@Spice_Weasel , you’d mentioned having the week to think it through – did you come to any conclusions?
No need to answer, of course, and good thoughts being sent your family’s way!
I have discussed it with my employers and they are being extremely flexible, so no FMLA at this time but we’ll see how it goes. My boss has been crazy nice about this, and we even had a deep conversation about her own daughter.
So far he’s been incident free at school for several days and improved in social skills group. His kindergarten teacher is implementing a new reward system for him at school and she sent me home with a social story today for dealing with upset feelings.
He seems to still be going off the rails at the very end of social skills group. We’re currently working with his BCBA to see if we can give him a little break during social skills group right before he typically tanks (last 20 minutes.)
It’s still a pretty grueling schedule for all of us, but the extra sleep helps, and I’m taking every other Friday off for a while to catch up on things at home. Our house… Not in great condition. That’s partly because since we stopped doing videos during weekdays he’s getting into all sorts of crafty projects which are all over our house. A good problem to have.
At home, honestly, I am just trying to make it as low drama as possible, not escalate things when he becomes resistant, especially not before school starts. He’s overall been good at home, though.
Oh great, that sounds like everything is really looking up! So glad <3
I’m glad for you but, honestly stuff like this scares me to death. As Bernardo O’Reilly said, “I have never had that kind of courage.”
At least with an auto or other piece of machinery you have a pretty good idea how to fix it and if that doesn’t work you can try giving it a good lick with a hammer. This is contra-indicated with kids.
It’s definitely a wild ride. It helps if you’ve done hard things before. But there’s nothing that quite compares.
It sounds like things are moving in the right direction. I’m happy for you.
Was going to post about the really great parent teacher conference we had last night. Teacher reported a vast improvement in my son’s behavior, attributed it to us parents adjusting our schedules so he can get more sleep. They’ve also implemented a reward system at the school. Great news!
After two good weeks, he crashed and burned today. They had a substitute teacher, and I presume the reward system was not used. Pushing, screaming, refusing to do as told, removed from recess, continued carrying on, etc. When I picked him up he was distraught and kept saying he didn’t know he was pushing people (?) and said he tried to calm himself down, but couldn’t.
I just feel bad for the kid. He was really tired from being up late due to conferences, and after carrying on for a while, he fell asleep in the car.
I actually believe him, that he doesn’t know how to stop himself. I think he is trying.
I’m really feeling like the social skills group in the evenings is too much for him. He needs a regular bedtime. But I don’t want to lose the support of the BCBA.
This sucks.
What about pausing the social skills group for a bit and see how much the sleep helps? It might even help to get a little break from the group. They’re both critical and maybe you need to alternate a bit.
Is it possibly for the social skills group to meet at another time? I keep thinking that the timing is probably difficult for other kids in the group, too, and not just your son.
I guess we’re going to drop it down to one time per week and see how it goes.
Part of the challenge is this place is 30 minutes away from our home. It used to be 7 minutes away and then they moved halfway across town. So my work day ends at 3:20pm, I pick him up from school at 3:50pm, drive all the way to social skills, then I have to go do something else for two hours. It makes no sense to drive home. He gets done at 6:30pm, we’re home by 7pm, it takes an hour to eat, another half hour to get him in bed, now it’s 8:30pm and he won’t go to sleep right away, he needs to play a little first and settle down.
These people are amazing but it’s a lot.
I really don’t think it’s good for him or me.
The group schedule seems to be somewhat in conflict with its goals, if young children are having their supper delayed, bed times pushed to too late, and just generally getting wiped out by the activity. It doesn’t really set them up to succeed in the uncontrolled environment of school and other everyday places.
It might be worth asking other parents if they are having the same struggle. They may not have the drive you do, but they may be facing the same types of challenges. If enough people raise the issue, perhaps something can be changed?
I feel so sad for your boy that the substitute teacher wasn’t able to implement the tools he needed and he struggled so much. I wonder if there’s a “this is new, I need extra help today” signal or sign or flag or something he can use to get the support he needs. The sub can’t know about the needs of everyone, but the school certainly should and this signal could help the sub reach out to the office or someone else? It really does sound like kiddo is trying, we can all be thrown by new challenges.
