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chicken lady
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I am trying to figure out how to disipline my son, who is goingthrough this array of testing. My dh specializes in disabled people, and he feels that the one thing he has seen over the years is parents not expecting proper behaviour from their special needs children. He has seen the results in the adults he has cared for, and he has seen adults who are profound make huge advances when they ae called to task.
So what is the problem.......well, as a mother I want to coddle him, and make excuses, and basically give in! Now I KNOW that is not "good" for him or my other dc, but I am struggling with how to implement disipline in a child when we don't even know what the problem is yet.
Any thoughts?????
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Marybeth
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My ds age 6.5 has selective mutism. Basically his he has severe anxiety which causes his shyness to be paralzying at times. We read basic book son shyness and realized from some words of wisdom some things to try with him. It helped...it wasn't the full diagnosis but a step for us in the right direction. ie: We don't allow people to call him rude or chide him for his not speaking. It isn't coddling him. It just makes it worse and doesn't resolve the problem nor make it easier to next time when meeting and greeting people.
I don't know if this helps. Just saying maybe start with a generic or "garbage term" for your ds and read about it. The books usual help with day to day struggles and positive steps you can take while trying to manage behavior and await a full diagnosis.
Also, could you possibly keep a log about his eating,sleeping and general behavior? It could help shed some light things. We noticed how much ds did speak when approached in certain situations and certain people's reactions made it easier for him to express himself.
Don't know if these random thoughts helped or not. I will be praying for quick results and peace for your family.
You are a wonderful Mom.
Marybeth
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Willa
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Molly, it's a wonderful topic. I don't know what specific issues you are dealing with so my thoughts will be quite general.
It was difficult especially when Aidan was younger to discern what parts of his behavior came from his special needs and what part stemmed from, well, sheer orneriness. He used to come up and pinch or bite us, for instance! No discipline seemed to work to stop him from doing the same things again and again.
The conclusion I came to was that it worked better to think in terms of "managing" behavior than trying to judge what was in his precious, inarticulate little heart and mind. I read that in a book somewhere and it seemed to make a lot of sense. Managing lets you think of ways to minimize problems and make life liveable for the other members of the household, and help the child to cope with whatever issues he has, without having to think up punishments or struggle with anger or whatever.
So here is my very general toolbox of skills:
1. Try to understand. .... ie look behind the behavior to what causes it. Some examples -- Aidan used to constantly shred toilet paper. A sensory issue. He used to wander very radically when he was outside -- he didn't understand boundaries and couldn't organize himself enough to stay put in one place.
2. Try to be proactive.... once you have some theory of what causes the behavior, try to think of ways to channel it acceptably. Even if your original theory wasn't quite on target, just the very process of thinking ahead of ways to meet the need can be REALLY helpful in giving the child a sense of security that mom is a bit ahead of the game. For Aidan's toilet paper -- we gave him newspapers and a contained area where he could shred to his hearts' content. AND put the TP out of his reach until that habit had been somewhat forgotten. With his wandering, we learned to all be on duty to corral him, and in some places (blush) I used one of those child harnesses if I wanted him to be able to be mobile but it was a safety issue to keep him next to me.
3. Try extra hard to bond with him -- find happy ways to interact. This really helps with motivation to please those who are around him. I think this part of it is where you really get to pour out all the mother's love and understanding. An example: Aidan helping me in the kitchen. He LOVES to help me. He makes messes; he dumps things in before they are ready. It is a test of my patience, but I know very well in this case that in his heart, he is trying with all his heart to be helpful and competent. So I can use all the motherly patience and toleration I have, and sometimes I could even use more than I have ;-).
There are other ways to coddle too that make discipline problems better rather than worse -- like Aidan just loves to have his back scratched when he is going to sleep and it really helps with his sensory issues and is a mom-child relationship time too.
4. Of course, pray. And try not to feel like a bad mom. Aidan's problems were so vexing that I often felt like a failure even though he was my sixth and all my others were pretty well behaved. It didn't help that he had a lot of interventions and sometimes his therapists had different ways of dealing with him than I did. But feeling like a bad mom doesn't help anything. You are a good mom. You know your son better than anyone else and you love him as only a mother can.
I'm sorry this is so long! And that I'm talking about MY child and his issues, but I thought the examples might help in illustrating what I'm trying to say. And I'm not saying I did all this all the time; these are things that seemed to help when I did remember to use them.
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Taffy
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Hi Molly, I'm a bit short for time so I hope that what I'm typing will make some sense.
Your husband is absolutely right about the importance of expecting proper behaviour from children with special needs. I've also seen the results of special needs adults and teenagers who didn't have this while growing up and it's very sad.
