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Is it wrong that I don't even like her anymore?
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<blockquote data-quote="Marguerite" data-source="post: 174168" data-attributes="member: 1991"><p>Hi, welcome.</p><p></p><p>In describing your first child, you said, "I guess the thing that bothers me most is that she treats my every command/order as though it's a suggestion that she has the option of turning down."</p><p></p><p>It is things like this that make me also consider high-functioning autism (including Asperger's) as a possibility.</p><p></p><p>We often misunderstand what autism is. The diagnostic criteria seemed to have shifted a great deal in recent years. I remember reading about autism when I was a child - I grew up with a stack of old Readers Digests on the bookshelves - and I remember thinking, "I never want to have a kid with autism, it would be so horrible. And to say there is no cure, and you are better off putting them in an institution and forgetting you ever had them! Not me, never, no way!"</p><p>Oh boy, have we changed!</p><p></p><p>difficult child 3 is not typical. I have learnt that few autistic kids ARE typical. difficult child 3 currently attends a drama class that is technically for kids with learning problems, but in fact the majority of his classmates have autism or Asperger's. There are a few others - a Downs kid or two, a couple with unspecified developmental delay, a boy with Prader-Willi - but as a result of this mix, the IQ span is incredible. difficult child 3's IQ has been conservatively measured as about 145, and he's not the brightest in the group (although he's one of the brightest). And his best friend in the group has just learned to read - at 18. difficult child 3 was reading in infancy.</p><p></p><p>Autism is a mix of a kid who is socially inappropriate (not necessarily withdrawn); has communication problems (but not always) and some level of extreme special interest or obsessiveness. </p><p></p><p>Where there has been no language delay the diagnosis while still technically autism, can be Asperger's Syndrome.</p><p></p><p>From Wikipedia, "Asperger syndrome ... is one of several autism spectrum disorders (Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)) characterized by difficulties in social interaction and by restricted, stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities. AS is distinguished from the other ASDs in having no general delay in language or cognitive development. Although not mentioned in standard diagnostic criteria, motor clumsiness and atypical use of language are frequently reported."</p><p></p><p>difficult child 3 is socially inappropriate, in that he is extremely outgoing and would tell our life history to a total stranger. Difficulty in making eye contact - not difficult child 3. He will SEEK OUT people to talk to. If we go to a park and he has the camera to take photos, he will often walk up to a person and introduce himself (often clumsily, although we've been trying to teach him).</p><p>And your comment about your daughter not taking orders from you - if could be connected to an Asperger's component where she simply does not acknowledge any difference between you and her, in terms of status. difficult child 3 is like this. difficult child 1 was not. easy child 2/difficult child 2 was (and is).</p><p>It seems odd to see this 100&#37; acceptance of all people being equal, as a flaw - but it is, when you actually have to live with it. And when I think about it - even easy child has shown signs of this. Back when she first was transferred to a city school with a very high Aboriginal enrolment (as well as a lot of kids from a very wide range of cultural and racial backgrounds) easy child made friends with a lot of kids, regardless. But she had a run-in very early on with one large girl who was a bit of a bully. This girl was picking on her, easy child called her a "female dog" and from that point on, other kids would come up and hassle easy child as well, "because you called my cousin a b**ch".</p><p>It was the word "cousin" that tipped me off - I asked easy child is the girl she's insulted was a Koori (aboriginal) and easy child said, "I don't know. She's a kid. Like me."</p><p>I persisted. What colour was her hair? What colour was her skin? What about her sisters? Her cousins? What colour were they?</p><p>I finally worked out, with a fair degree of certainty, that easy child had landed herself a label of racist. She had not realised that the girl she insulted belonged to a different group of people (according to easy child, the girl had a great tan!) and the problem would need to be sorted or easy child would continue to get hassled.</p><p>I won't go into detail - we sorted it (in an unusual but effective way) and the girls became friends. But easy child had not recognised any difference between her and this other girl.</p><p></p><p>difficult child 3 - views an adult as being on the same social scale as a child, ANY child. It's the ultimate in egocentricity - 100% equality, because in difficult child's eyes, "everyone thinks and feels exactly what I do."