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My 5 Year Old Has Aspergers and ADHD
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<blockquote data-quote="Marguerite" data-source="post: 108174" data-attributes="member: 1991"><p>Also, she's still only five. In autistic terms, this is still the two-year-old tantrum stage and it continues for a few more years but eases the more you can be flexible. </p><p></p><p>A couple of kids at difficult child 3's drama class - they look like sisters but as one girl described it, "we are the bestest friends in the whole world." Read that as "only". Whatever their diagnosis, they SEEM to be Aspie.</p><p>One girl hurt herself badly a few weeks ago, cutting her leg to the bone and needing an ambulance. Her friend was hysterical. No way would she leave her friend's side, but her distress was making her friend anxious and her mother didn't know what to do (eldest child; had never had to do this before). I got the anxious friend away by suggesting we make a cold compress for her with paper towel in the girl's toilet area. While I had her on my own I asked her why she was afraid. She said she was scared her friend would bleed to death. I then asked her, "Do you know how much blood is in your body?"</p><p>She answered promptly with the correct answer - 5 Litres. I pointed out that for a child her size it would be closer to 3 Litres and then said, "I estimate she has lost maybe 30 ml at the most. And her mother is holding a t-shirt over the leg as a pressure bandage. This will stop the bleeding until the ambulance blokes get here and they will look after her from there. So the most she's lost is one hundredth of her blood, that's nothing to worry about at all. Her next drink of water will replace that volume. She will be fine."</p><p>The whole conversation took the minute or so we took to wet down some folded paper towel and she dashed out to put that on her friend's forehead.</p><p></p><p>Meanwhile her mother (friend's mother) couldn't stand the sight of blood, so when the ambulance fellas got there, she insisted her daughter leave her injured friend and come inside. The most amazing tantrum ensued, hysterics began in earnest which meant we HAD to get her away now, when frankly I felt she should have been permitted to stay. In the poor kid's mind, she must have been imagining all the horrifying arcane mysteries the ambulance men would do to her friend; she was scared she would never see her friend again. I was able to understand quickly that friend's mother was reacting from her own fear of fainting in front of her daughter, so I managed to get her to let her daughter watch from inside the glass doors, to see her injured friend joking with the ambulance blokes as they put a better compression bandage on the leg. The friend was permitted (by her mother - the ambos were OK with it) to come out to wave goodbye to her friend. By then the ambos had personally assured friend that everything was going to be OK, her friend would probably miss a few days of school but would probably be home later that night after her leg got stitched.</p><p>Dragging the friend away at that point - the mother (who doesn't know about Ross Greene, despite my efforts!) would have put it as Basket A, where I felt Basket B was the place. And then Basket C. The friend might have screamed a bit when the ambos took off the t-shirt quickly to replace it with their own compression pad (the leg spurted a fair bit, the girl had hit an artery) but it was so quick that I suspect had the friend been watching, they would have shielded her with their own bodies or told her to change the compress or something.</p><p></p><p>This is an example of how we each would do things differently. The mother was allowing her own fear and phobia to influence her even though she knew her insistence would provoke a meltdown. She was even critical of her daughter for the hysterics, although she clearly did understand a great deal. She seemed to be trying to use "You really shouldn't behave this way," as a shock tactic to get her behaviour under control. This was an extraordinary situation, and the mother was out of her depth on many levels. I think we all were, really.</p><p></p><p>20:20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. We all learned some interesting lessons, and this mother most of all - her daughter, despite the hysterics, will put up with a great deal when it comes to helping a friend. The girl is strong. So is the girl who was injured, who was also concerned for her distressed friend. And they both came through the incidence positively, at the end. The injured girl will probably have a scar for life but it WILL fade. She was back at drama class two weeks later and was there last night with no ill effects participating at the final performance.</p><p></p><p>Both lovely girls. The friend was too distressed to attend drama class that week, when her friend left in the ambulance she begged her mother to take her home because she was too upset. By that stage she was beginning to withdraw and hide behind her mother's skirts; the shock was setting in. I believe they talked on the phone later that night, which helped things calm down more. </p><p></p><p>The other point from this - we sometimes have to make fast decisions and for a while, the decisions we make are the ones based on how we THINK we should be parenting, all based on how WE were raised. It takes time and practice to be able to make the changes to our methods. I think next time friend witnesses blood, she will be better equipped to cope (as long as her mother isn't around to try to drag her away and project her own phobias onto her daughter). And her mother I think now knows this and feels more confident in her own daughter's ability to handle things.</p><p></p><p>It's not easy, when you see your child not able to do some things that other kids can. When I sit with a friend's child and hold a detailed conversation with her on politics, her favourite TV show, the latest book she has read - I feel sad, because difficult child 3 simply can't do this anywhere as well and for years could not at all. When this girl (same age as difficult child 3) first told me in detail about her favourite scene in the TV show she liked, difficult child 3 was still non-verbal. He would have watched the same TV show and not understood the action or the message, even though it was non-verbal. He could barely recognise that a TV show had people on it depicting what people do, he simply saw movement and focussed on what he could recognise on TV - letters and numbers. People were entirely incidental and didn't seem representative of anything in real life. A man or a dog - he wouldn't have recognised the difference, on TV.