I've always expected my PDD fellow to behave himself regardless. He is my oldest so, due to a serious lack of experience, I made many mistakes. But, due to issues of safety, if nothing else, I monitor his behaviour more closely than his younger siblings and I try to be as consistent as possible in preventing him from misbehaving as well as using corrective measures (not physical punishment, but something to ensure that the poor behaviour will lead to something he doesn't like). I'd say that consistency is extremely important, more than for his siblings.
FWIW, I strongly believe that people will live up to their expectations. I have high goals for all of my children, especially my PDD affected boy. Dh was conviced to pull him out of public school when it became apparent that his teachers did not share our expectations that he would be able to learn what he needed to in order to successfully pass each grade (they were more interested in keeping him with his peers than in whether or not he had mastered the material). And, while he's seriously behind and I'm really struggling with teaching him, he's doing well. He's developing a work ethic. He's learning to play the piano, quite well, and learning how to work with a different teacher. He has recently joined the special olympics in order to participate in a therapeutic riding program and his teacher there is pushing him to ride independently.
I'm sorry, Molly, I'm afraid I'm not making much sense. Willa has given you some good ideas on how to discipline. And Marybeth has made some good points on looking into the environment as causes for misbehaviour. I guess the point that I'm trying to make is - Don't coddle him. Push him to succeed. At some point, all of our children will leave the nest, even the ones who can't be independent. After all, we are all mortal and want our children to outlive us. A child/adult who can live peacefully with others is going to have a much happier life than one who can't behave properly with others. And it is MUCH easier to teach proper behaviour to a child than an adult.
And, since my brain is turning to mush right now, I'd better go. Hope I've said something useful.
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chicken lady
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Yes to all of you, this is good stuff to hear, and I love the prespective of other moms!
LAst night for example Seamus wantd a soda, dh told him no we don't have soda, he could have a drink......Seamus took the glasss and throw it at dh! Dh looked at me and said sternly "do not interfere" YIKES! He made Seamus apologize, clean up the water, and go to bed! Honestly I don't know what I would have done, but the whole scenerio took 45 mins!
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Taffy
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Well, I probably would have done exactly what your husband did! (Although I probably wouldn't have sent him to bed unless it was bedtime.) You wouldn't accept this kind of behaviour from your other children, Seamus is no different. He's a child testing his limits and it's our job to let them know what these limits are. Which is a good thing! Better for us to teach our children what the limits are than for the rest of the world (who may not be so kind or charitable).
Good luck with this, Molly! 
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Willa
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Sounds like your Seamus and my Paddy would get along pretty well -- if they didn't throw things at each other 
I am always a bit glad when my DH gets involved in one of these issues. Means I can go off-duty for a bit as "mean mom". Paddy really takes his Dad seriously, even when he is tuning the rest of us out.
Personally when Paddy throws something I sit him in a chair or on a bed until he's worked off steam and THEN have him apologize and clean up or whatever.... sympathetically but he can't go on with his life until he's done it.
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Waverley
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I agree with Willa in that so much negative behavior stems from the child's emotions. When parenting my PDD children, we talk about(and model) emotions and the proper responses to emotions A LOT. For example, we talk about how it is OK to be angry - it is how we deal with anger that is important. Frequently, typical children can find thier own appropriate ways to deal with an emotion. Our PDD children often cannot figure out the appropriate response on their own. We have to give them appropriate choices and even model those choices. For example, one of my children struggles with dealing with frustration. When she is calm, we talk about ways she can act when she gets frustrated. But then I also let her see ME get frustrated and let her see how I deal with it. I don't discuss it, I just let her see it.
Hope this helps. It has improved our family life a great deal.
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marysjoys
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Imagine how difficult it is to deal with feelings with a verbally limited child whose acting out in anger is an outgrowth of that same problem. Christina(5 years old with Down Syndrome) can't say what she wants very often, so she's stuck in the mode of negating everthing else until we guess the right thing. This leads to lots of meltdowns!
We're improving at understanding her requests, however, so there is light at the end of the tunnel!
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hopalenik
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Good post.
My son had a transplant-kidney at 15 months and has many problems ever since. As it turns out he is extremely busy, active and high strung, but looking back most of his discipline issues were failures of ours to see other medical issues....
1) He didn't follow directions well and we used to have screaming battles to make him do anything. Just before his 5th birthday, we discovered that he had a 55% hearing loss. Hearing aids made a huge difference in behaviour, although they did almost nothing for his speech.
2) At 5 1/2 he was still have accidents. We assumed that this was behavioural and psychological-you know pent up anger at being messed with medically so much. As it turns out...the GI accidents were from lactose intolerance and the peeing accidents were corrected by ditrupan.
3) Josh had lots of moments of frustration and screaming temper tantrums which were resolved when we put him on a lactose free diet-guess it is hard to control your temper when your tummy hurt.