I’m glad for the great parent-teacher conference! But oof for today.
Question: why was he up late due to conferences? Was he expected to be at the conference? (I’m just surprised – I’ve never had a kid present at parent-teacher conferences until middle school.)
Yeah, I agree that he doesn’t know how to stop himself. My kid also could not. She did learn eventually but it just took longer.
My kid never seemed to be too affected by bedtime but not being able to eat until 7pm would have meant at your son’s age that she’d be melting down every. single. time. (Even at age 15 the kid will get cranky and hangry by that time!) (okay, fine, even in late 40’s I will get cranky and hangry by that time!) Ugh, yeah, try one evening a week and see how it goes. I agree you do not want to lose the support of the BCBA if possible. I wonder if they could do shorter sessions, like, get out at 6 instead of 6:30? What do they think?
Our babysitter cancelled that day, I managed to get my husband’s cousin over with her daughter, which was so wonderful of her to do on short notice, but she wasn’t 100% on point with getting him to bed on time, and he apparently refused to sleep until we got home (we went out for dinner after.)
This is the first week we’re doing social skills only once a week. So far, so good.
At school he’s been… better. He eloped during the after school program on Friday, but that was because the building went on emergency lockdown and he freaked out. I couldn’t hold that one against him.
He got in some trouble today at school, but it was more moderate than severe. So this is the new normal I guess, that he’s going to struggle with his behavior for a while, and we sort of have to measure things by the overall trend improving rather than the behavior stopping completely.
He struggles with keeping his hands to himself and respecting other people’s physical boundaries. I don’t know why this is so hard for him, but he doesn’t know either, and he sometimes gets very upset at himself for breaking rules. We’ve been working on “Stop. Think. Act.” Which he got from social skills.
Maybe this is just a thing now. I’m hoping that prefrontal cortex and impulse control develops as he gets older.
IOW I’m trying to support him but I’m also trying not to catastrophize. I do think it’s better that we’re all getting more sleep. I have lost work time but it doesn’t make a difference most weeks. I really do think we all feel less stressed and better rested and that has to count for something.
This is all sounding very positive, I’m so glad things are looking up. I know you’re not out of the woods at all but you have a pathway, the trend is looking good.
Impulse control definitely is something that gets better as a kid gets older. I think also something that happens is that they have more experience under their belts, so fewer things are breaking the template of Things They Are Used To, if that makes sense. I do encourage you to still keep looking into that ADHD diagnosis and even medication if indicated (obviously there would be a lot of pros and cons in that situation that your medical/therapy team could help you sort through). I wonder if this is related:
My kids didn’t have this problem (they are also not ADHD), but a kid in my son’s class did struggle with this (and it was often my son’s boundaries he was not respecting – it was never badly meant, as I know the kid really liked my son, but it was a lot at times). I think it’s great that it’s something that you’re working on and that his social skills and school team are working on. In my son’s classmate’s case, the school was working on it a lot but I sort of got the impression the parents were not ready to accept that their kid was ND (the kid was definitely ND). That kid isn’t in my son’s school any more, so I don’t know what is going on with him these days.
He had another rough day today. Sigh.
The thing that concerns me is when he violates people’s boundaries he tries to rationalize it when told no. He’s smart. He tries to rationalize a lot of things. “It’s okay because I’m not pushing that hard.”
No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay to push someone even a little bit.
He does this the most and the worst with his Dad.
Or if he has a terrible afternoon he’ll say, “But I had a good morning.”
And I don’t want to be overly harsh with him, but it’s not okay to have a good morning and a terrible afternoon.
Stuff like this, it’s like talking to a little rules lawyer. I think he needs to learn that there are rules you have to follow that you don’t understand, but my husband is convinced he has a deep autistic need to understand everything. But I think it’s taught him to push back inappropriately.
I need to have a conversation with my husband about all this, because we’re not exactly on the same page with how to deal with him. I think we need to pick our battles but also toughen him up a little. Whereas my husband is more micro-managy, which means they are always arguing, and when he’s not that, he’s coddling, there I said it. I think there’s a chance my husband’s approach is making him feel stifled and reactionary.