</p><p>With a very young child, this equates to, "Why didn't you get me what I wanted? I was thinking it hard enough, you should be able to know what I'm thinking." And you get the child who throws a tantrum the first time they ask for a drink, because they shouldn't HAVE to ask; you should KNOW. After all, you're the person who has been meeting the child's physical needs all her life. You MUST know! And if you know, and don't comply, then you must be withholding what she wants out of deliberate malice. = tantrum.</p><p></p><p>There are nicer sides to this - difficult child 3's drama group classmates all really are great friends. They greet each other with a hug and encourage one another. They are learning the different capabilities (although some of the autistic kids are more scathing or condescending about others who aren't on their level). It is helping to overcome some of the social problems.</p><p></p><p>WHAT WORKS - We've found that if we treat difficult child 3 with the respect tat we require form him, we have a chance of getting it. Eventually. He will still get impatient (especially when feeling frustrated) but we do not get loud and angry with him, we just quietly say, "I didn't use that tone of voice with you; please treat me with respect."</p><p></p><p>We also found that we MUST give time warnings, even if he's doing a job he doesn't particularly like. For a while we found that we would give a time warning when he was, say, playing a computer game and yet when we went to call him for the final warning, he would insist he hadn't been told. And in his mind, he hadn't. He would then accuse us of lying to him and spoiling his fun.</p><p>So we put a post-it note in the corner of the computer screen with the name of the task and the time warning he'd been given. It meant that if he said, "I never got told!" we could just point to the note and say, "remember me putting this there?"</p><p></p><p>The thing is, by doing this you are giving your child RESPECT. And it is the same respect we want - if we're in the laundry doing the ironing, and our kid comes in and says, "Where's my drink?" we not inclined to drop what we're doing and go get them a drink, are we?</p><p>Even if the kid asks politely, "Mum, can you please get me a drink?" we are likely to say, "I am doing the ironing, I need to finish this first." And if the child comes back in at five minute intervals (or less) and says, "I want my drink!" it's going to make us cranky.</p><p>But that is what WE are doing, when we nag and expect immediate compliance.</p><p></p><p>It's important to get back in touch with what we want, as a whole. OK, we say we want a peaceful life, but we really messed THAt up, we went and had kids. So lets think - what we really want, is for our kids to do what we ask them to.</p><p>Now, how do we achieve that? </p><p>We do what we need to do. And we avoid punishments, instead we aim for natural consequences.</p><p>For example: difficult child 3 is playing computer games. From HIS point of view, he has finally, for the first time, managed to unlock the next level on a particularly tricky game. He is deep in concentration and trying to manage some new action on-screen. And then I come on and say, "Dinner time!"</p><p>If he can spare ANY mental power, he might crossly say, "Not now!"</p><p>If I insist on instant compliance by walking over and shutting off the game, it will trigger a meltdown of Krakatoa proportions.</p><p>If I nag, he might not even remember that I had previously told him his dinner was ready.</p><p></p><p>Most GOOD computer games have a PAUSE option, at least at some point. So what I do now - I ask him to pause as soon as he can. I then make sure I have eye contact and say, "Your dinner will be ready for you in ten minutes. Please organise your game to fit in with this."</p><p>If he fails to do this, then the natural consequences will be that his dinner is cold and he probably will have to eat alone. OK, dinner can always be reheated in the microwave oven, but the message still gets home.</p><p></p><p>There is so much more I could say, but it will overload you. My point is - a lot about your daughter, from the high IQ, the better success at school, the apparent doing better with routine, the obsessiveness about certain things, doing better with time warnings, even the early reading (hyperlexia?) all fits with what I see when I meet someone with any one of a number of forms of high-functioning autism.</p><p></p><p>difficult child 3 is definitely autistic - he had quite severe language delay. But he has sure caught up now, I reckon he's halfway to a law degree. When tested, he scores within the normal range, with some of his language scores being almost off the scale brilliant.</p><p></p><p>There is also a school of thought that ADHD is actually one end of the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) scale, fitting in neatly to one end of autism (up near the Asperger's end).</p><p></p><p>When I see, especially in a young child, that they've been given a diagnosis of ADHD plus ODD - I think, "I wonder if this could be Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD)?"