Now, we did miss the ball about some discipline issues but in looking back most of our misses were medical...we didn't listen and presupposed some very false modern psychobabble on our son.
Holly
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Taffy
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Holly, those are some really important points. It's really important (and difficult) to know if the child is able to control the "problem behaviour". And yes, poor communication abilities lead to a LOT of melt-downs and frustration all around.
For instance, potty training was very difficult for my PDD boy and I acted as though it was a discipline issue.   In reality, his digestive problems (chronic diarrhea) were making it very difficult to impossible for him to know when he needed to use the potty. Once we solved the digestive issues (in our case, it required a gluten free diet for our son), potty training was accomplished in days.
Another example, though, for when an appropriate alternate behaviour needed to be learned, happened when LogoBoy became a big brother. When his little brother started to become mobile, LogoBoy would, aggressively, stop BiologyBoy from moving. For safety concerns, we had to put a stop to this. The best suggestion we got (and I sought a LOT of help for this) was to teach LogoBoy how to act appropriately using a doll. It took a couple of weeks, but he learned that it was not OK for him to be so aggressive with his brother.
It's tough to know sometimes when a problem behaviour is due to a physical issue or discipline issues. My general rule of thumb is to use basic discipline (a firm "NO" or redirection) when the behaviour first arises and progress from there. If the problem persists, I try re-teaching the appropriate behaviours. Then, if there is still no success, I look for physical causes. And I ask a LOT of questions (or do a lot of listening  ) from parents who've already gone through the same problem.
But, if there's an easier way to discern physical problems versus discipline issues, I'm all ears!
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marysjoys
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Speaking of behaviour issues, this month's column at Literary Momma discusses having to force our special children to do every day things, like cutting their fingernails. I have included the link in my post about my own struggles here.
If you feel guilty about constant physical struggles to get your special needs child to do the simplest things like stay in a shopping cart, please read it and STOP beating yourself up about it! You have plenty of company!
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I enjoyed your post, marysjoys, and I know EXACTLY what you mean! Been there, done that, so to say.
It might help to know that it does get better as they get older. Some things I let go of that I shouldn't, such as cutting nails. LogoBoy developed the habit of biting his nails  , don't know how to stop that one. I switched all of his supplements to chewables as I was so upset at having to force a pill down him I swore I'd never do it again unless absolutely necessary (i.e. - life or death). And needles? Forget it!
But, a LOT of the other sensory issues have calmed down as his nervous system has matured. There's hope!
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marysjoys
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Thanks SO much, Taffy, you have given me hope, that if I can just hold on, things will calm down a bit.
I am getting tired of just saying,with blind hope, "five year olds don't run away from their mothers into the street, maybe she'll stop when she's five, nope, well, then six year olds never do that, maybe when she's six. . ." fully knowing that Christina's developmental age is 2 1/2, and they run away from their mommies constantly!
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Willa
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| Posted: May 01 2007 at 9:17pm | IP Logged
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Taffy wrote:
| But, if there's an easier way to discern physical problems versus discipline issues, I'm all ears! |
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When I'm in any doubt at all, I go with physical problems. That doesn't mean I just let it go by. I still work to manage the behavior, but just not in a punitive way.
I hope that makes sense. Aidan was not completely toilet trained until this year. He would freak out when I put him on the potty -- no doubt vestibular sensory integration difficulties. We just kept working on it.... getting him comfortable with the idea of just sitting there, etc. Eventually he got it.
I remember a nurse getting mad at Aidan once because she was trying to bag him for a urine sample and he was shrieking and completely out of control. She didn't know that he had been bouncing in and out of the hospital for a large part of the past year and that he had just recently gone through a nightmarish catheterization at the ER.
That really crystallized for me that often, we don't know what's going on in a child's heart or spirit. Her annoyance did not help the situation at all -- it just made her less effective and added a poor atmosphere to the difficult situation. (I will add that this is one of the few times I've seen a nurse act this way; many or most are very good at managing children with complicated physical and emotional issues).
I'm not saying that discipline has to be negative or IS, for any of you. I'm just saying that when I personally, am thinking that a child is being deliberately difficult, it closes things down. Then I lose my positive focus and start thinking of the issue as a struggle, rather than as teamwork -- me trying to help the child be the best he can be. But in fact, even if he is deliberately being difficult, he may not know WHY. Strategizing and finding solutions for him, I HOPE, and sharing them with him, will teach him to examine his own behavior and look for strategies in the future, himself.
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Taffy
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| Posted: May 02 2007 at 12:31am | IP Logged
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WJFR wrote:
Taffy wrote:
| But, if there's an easier way to discern physical problems versus discipline issues, I'm all ears! |
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When I'm in any doubt at all, I go with physical problems. That doesn't mean I just let it go by. I still work to manage the behavior, but just not in a punitive way.
