there. But it does reinforce that these issues are nothing new to this school.
If something catastrophic happens, well, we didn’t relocate to one of the best public school districts in the state for nothing. The public school here has a very strong reputation for 2e kids.
I think we can’t lose.
When I look back at this summer, it’s amazing we found a school, found a house, closed on the house and had his surgery in just a couple months, just in time to start school! And that’s not getting into all the federal grants I wrote! Whew! And we’re still selling our old manufactured home (which just appraised at twice what we thought it was worth, great to know before we list it!) Most of the selling is being handled by family, though. Everyone in my husband’s family is in real estate.
I’m very pleased with where we ended up, and I think that’s kind of it for me. My last big thing I wanted to do was have a house, and I love this house. We’re not very fancy people but I feel like we invested in a great location, a nice place to live and more opportunities for us all as a family.
I really hope we can settle into a new routine in the Fall.
I’ve had many parents tell me that their kids’ behavior was MUCH better after diseased tonsils and adenoids are removed. This was the right decision for him.
That is my fervent hope!
I’m assuming it’s going to take at least a couple weeks before we see a difference. I can’t imagine a swollen, injured throat is great for sleeping either.
On the other hand, maybe it’s notable that he only had one meltdown so far this week, which can be explained by excessive screen time and loneliness.
We’re doing real family time this weekend. Long overdue.