</p><p></p><p>ODD is one of those conditions that SHOULD take a lot of testing and observation over a long period of time, to diagnose. But I think that there exists out there, especially in ADHD kids and autistic kids, a subset of difficult behaviour that can LOOK like ODD, but is in fact caused by parenting. Now, before you get upset with me - I am NOT saying that you are a bad parent. Far from it. Chances are, you are too good at parenting. BUT (and remember, I include myself in this) sometimes the WAY we parent, often based on the GOOD parenting we observed or experienced ourselves, is exactly the wrong sort of parenting for kids like ours. It may work brilliantly with other kids in our family, but for one kid, it can make them worse.</p><p></p><p>That is how it was for us. And that is how it has been for many others on this site. We earnestly read every book on parenting to validate what we already are doing (and so often these books tell us we're doing everything as we should be) and our other kids do well - but the strict, no-nonsense approach of reward-punishment and "do unto others" is not stopping the tantrums or the bed behaviour. If anything, it's all getting worse, and we get glares when we go out in public shopping, with people clearly thinking we're lousy parents. WE know how hard we work at it! WHY doesn't it work?</p><p></p><p>It doesn't work, because of relativity. That 100% egalitarianism in the child, which says, "we are all equal" is the problem. To a child who feels this way, one larger person who uses any kind of force (including force of personality) to rule the roost, is a bully and a threat. They do not accept our authority to do these things - in fact, they resent it.</p><p></p><p>To win we need to move beyond resentment and work on cooperation - each with the other. It actually speeds up understanding of social requirements to do this, so it becomes win-win.</p><p></p><p>I have moved well beyond my phobia of having an autistic child, and into the realm of possibilities. I have found that autism has bequeathed many good qualities to these kids, which otherwise would be in much smaller measure. I can use these qualities as added leverage and assurance that we are working towards a good future for the kids, cooperatively.</p><p></p><p>And to make it good news on your budget - I've learned a lot of good stuff without having to spend money in vast sums. Our best therapy has often been what we've worked out for ourselves.</p><p></p><p>One last thing - difficult child 3 qualified for an IEP despite his high IQ, because of his autism. It works on a functional level - what do we need, in practical terms, to help this child achieve to the best of his abilities? Just because a child is already doing better than average is NO excuse for the system not giving the child any help he/she needs.</p><p></p><p>Your daughter may not have autism, but there are a lot of similarities I can see, which for practical purposes would respond to similar management techniques (and hopefully make EVERYBODY's life more enjoyable).</p><p></p><p>Marg</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Marguerite, post: 174168, member: 1991"] Hi, welcome. In describing your first child, you said, "I guess the thing that bothers me most is that she treats my every command/order as though it's a suggestion that she has the option of turning down." It is things like this that make me also consider high-functioning autism (including Asperger's) as a possibility. We often misunderstand what autism is. The diagnostic criteria seemed to have shifted a great deal in recent years. I remember reading about autism when I was a child - I grew up with a stack of old Readers Digests on the bookshelves - and I remember thinking, "I never want to have a kid with autism, it would be so horrible. And to say there is no cure, and you are better off putting them in an institution and forgetting you ever had them! Not me, never, no way!" Oh boy, have we changed! difficult child 3 is not typical. I have learnt that few autistic kids ARE typical. difficult child 3 currently attends a drama class that is technically for kids with learning problems, but in fact the majority of his classmates have autism or Asperger's. There are a few others - a Downs kid or two, a couple with unspecified developmental delay, a boy with Prader-Willi - but as a result of this mix, the IQ span is incredible. difficult child 3's IQ has been conservatively measured as about 145, and he's not the brightest in the group (although he's one of the brightest). And his best friend in the group has just learned to read - at 18. difficult child 3 was reading in infancy. Autism is a mix of a kid who is socially inappropriate (not necessarily withdrawn); has communication problems (but not always) and some level of extreme special interest or obsessiveness. Where there has been no language delay the diagnosis while still technically autism, can be Asperger's Syndrome. From Wikipedia, "Asperger syndrome ... is one of several autism spectrum disorders (Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)) characterized by difficulties in social interaction and by restricted, stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities. AS is distinguished from the other ASDs in having no general delay in language or cognitive development. Although not mentioned in standard diagnostic criteria, motor clumsiness