I hope that makes sense. Aidan was not completely toilet trained until this year. He would freak out when I put him on the potty -- no doubt vestibular sensory integration difficulties. We just kept working on it.... getting him comfortable with the idea of just sitting there, etc. Eventually he got it. |
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This makes a lot of sense, Willa. The farther along I go in this parenting adventure, the more that I'm learning about how to discipline. I had a crash course as my special needs child is also my oldest.  Poor guy, dealing with all his difficulties plus inexperienced parents. 
I have to admit to using punitive measures when potty training LogoBoy as he seemed to understand what he needed to do and was simply refusing to comply. Little did I know that, due to a gluten sensitivity that we didn't know about, he was physically unable to control himself sufficiently to use the potty. Within two weeks of making the necessary changes in his diet (which his doctor thought was stupid to try) he was potty trained.
Sometimes I wonder what God was thinking when he gave us this child. But, then I'm reminded of how much I've grown and learned from this special boy of mine and I'm very glad he was sent to me. I just hope and pray that all the mistakes I make with my children won't thwart their lives and love of God in any way.
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marysjoys
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Sometimes I wonder what God was thinking when he gave us this child
God was thinking of making you a saint, Susan! Seems like you're well on your way!
I understand the physical problems of being sensitive to touch affecting hair combing, teeth brushing, nail cutting, etc.
I understand that though Christina is 5, her developmental age is 2 1/2 which is just the right age to begin potty training, her older sisters weren't trained till after 3.I have resisted hints by family and friends to train her before this. I always feel that the child has to be able to communicate her need to use the potty BEFORE training should begin, or you're asking for trouble.
What I don't think is a physical issue is the running away from me in public towards danger. I have gotten a handicapped parking permit so I have room next to my van to wrestle her into her stroller, without being in the flow of traffic. She must be in her stroller or a shopping cart, or we spend the entire time in the store chasing her. What do you ladies think?
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Taffy
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Well, I am light years away from attaining saint status but thanks for the kind words MarysJoys! 
Regarding the problem of running away - we've dealt with this too. This is a safety issue and I don't feel the least bit guilty for causing a temper tantrum to prevent this. When LogoBoy was a toddler, he had a fascination with wheels and loved to observe wheels in motion on moving vehicles. I don't know how many times I had to physically restrain him from running into traffic! Fortunately, the only issue we have now is that he doesn't think it's important to let us know that he's gone to the bathroom - or wherever - when we're in a strange crowded place.
Could you teach your daughter to stay with a specific concrete item - say holding your hand or onto the shopping cart? Then, she would begin to learn the rules of not taking off (which she needs to learn) while still having some security. I admit, this would make shopping harder and longer. This helped LogoBoy though.
I do know that dogs can be specially trained to deal with this. They are leashed to the "runnaway" and will physically pull the person away from danger or back to the parent. This is a big help for older and bigger people especially. But, at 5 your daughter is probably too young for you to look into this seriously.
Just throwing out some ideas!
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Willa
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Taffy wrote:
This makes a lot of sense, Willa. The farther along I go in this parenting adventure, the more that I'm learning about how to discipline. I had a crash course as my special needs child is also my oldest. Poor guy, dealing with all his difficulties plus inexperienced parents. |
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Yes, indeed. If it's any help my second-born had some sensory issues and I was inexperienced and stressed at the time... made more than my share of mistakes in his early years. Talking from experience! And I STILL made mistakes with Aidan, experience or no. It's new with every kid! But you do learn that these things often turn out different than you might have thought at the time.
I used to wonder a lot about that discerning of "physical problem vs discipline issue" through the years, and finally realized that 90% of the time I could handle either with basically the same methods -- training and habits and patience. So I was trying to put that into words.
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marysjoys wrote:
| What I don't think is a physical issue is the running away from me in public towards danger. I have gotten a handicapped parking permit so I have room next to my van to wrestle her into her stroller, without being in the flow of traffic. She must be in her stroller or a shopping cart, or we spend the entire time in the store chasing her. What do you ladies think? |
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I think it's a physical issue in the sense that it's a developmental issue.... that developmentally, it's age appropriate for her. Aidan was the same. I still hold his hand or have him in some kind of restraint whenever I'm in the store, and he's almost eight.
I have to admit that when he was younger I had one of those child harnesses for him. This was not something I would normally have been tempted to acquire, but for him, it was a trade-off. That was the only way I could take him for walks and let him explore a bit without being afraid for his safety.
He does not need the harness anymore but I do take lots of precautions in situations where a mistake would be a significant danger. He is SO much better now; everyone that has known him for years is amazed at how much more responsible he is. But his judgement will never be excellent in unfamiliar situations, particularly, and I have to just keep that in mind and think of where he is now, not what would be age appropriate.
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4Real Forums : Special Blessings
Topic: disipline
