Dara, you may need to prepare yourself for the likelihood that he will need some form of home-schooling. From my own experience - the sensory input problems for difficult child 3 meant that a classroom just had too much going on in it, for difficult child 3 to be able to stay on task. He also had problems task-changing, which meant that when everyone else was ready to switch from doing maths to reading a story, he couldn't cope. And I won't even begin to talk about the social problems and the bullying - teachers can't be everywhere and difficult child 3's anxiety was already a problem; add in the number of incidents from bullies getting in an attack or even a niggle, and the problems would undermine any possible successes.
But there have been bonuses - part of the task-changing problems is the flip side, that difficult child 3 (like a lot of Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids) can stay ON task for a lot longer than other kids his age. As a result, he could be studying his maths (once he got started) and stay on the same topic ALL DAY. So in one day, he would complete all the required curriculum for maths for a week, or even two weeks. The same for other subjects. We found the same thing with difficult child 1, when he began learning at home. I keep hearing the same thing from other parents of similar kids. Another aspect, connected to the rule-following too, I think - they tend to get into the habit of learning and working on their education. difficult child 3 is quite comfortable about ringing his teachers if he has a problem (he is a correspondence school student; home-schooling but with teachers on call in the city on the other end of a phone). Similarly, he will come to me and ask for help if he needs it. He's had to re-learn (after many mistakes made in mainstream) that work he doesn't do, will not magically disappear if he stalls for long enough.
One often-expressed concern about home-schooling - that the child will miss out on important social contact - is a fallacy, in my experience. School is NOT a normal social environment. Never again in your life will you have to sit in a room with thirty other people the same age as you, with an authority figure (one) controlling your environment for 6 hours a day, five days a week. Even the work environment in an office is more natural than this. And at school you have to get on with other kids. In the real world you mix with a much wider age range and cultural range. Your interactions are less intense, less forced, more under personal control and if the larger numbers of a classroom are a problem, you have more control in the real world about easing back on interacting with too many people at once. He MAY have to interact with a large group of children later in his life but then he will be interacting as an adult, not as a fellow child.
difficult child 3, when he first was absent a lot from mainstream school, would come shopping with me. I found that he learned to interact with shopkeepers, with the checkout staff, with other customers (family as well as strangers) and he also learned more about context and appropriateness. It didn't take him long to be able to run messages for me "Here is $10, go and buy me four batteries." To run a message he had to know where to go, what to ask, how to manage a transaction and to wait for change. He was eased into it - at first I would let him watch me. Then I would let him hand the money over and make sure he waited for the change. Piece by piece, he learned what to do until now, he's confident. It will still be a long road for Sammy, but he's only 3.
Dara, about his aggression towards you - I have a couple of thoughts. First, he feels safe with you. It's like the way some kids behave well at school then let go when they come home.
Second, you've been the one trying to manage his behaviour and it's possible you've been using your professional skills (which have stood you in such good stead in your work). And they may just have been not quite right, for Sammy. It's "Explosive Child" stuff again, having to think outside the square and find a different method to get compliance from Sammy. The part of you that is a trained (and undoubtedly highly skilled and empathic) teacher is likely resent this, but I've found with difficult child 3, and difficult child 1, and easy child 2/difficult child 2, and their friends, you need to throw away the rule book, throw away everything you've ever learned about educational psychology, and begin from scratch.
Third (and perhaps the most important) - Sammy is three years old. He is likely to be feeling VERY frustrated because the world is not doing what HE wants it to. We're all taught about the Terrible Twos - this is much the same, only it takes longer to set in sometimes and it lasts A LOT longer, because of the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD).
Sammy remembered the story about you falling off your bike when you were a little girl - that is revealing. He clearly values you enough to remember something about YOU. And to be able to remember the story and to understand it well enough to remember it, AND to re-tell it - that is amazing, really good, for a 3 year old with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD).
I mentioned the research into how savant skills can be used to help Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids in education especially in subjects that they find more challenging. difficult child 3 was almost involved in this research, it was undertaken in Sydney when difficult child 3 was only three or four years old.
You're starting much earlier with Sammy, than we were able to start with difficult child 3. That is a big advantage. You say you've begun using a picture schedule which is helping Sammy a lot - that is really great! We made the interesting discovery with difficult child 3, that if we gave him EVERYTHING - the sound of a word, the look of a word, the meaning of a word, the context of a word - that he learned the word holistically. It seemed too much at once, but if we broke the task up, it just didn't sink in. By giving it to him holistically, I think it helped him 'slot it in its place' in his own mind. I use words as an example.
Something else that worked for us - the "difficult child 3 book". It's not strictly a social story (at least not in any sense I recognise). You may understand this better because of your training - what difficult child 3 was provided with at school as "social story" was generally a handwritten lecture (or harangue) on why his behaviour was unacceptable. It really didn't help much -he already knew, after the fact, that his behaviour was not acceptable. But his poor impulse control added to the constant needling by other kids, meant that there were repeated incidents. It's no good telling a kid constantly that he shouldn't swear at other kids or hit other kids, but when he got sworn at, and hit, over and over, then eventually he would snap and swear back or hit back.