and atypical use of language are frequently reported." difficult child 3 is socially inappropriate, in that he is extremely outgoing and would tell our life history to a total stranger. Difficulty in making eye contact - not difficult child 3. He will SEEK OUT people to talk to. If we go to a park and he has the camera to take photos, he will often walk up to a person and introduce himself (often clumsily, although we've been trying to teach him). And your comment about your daughter not taking orders from you - if could be connected to an Asperger's component where she simply does not acknowledge any difference between you and her, in terms of status. difficult child 3 is like this. difficult child 1 was not. easy child 2/difficult child 2 was (and is). It seems odd to see this 100% acceptance of all people being equal, as a flaw - but it is, when you actually have to live with it. And when I think about it - even easy child has shown signs of this. Back when she first was transferred to a city school with a very high Aboriginal enrolment (as well as a lot of kids from a very wide range of cultural and racial backgrounds) easy child made friends with a lot of kids, regardless. But she had a run-in very early on with one large girl who was a bit of a bully. This girl was picking on her, easy child called her a "female dog" and from that point on, other kids would come up and hassle easy child as well, "because you called my cousin a b**ch". It was the word "cousin" that tipped me off - I asked easy child is the girl she's insulted was a Koori (aboriginal) and easy child said, "I don't know. She's a kid. Like me." I persisted. What colour was her hair? What colour was her skin? What about her sisters? Her cousins? What colour were they? I finally worked out, with a fair degree of certainty, that easy child had landed herself a label of racist. She had not realised that the girl she insulted belonged to a different group of people (according to easy child, the girl had a great tan!) and the problem would need to be sorted or easy child would continue to get hassled. I won't go into detail - we sorted it (in an unusual but effective way) and the girls became friends. But easy child had not recognised any difference between her and this other girl. difficult child 3 - views an adult as being on the same social scale as a child, ANY child. It's the ultimate in egocentricity - 100% equality, because in difficult child's eyes, "everyone thinks and feels exactly what I do." With a very young child, this equates to, "Why didn't you get me what I wanted? I was thinking it hard enough, you should be able to know what I'm thinking." And you get the child who throws a tantrum the first time they ask for a drink, because they shouldn't HAVE to ask; you should KNOW. After all, you're the person who has been meeting the child's physical needs all her life. You MUST know! And if you know, and don't comply, then you must be withholding what she wants out of deliberate malice. = tantrum. There are nicer sides to this - difficult child 3's drama group classmates all really are great friends. They greet each other with a hug and encourage one another. They are learning the different capabilities (although some of the autistic kids are more scathing or condescending about others who aren't on their level). It is helping to overcome some of the social problems. WHAT WORKS - We've found that if we treat difficult child 3 with the respect tat we require form him, we have a chance of getting it. Eventually. He will still get impatient (especially when feeling frustrated) but we do not get loud and angry with him, we just quietly say, "I didn't use that tone of voice with you; please treat me with respect." We also found that we MUST give time warnings, even if he's doing a job he doesn't particularly like. For a while we found that we would give a time warning when he was, say, playing a computer game and yet when we went to call him for the final warning, he would insist he hadn't been told. And in his mind, he hadn't. He would then accuse us of lying to him and spoiling his fun. So we put a post-it note in the corner of the computer screen with the name of the task and the time warning he'd been given. It meant that if he said, "I never got told!" we could just point to the note and say, "remember me putting this there?" The thing is, by doing this you are giving your child RESPECT. And it is the same respect we want - if we're in the laundry doing the ironing, and our kid comes in and says, "Where's my drink?" we not inclined to drop what we're doing and go get them a drink, are we? Even if the kid asks politely, "Mum, can you please get me a drink?" we are likely to say, "I am doing the ironing, I need to finish this first." And if the child comes back in at five minute intervals (or less) and says, "I want my drink!" it's going to make us cranky. But that is what WE are doing, when we nag and expect immediate compliance. It's important to get back in touch with what we want, as a whole. OK, we say we want a peaceful life, but we really messed THAt up, we went and had kids. So lets think - what we really want, is for our kids to do what we ask them to. Now, how do we achieve that? We do