Devastated - please help!

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Yes, I got that. Thank you!
We're certainly working on these issues using techniques very close to what you described.
He has unbearable days and bearable days when it comes to such things - which ultimately boil down to getting what he wants, right there ans then.

You think I would be able to do this thing repeatedly without an abrupt escalation of tension and emotionality on his part?
He gets very upset when I try to redirect him as you describe. Not that I back off, I do it - but I pay the price for it.

Ouch. Yeah...that's....not easy to deal with.

In the book that has been mentioned on here a few times-The Explosive Child by Ross Greene-this is how that scenario might have gone using the method known as Collaborative Problem Solving:

You find stickers all over the bed and say to him "I see you put your stickers all over the bed."
He might say "YES! I want my stickers on the bed!"
You say "I can see you like these stickers. Do you feel like you want them on the bed so you can see them easier?"
He says "I want them on the bed!"
You say "You want them on the bed. They are nice stickers. I'll bet you want to keep these stickers in a safe place"
He says"But I like them on the bed"
You say "I can see why you like them on the bed but on the bed they might get torn by someone who doesn't know you like them so much. Maybe there is place we can put them where they won't get torn?"
He says "I don't want them to get messed up"
You say "I don't want them to get messed up either, that's why we should put them some place safe. Can you think of any safe place we could put them?"
He says "Maybe on the wall?"
You say "That's a good idea. But maybe they would still get messed up on the wall when someone passes by them. Can you think of another place?"
He says "I don't know!"
you say "What about a special book just for your special stickers?"
He says "That might work...BUT I don't have a sticker book"
You say "We can make you a special book for your stickers. Let's go get some paper and we'll make you a special book."
He says "OK"

And the situation was solved in a way that both sides win. No conflict has occurred and he feels as though he has come up with an alternative solution instead of being dictated to. Of course there's several variations on how this scenario might go but the premise is the same: validating his reasoning instead of dictating to him "just because you said so".

As others have mentioned it is not abruptly restraining them. It is finding creative ways to nicely restrain them. Holding their hands, giving them fidgets, rdirecting to something they want such as a sucker or a handheld game. It is a SLOW process. It might create tension the first few times but the tension would decrease as the rule becomes more recognizable. Yes, children will stretch the boundaries as much as they can, this is true for NT as well as AS children. But calmly maintaining the "rule" as emotionally matter of fact as possible and helping them succeed in it as much as possible so they can see the fruits of their labors-positive feedback when they succeed-is what it takes to get the "rule" to manifest.

This sounds beautiful; and I often do that.
However, I found this is not always realistic in day-to-day life. People live life at a fast pace, often situations need to be solved in an expedited manner. Such strategies to turn things around completely often require tons of time (very time consuming) and tons of patience, particularly when the child is not exactly a dummy and he smells your intentions of trying to make him stop a certain behavior. My son is a Master at figuring out your intentions in such situations (which again, is not exactly a trait of AS).
I can tell you he would not have been tricked by the white flag in the scenario you gave and he would have persisted with the oppositional attitude. Yes, I've often thought he might have the ODD too.

We've had many episodes like this.
And even when you DO arm yourself with all the time in the world and the patience of a saint to go through such motions, they are far from guaranteed to work. At least, this has been my experience.

But you seem to be missing the point of CPS-it's NOT to manipulate him to stop the behavior. It's to flesh out the REASONS behind the behavior. If you see all of his behavior as intentially done JUST to provoke you-you might be missing the real reasons behind his behaviors. In my scenario I fleshed out that he wated to keep the stickers safe-maybe the real reason is different-such as he wants to "decorate" the bed for your mother, etc. Once you discern the reason behind the behavior you can help direct him to a more appropriate replacement behavior. If he recognizes that you UNDERSTAND what he's trying to accomplish and that you are NOT trying to manipulate him, perhaps he would be more receptive to the replacement.