No, the stories I mean were purely a narrative, describing either difficult child 3's daily routine (like a children's book) or a "day in the life of" especially if it had been a special day.
We had two main types of stories - one was the "day in the life of" which was designed to help him understand his daily routine and to follow it. We could sometimes set tis up to prepare him for an upcoming change in his routine. The second book we would have (concurrently) was the "red letter day" story.
There are two good ways to present a book like this, especially for a younger child who can be rough on books:
1) set it up scrapbook-style, present it in a photo album which has hard pages that are easy to turn, and where the pictures etc are protected under a plastic sheet.
2) Cheaper, but almost as good - the folders with plastic sleeves inside that you can slide pages into. For a harder page you can also insert a heavier card between the two sheets of paper. So each plastic sleeve would have three sheets in it - the first page, the cardboard stiffener, then the next page (as you turn it over).
I used a larger font on the computer and kept the text as simple as difficult child 3 needed, with just a little challenge. I put the text together with photos (depending on which type of book it was). For a book on difficult child 3's routine, I followed him around and took the photos. This meant asking permission of the school to get photos of difficult child 3 arriving at school, going into class, a photo of difficult child 3 and his teacher - etc. The photos were posed which meant I had difficult child 3 cooperating with the project. I didn't have too much trouble - I told difficult child 3 that I was making a book about difficult child 3 and what he did each day and he and I would make it together.
The other kind of book - I used photos we had taken anyway, on a special family trip.
These days difficult child 3 does this himself - when we've been on holidays he will write text himself about what we do, the things we see and anything academically relevant. He then takes photos and when we get back home after the holiday, he puts it together into a report which then gets sent in to the school. But that is a few years away for you yet.
One "red letter day" book we did for difficult child 3 was a lovely train trip we went on. We also took note of the things that difficult child 3 was interested in - the purpose of the book was to record HIS day, not ours.
Example: another "red letter day" for difficult child 3 was when we had lunch at Sydney's "Summit" restaurant (easy child's 21st birthday). It is a revolving restaurant in Sydney's CBD, there is a lot to see there, very interesting. But what really stood out for difficult child 3 was the elevator and the floor number.
For easy child 2/difficult child 2's 21st birthday we didn't get to "Summit", we went to the other revolving restaurant in Sydney (Centrepoint Tower). Again, difficult child 3's main focus was not on the view out the windows, but looking the other direction to the elevators which are actually two-storey. difficult child 3 gets anxious with elevators and (I think) connected to this and perhaps part of his coping strategy, is his intense interest in them. It's like, the more he knows about them, the less he needs to fear them. So for his book, we didn't rave on about the view (we did mention it, though) but instead we made sure we took a photo of the elevator and wrote in the book what floor we were on and what the elevator was like.
These books work well, a major factor being that difficult child 3 is in them and really likes to look at photos of himself. He would go through our photo albums and ask me what each photo was about. After I had told him, he would do it again. And again. The next day - same again. "Mummy, who is this? What are they doing?"
With the books, I would sit with difficult child 3 and read them to him. It didn't take long before he had the text memorised and he would go through them again. When the book was "day in the life of" it meant that he was rehearsing his own daily routine. This meant I had to keep the book up to date but he soon learned to tell me of any major change.
Dara, keep a diary of how he's going. I used the entries from his Communication Book (which is how we managed at pre-school and school). Entries here on this site would also be helpful to keep. You write down anything good, anything bad, your own concerns and also anything different or interesting. Even if you're certain you could never forget this stuff - so much happens, it is amazing what you can forget.
You have an amazing son, but it's not going to be easy. I do feel, however, that you will find it rewarding as well as challenging. You are also an articulate, intelligent woman and I think you should consider Sammy a project well worth documenting, with a view to writing a book eventually (just before they cart you off to the retirement home for burnt out mothers!).
I've said it before and I've been hearing (occasionally) other people saying similar things - I think Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids are slower to reach a lot of milestones (especially initially) because their brain is wired differently and they are trying to use this differently-wired brain to do the same things as everyone else. But they can't always do it when everyone else does, they have to wait until their brain is ready. Sometimes they have to learn to use a different part of their brain to do what everyone else can manage easily - this can have interesting effects.
When difficult child 3 was learning to talk, it was not just speech that was the issue, it was language - the concept of communication. Language is symbolism - it is very abstract. when we talk about something, we are using our words to represent what we are talking about. For difficult child 3, it was difficult initially because I don't think he had any frame of reference. Then when I began to show him words with images to demonstrate meaning plus would act out the words at the same time as saying the words and showing him the images and the written words - by giving him the lot, he had his frame of reference.
I learned that we use an entirely different part of our brains to learn a second language, than we use to learn our primary language. I think that is because when we learn a second language we are using our primary language as a reference point. Which makes me think - I believe difficult child 3 (and maybe other kids with language delay) are having to use this 'second language' part of his brain to learn language as a whole. It would account for the delay, as well as the need to have everything cross-referenced.
The milestones are much slower to reach (some of them) but along the road we have discovered some amazing hidden treasures tat sometimes make us deviate in different directions. Sometimes there can be shortcuts and always the scenery is unexpected.
Marg