what we need to do. And we avoid punishments, instead we aim for natural consequences. For example: difficult child 3 is playing computer games. From HIS point of view, he has finally, for the first time, managed to unlock the next level on a particularly tricky game. He is deep in concentration and trying to manage some new action on-screen. And then I come on and say, "Dinner time!" If he can spare ANY mental power, he might crossly say, "Not now!" If I insist on instant compliance by walking over and shutting off the game, it will trigger a meltdown of Krakatoa proportions. If I nag, he might not even remember that I had previously told him his dinner was ready. Most GOOD computer games have a PAUSE option, at least at some point. So what I do now - I ask him to pause as soon as he can. I then make sure I have eye contact and say, "Your dinner will be ready for you in ten minutes. Please organise your game to fit in with this." If he fails to do this, then the natural consequences will be that his dinner is cold and he probably will have to eat alone. OK, dinner can always be reheated in the microwave oven, but the message still gets home. There is so much more I could say, but it will overload you. My point is - a lot about your daughter, from the high IQ, the better success at school, the apparent doing better with routine, the obsessiveness about certain things, doing better with time warnings, even the early reading (hyperlexia?) all fits with what I see when I meet someone with any one of a number of forms of high-functioning autism. difficult child 3 is definitely autistic - he had quite severe language delay. But he has sure caught up now, I reckon he's halfway to a law degree. When tested, he scores within the normal range, with some of his language scores being almost off the scale brilliant. There is also a school of thought that ADHD is actually one end of the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) scale, fitting in neatly to one end of autism (up near the Asperger's end). When I see, especially in a young child, that they've been given a diagnosis of ADHD plus ODD - I think, "I wonder if this could be Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD)?" ODD is one of those conditions that SHOULD take a lot of testing and observation over a long period of time, to diagnose. But I think that there exists out there, especially in ADHD kids and autistic kids, a subset of difficult behaviour that can LOOK like ODD, but is in fact caused by parenting. Now, before you get upset with me - I am NOT saying that you are a bad parent. Far from it. Chances are, you are too good at parenting. BUT (and remember, I include myself in this) sometimes the WAY we parent, often based on the GOOD parenting we observed or experienced ourselves, is exactly the wrong sort of parenting for kids like ours. It may work brilliantly with other kids in our family, but for one kid, it can make them worse. That is how it was for us. And that is how it has been for many others on this site. We earnestly read every book on parenting to validate what we already are doing (and so often these books tell us we're doing everything as we should be) and our other kids do well - but the strict, no-nonsense approach of reward-punishment and "do unto others" is not stopping the tantrums or the bed behaviour. If anything, it's all getting worse, and we get glares when we go out in public shopping, with people clearly thinking we're lousy parents. WE know how hard we work at it! WHY doesn't it work? It doesn't work, because of relativity. That 100% egalitarianism in the child, which says, "we are all equal" is the problem. To a child who feels this way, one larger person who uses any kind of force (including force of personality) to rule the roost, is a bully and a threat. They do not accept our authority to do these things - in fact, they resent it. To win we need to move beyond resentment and work on cooperation - each with the other. It actually speeds up understanding of social requirements to do this, so it becomes win-win. I have moved well beyond my phobia of having an autistic child, and into the realm of possibilities. I have found that autism has bequeathed many good qualities to these kids, which otherwise would be in much smaller measure. I can use these qualities as added leverage and assurance that we are working towards a good future for the kids, cooperatively. And to make it good news on your budget - I've learned a lot of good stuff without having to spend money in vast sums. Our best therapy has often been what we've worked out for ourselves. One last thing - difficult child 3 qualified for an IEP despite his high IQ, because of his autism. It works on a functional level - what do we need, in practical terms, to help this child achieve to the best of his abilities? Just because a child is already doing better than average is NO excuse for the system not giving the child any help he/she needs. Your daughter may not have autism, but there are a lot of similarities I can see, which for practical purposes would respond to similar management techniques (and hopefully make EVERYBODY's life more enjoyable). Marg [/QUOTE]
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