Yep, it takes tons of time and tons of patience and even when all of that is diligently applied there are still days that are miserable. That is the simple fact of the matter. Life with a child with ASD is different. It is however very possible to reduce the number of miserable days and increase the number of easy, happy days. The choice is yours. You can keep going the way you are or you can start to adjust the way you think about your son and his behaviors.

Goodolddays, your son sounds like my daughter when she was the same age. Too smart for their own good. She once even told me to 'stop trying that positive parenting on me!'. My brother used to say that she's not autistic, she's just defiant.

It's true what the others have said, you have to try and understand why they are doing what they are doing in order to correct it. Sometimes the why isn't obvious, even to them. Sometimes my daughter comes in from school in a rage and her behaviour is terrible. I ask what's wrong and she tells me one thing, then another and another. None of which is actually the problem. Sometimes it take over and hour of her ranting over stuff that's no problem before she hits the mark and I can see it in her face that now we're at the real problem. Sometimes it's something minor but her inability to express or even focus on the cause blows it all out of proportion. Once the cause is known, it's easily fixed and her behaviour changes.

As for the specifics of shopping. I always got my daughter to help and turned it into a game. 'Right, I need six big bananas that don't have bruises, you've got till I count to 20, on your marks, get set, go.......' She was a sod for touching the strawberries, despite me repeatedly saying no. The reason was simple, they looked delicious and she wanted some. Once we got to the end of the shop with everything we needed and no bad behaviour, she was allowed to go back and choose a punnet.

I think you missed my point in posting that. AS children, just like other children, grow and change with the right prompts and information, and they are not anymore inherently selfish than any other child. ALL kids are born self centered, believing the world revolves around them, and an AS child is no different. At age five I most certainly felt my son was self centered, and maybe at that time, given my lack of understanding about his condition, I would have said he was selfish. But time and understanding have changed that. Does he still have tremendous difficulty seeing anything from someone else's perspective? Yes, he does: problems with theory of mind are huge for him. But it doesn't mean he knowingly and intentionally puts his own needs and wants ahead of those of others: he does not. As soon as he understood the rules for ownership and theft, he took them to heart. But it was tough to learn, when you think about it, because we spend a lot of time telling young ones they must share. Some things are paid for, some are free. Some things we expect them to share, others not. These are amazingly complex and subtle social rules, when you think about it, and AS kids have tremendous difficulty understanding the distinctions, as clear as they may seem to us. You need to slow it down, and break it down, if you want your child to implement and understand it. You need to live black and white, adults following the same rules as spoken to the kids, if you want your son to be able to sort it out. Your son will need to not only hear in minute detail what the rules are supposed to be, but see that pretty much everyone else follows them (a tough part), and feel they have logic (another tough part), and THEN he'll integrate it. Without all three elements in place he'll default to what serves him best: that is basic human survival instinct.

My message for you in posting what I did was that it is possible for him to learn, because my son learned. But the key is to know how your child thinks, and to drop negative terms like selfish. Your son is not selfish, he is simply a child who has not yet sorted out how things work, or how to balance his needs and desires against those of others, and so defaults to the one thing he knows and understands: what he wants or is driven towards.

Are you starting to see what I mean by changing perspective?

And ... Allow for periods when he tests out and challenges the rules, even after he really "gets" them. That is a normal childhood phase; you deal with that same with an AS child as you do any other child: let them learn life is better sticking to the rules than breaking them. But first make sure he really knows the rule in all it's colors and subtleties. First get through the long slow slog of teaching.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 13 Jul 2011, 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That is a really good suggestion. My son is a fidget kid; he just NEEDS to touch everything, isn't even aware he is doing it. But when he has a job to do and his hands have a task, he stops. Simple physics. Can't do that and this at the same time. So giving a child a toy to manipulate, or a shopping list to carry, or items to search for and select, solves a lot of problems. Creative and proactive parenting makes life soooo much easier.