For example, my son likes to spin in circles while brushing his teeth. He’s stimming. I get it because I feel the same way brushing my own teeth. It’s intense. My husband keeps telling him it’s dangerous and they get into this back and forth over it.
Is it dangerous? Maybe a little. I wouldn’t advise jumping around with a toothbrush in your mouth. Will it kill him? Certainly not. A little soft tissue damage at worst. So maybe he gets a little hurt, learns the hard way. I am wholly uninterested in a power struggle over something like this.
Yeah, we need to talk.
Yeah. I am glad you’re holding firm on that. I really tried to be pretty strict about this with my kiddo because this kind of rationalization is something that can easily get out of control. I struggle with it too, and so does my mom (who is probably also on the spectrum). Not with pushing, but with saying “oh, what I did isn’t so bad because…” and sometimes it’s like, no. No, actually, what I did there wasn’t right. And taking responsibility for one’s own actions is really important, I feel (even if I’m not always good at it). My mom’s terrible at that (she thinks she’s always right) and I feel it’s damaged our relationship.
I mean, these can both be true, but living in a society means that sometimes you have to play the games of the society. Sometimes these are for reasons that actually make sense but that you don’t yet have the capacity to understand. (Like, maybe he doesn’t understand, because he doesn’t have the theory of mind yet, that you shouldn’t push people because it hurts them and that they have a right to a boundary and that their need to be comfortable in their boundaries outweighs your need to push them. Doesn’t matter if you don’t have that theory of mind yet! Still have to not push them!) Sometimes the reasons are actually kind of dumb, but you have to follow them anyway. (Does the speed limit really need to be 25 mph on that road? Probably 40 mph would be reasonable, but if you go 40 you WILL get a ticket and your life will suck.)
That being said, I definitely agree with you about picking your battles while still having firm boundaries! I admit that the spinning in circles things would probably freak me out the first time (I don’t stim like that), but seems like it’s pretty reasonable.
I see this all the time with the autistic kids I teach (weirdly, in the world of gifted ed, I see a lot of them). What’s often worked for me is being both really blunt about the rules, and also blunt about when I’m willing to explain them. Some kids will accept, “Hey, do you see me explaining rules? Am I willing to tell you why the rules are there? If you don’t understand a rule, you should trust that I’ll explain it eventually, but also I’m telling you now that the explanation has to come after you obey the rule, because often it’s a safety issue,” or things along those lines.
I’m working with a kid now, and I can’t go into details for privacy reasons, but the rhythm you’re having –really good days followed by hard days and it’s sometimes tough to tell what’s causing them–is so, so familiar. I wish I had good advice.
Well, it does help to talk about it here, even if we’re all kind of stumped. Sometimes hard things are just hard.
He doesn’t get rewarded on his bad days but there’s not a lot else I can do in terms of revoking privileges. He already gets no videos during the week just to help with regulation and such. If he’s good for the whole week he gets videos Friday night.
So I’m not sure what else I could take away or how else to get the message through. When he gets in these moods he doesn’t seem to be thinking about the consequences at all. Even if you tell him he’s going to lose rewards, he persists.
Which is why we need to work on stop, think, act. With maybe a heavy emphasis on Think to consider the consequences.
Heh. Yeah, I feel like with my kid, she would probably have been somewhat above average intelligence but not particularly so, except that all the circuits in her brain that in NT kids would have gotten used for social and emotional work instead got shunted to logic and mathematics and Being Right. So she’s scary great at math and proofs where there’s a Single Right Answer but the social stuff is very lacking.
As she’s gotten older, interestingly, I feel that she started to repurpose some of those circuits back for socioemotional stuff (she’s still significantly below average but she’s much better than she used to be), and as she started to do that she started making mistakes in math competitions (still never does in school). She’s still great at it but it used to be that she never ever made any mistakes at all (in large part because, again, she was invested in always being right – in those days she’d rather not answer a question at all than risk getting it incorrect). She’s probably the only kid I know where her parents got really happy and excited once she started making math mistakes!