</p><p></p><p>They take a lot more time, but they do make progress, long after people would think they could not.</p><p></p><p>Marg</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Marguerite, post: 108174, member: 1991"] Also, she's still only five. In autistic terms, this is still the two-year-old tantrum stage and it continues for a few more years but eases the more you can be flexible. A couple of kids at difficult child 3's drama class - they look like sisters but as one girl described it, "we are the bestest friends in the whole world." Read that as "only". Whatever their diagnosis, they SEEM to be Aspie. One girl hurt herself badly a few weeks ago, cutting her leg to the bone and needing an ambulance. Her friend was hysterical. No way would she leave her friend's side, but her distress was making her friend anxious and her mother didn't know what to do (eldest child; had never had to do this before). I got the anxious friend away by suggesting we make a cold compress for her with paper towel in the girl's toilet area. While I had her on my own I asked her why she was afraid. She said she was scared her friend would bleed to death. I then asked her, "Do you know how much blood is in your body?" She answered promptly with the correct answer - 5 Litres. I pointed out that for a child her size it would be closer to 3 Litres and then said, "I estimate she has lost maybe 30 ml at the most. And her mother is holding a t-shirt over the leg as a pressure bandage. This will stop the bleeding until the ambulance blokes get here and they will look after her from there. So the most she's lost is one hundredth of her blood, that's nothing to worry about at all. Her next drink of water will replace that volume. She will be fine." The whole conversation took the minute or so we took to wet down some folded paper towel and she dashed out to put that on her friend's forehead. Meanwhile her mother (friend's mother) couldn't stand the sight of blood, so when the ambulance fellas got there, she insisted her daughter leave her injured friend and come inside. The most amazing tantrum ensued, hysterics began in earnest which meant we HAD to get her away now, when frankly I felt she should have been permitted to stay. In the poor kid's mind, she must have been imagining all the horrifying arcane mysteries the ambulance men would do to her friend; she was scared she would never see her friend again. I was able to understand quickly that friend's mother was reacting from her own fear of fainting in front of her daughter, so I managed to get her to let her daughter watch from inside the glass doors, to see her injured friend joking with the ambulance blokes as they put a better compression bandage on the leg. The friend was permitted (by her mother - the ambos were OK with it) to come out to wave goodbye to her friend. By then the ambos had personally assured friend that everything was going to be OK, her friend would probably miss a few days of school but would probably be home later that night after her leg got stitched. Dragging the friend away at that point - the mother (who doesn't know about Ross Greene, despite my efforts!) would have put it as Basket A, where I felt Basket B was the place. And then Basket C. The friend might have screamed a bit when the ambos took off the t-shirt quickly to replace it with their own compression pad (the leg spurted a fair bit, the girl had hit an artery) but it was so quick that I suspect had the friend been watching, they would have shielded her with their own bodies or told her to change the compress or something. This is an example of how we each would do things differently. The mother was allowing her own fear and phobia to influence her even though she knew her insistence would provoke a meltdown. She was even critical of her daughter for the hysterics, although she clearly did understand a great deal. She seemed to be trying to use "You really shouldn't behave this way," as a shock tactic to get her behaviour under control. This was an extraordinary situation, and the mother was out of her depth on many levels. I think we all were, really. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. We all learned some interesting lessons, and this mother most of all - her daughter, despite the hysterics, will put up with a great deal when it comes to helping a friend. The girl is strong. So is the girl who was injured, who was also concerned for her distressed friend. And they both came through the incidence positively, at the end. The injured girl will probably have a scar for life but it WILL fade. She was back at drama class two weeks later and was there last night with no ill effects participating at the final performance. Both lovely girls. The friend was too distressed to attend drama class that week, when her friend left in the ambulance she begged her mother to take her home because she was too upset. By that stage she was beginning to withdraw and hide behind her mother's skirts; the shock was setting in. I believe they talked on the phone later that night, which helped things calm down more. The other point from this - we sometimes have to make fast decisions and for a while, the decisions we make are the ones based on how we THINK we should be parenting, all based on how WE were raised. It takes time and practice to be able to make the changes to our methods. I think next time friend witnesses blood, she will be better equipped to cope (as long as her mother isn't around to try to drag her away and project her own phobias onto her daughter). And her mother I think now knows this and feels more confident in her own daughter's ability to handle things. It's not easy, when you see your child not able to do some things that other kids can. When I sit with a friend's child and hold a detailed conversation with her on politics, her favourite TV show, the latest book she has read - I feel sad, because difficult child 3 simply can't do this anywhere as well and for years could not at all. When this girl (same age as difficult child 3) first told me in detail about her favourite scene in the TV show she liked, difficult child 3 was still non-verbal. He would have watched the same TV show and not understood the action or the message, even though it was non-verbal. He could barely recognise that a TV show had people on it depicting what people do, he simply saw movement and focussed on what he could recognise on TV - letters and numbers. People were entirely incidental and didn't seem representative of anything in real life. A man or a dog - he wouldn't have recognised the difference, on TV. They take a lot more time, but they do make progress, long after people would think they could not. Marg [/QUOTE]
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