We do this as well. My daughter likes to play the game where she works at the store. So she asks me "Ma'am, what can I help you find?" and then I tell her one by one while she helps me find stuff. Yes, it prolongs our shopping trips when we go together and do this but it makes her happy WHILE teaching her appropriate social skills, not to mention skills in navigating a grocery store.

My daughter is VERY into make believe so I can usually turn a non-compliant situation around with a little brainstorming. I "entice" her into a bath (she has sensory aversion to water) by asking her to visit the "GRACE-ful SPA". I light candles, give her a robe to put on, and add some "salts" to the water. She loves it! And yes, it takes more of my time but when I look at the fact that all of that time could have been enduring a meltdown and/or dealing with angry confrontation-it's WELL worth the little extra time!

Just wanted to thank you for your examples and descriptions of this book. Its one I have really skipped over bc who wants to admit that is their child.. LOL but from your description of the approach I really think it may work in our home. So thanks!

I often read statements anxiously reminding the reader to remember that autism does not = mental retardation. Yet, there seems to be a comparatively much larger mental retardation rate among the autistic population (was it 40%?) than among the NT population. If autism is not mental retardation, then why the high rate of mental retardation among autistic people?

Also, it is clear that autistic children are severely behind in social and emotional skills compared to their age peers. Social and emotional astuteness are, after all, an intrinsic part of intelligence. Colloquially : the ability to "catch on". Street smart-ness.

How is mental retardation defined, after, all in the neuro-psych community? Is it only an IQ thing?

It is terribly frustrating to have a child who scored in the 95th percentile on parts of the cognitive test yet who will sometimes give you answers that can indicate mental retardation for anyone who would not know better.

In those moments even I, as a mother, become confused about his reply: is he that mentally challenged or has he become a Master at pushing my buttons and provoking me?
I desperately want to believe it is the latter.

OP, you are looking at the rates for everyone with AUTISM. For HFA or AS the figures are quite different. As a matter of fact the rates of SUPERIOR IQ are higher in AS/HFA than the GENERAL POPULATION. By all accounts, your son is not lower functioning so I don't know why you continue to disparage him. It is really sad and upsetting for the rest of us to continue to watch you bash his capabilities.



Study in Korea Puts Autism’s Prevalence at 2.6%, Surprising Experts
By CLAUDIA WALLIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/healt ... .html?_r=2

The figure, 2.6 percent of all children aged 7 to 12 in the Ilsan district of the city of Goyang, is more than twice the rate usually reported in the developed world. Even that rate, about 1 percent, has been climbing rapidly in recent years — from 0.6 percent in the United States in 2007, for example.

But experts said the findings did not mean that the actual numbers of children with autism were rising, simply that the study was more comprehensive than previous ones.

“This is a very impressive study,” said Lisa Croen, director of the autism research program at Kaiser-Permanente Northern California, who was not connected with the new report. “They did a careful job and in a part of the world where autism has not been well documented in the past.”

For the study, which is being published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from the Yale Child Study Center, George Washington University and other leading institutions sought to screen every child aged 7 to 12 in Ilsan, a community of 488,590, about the size of Staten Island.

By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and most other research groups measure autism prevalence by examining and verifying records of existing cases kept by health care and special education agencies. That approach may leave out many children whose parents and schools have never sought a diagnosis.

In recent years scientists have come to see autism as a spectrum of disorders that can include profound social disconnection and mental retardation, but also milder forms, like Asperger’s syndrome, that are pervasive and potentially disabling but that often go undiagnosed.

“From the get-go we had the feeling that we would find a higher prevalence than other studies because we were looking at an understudied population: children in regular schools,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Young-Shin Kim, a child psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Yale Child Study Center.

South Korea was chosen not only because autism prevalence had not been measured there, but also because its national health care system, universal education and homogeneous population made it a promising region for a planned series of studies that will also look at genetic and environmental factors in autism.

The study, which was largely financed by the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks, raises the question of whether a similarly high prevalence would be found in the United States if all children were screened.

Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, chief of developmental disabilities at the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities of the C.D.C., acknowledged that her agency’s records-based approach probably missed some autistic children — especially among the poor, among racial minorities and “potentially among girls” — and said the agency was interested in taking part in a population-based approach like the Korean study.

“We believe this will be a way to get as complete an estimate of A.S.D. prevalence as possible,” she said in an e-mail, using the abbreviation for autism spectrum disorder.

Most cases of autism spectrum disorder in the Korean study, the researchers said, turned up among children in regular schools who had no record of receiving special education or mental health services. A third were found among a “high-probability group” of 294 children who were attending special-education schools or were listed on a registry of disabled children.

The children in that high-probability group were similar in many ways to children with autism in the United States and elsewhere. Fifty-nine percent were intellectually disabled, or mentally ret*d; more than two-thirds had full-blown autism, as opposed to milder forms like Asperger’s; and boys outnumbered girls five to one.

Among the children with autism spectrum disorder in regular schools, only 16 percent were intellectually disabled, more than two-thirds had a milder form of autism, and the ratio of boys to girls was unusually low: 2.5 to 1.

In addition, 12 percent of these children had a superior I.Q. — a higher proportion than found in the general population.
Researchers used a two-step process to identify autism among ordinary schoolchildren: parents and teachers completed a 27-item questionnaire on each child, and children who scored in the autistic range on that questionnaire were individually evaluated.

“If we had only looked at the high-probability group, we would have come up with about 0.7 percent, which is in line with C.D.C. statistics for the U.S.,” said the study’s senior author, Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University.

The surprisingly large proportion of cases uncovered in ordinary schools, he noted, may in part reflect the low level of awareness and high degree of stigma attached to autism in South Korea. In addition, children with autism spectrum disorders may stand out less in South Korean schools, which follow highly structured and predictable routines and emphasize rote learning.

Other experts said that more “population based” studies, though costly, could help determine how broadly the Korean findings could be generalized to other societies.

Craig J. Newschaffer, chairman of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Drexel School of Public Health in Philadelphia, praised the new report, calling it “quite a strong study,” but he added that the results were based on information about 63 percent of the schoolchildren, a good response rate but not ideal.

“It is just one area of Korea,” he said, “and we know that there’s random variation in how diseases are distributed.”

There are many different kinds of intelligence. IQ only measures one, although even that one type has multiple components.

Did your son take an IQ test as part of his evaluation? It is common practice to do so, because the contrasts among the components can be striking. My son tested gifted overall, but had component scores ranging from 80 to 160. That is what AS is: a condition of extremes, gifts and deficits. When you are well tuned into your child, you can help him learn to use the gifts to make up for or work around the deficits. There is little point in bemoaning the deficits. Instead, you to work on figuring out how to use the gifts to adapt and accommodate. That is how you raise your child to be a happy and successful adult.

Yes, your child can be that "mentally challenged" on something that seems simple and obvious to you, despite his brilliance on things far above your ability to grasp (which can and will happen). Realizing that is essential to being fair to him as a parent, and meeting his needs. What you want is irrelevant; he is what he is and it is your job to raise the child you have.

AS is a spectrum. I couldn't care less what the statistics are for IQ among those diagnosed with ASD. I'm not raising those others: I'm raising this one child, and what I need to know is where HE struggles, and where HE excels. Then I do my best to be positive about that mix so he can have some self-esteem and grow up able to make the most of the mixed bag he has.

PLEASE get rid of words like ret*d. They are so negative. What your child has are things that come easy, and things that are hard. There isn't one person in this world who doesn't face challenges, so words that make anyone feel bad about their unique challenges are needlessly destructive. My son struggles with common sense and many other things; he has slow processing speed and cannot handwrite. But he is prgramming computer games from scratch, typing impressive creative stories, creating whole worlds in his imagination, and is one step shy of becoming an Eagle scout. He wishes he didn't carry the burdens he does, but he knows they are part of the package deal with his strengths, and he is doing his best to have a good life. What else is there to do?