Making some progress...I hope

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LadyM

Guest
When I came home from work today, I tried making a better effort at keeping things calm with difficult child. There were a couple times when I caught myself getting annoyed with, what I affectionately call, his "Spanish Inquisition", aka, fixating on a topic and asking me dozens of questions about it. We went to the grocery store and it was surprisingly manageable.

At one point he started doing his "squealing" noises and I turned and said, "honey, that's not how to behave in public, please stop", and he replied "oh, sorry" and didn't keep doing it to my amazement.

At another point, he started mouthing because I was getting myself some sausage/egg biscuits and explaining to him that I didn't have time to make breakfast for myself in the morning (his dad makes b-fast for him and gets him off to school because I have to leave at 6:30 am). This wasn't good enough for him and I could see him starting to get angry. I calmly told him that if I had to buy him convenience food like this I wouldn't be buying him the game he wants and he immediately shifted gears and stopped the arguing.

There have been times I've come out of stores wanting to hang myself from the tallest tree because of his behavior, so I'm amazed to actually go grocery shopping with limited incident.

Can't say the same for difficult child and husband. They had it out in the car.

We'll see how bed time goes tonight...wish me luck.
 

DaisyFace

Love me...Love me not
Sounds like a good day! And sometimes, you just gotta take what you can get!

Hopefully, there will be many more...

--DaisyFace
 
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LadyM

Guest
Things have been going well with difficult child. husband and I had a talk with him today about breaking things in the house and it went very well in my opinion.

Instead of the usual arguing with him, I took several other approaches, mostly from the approach of "you're a young man now and you want us to treat you like one, this is what you can do to achieve that..." and "we're a team and all of us have to work together to keep our home looking nice, you're a part of the team". He actually came out of it apologetic for breaking things up and promising to do his part. I'm sure it's going to take a lot more reinforcement to see this through, but it's a nice start.
 

Marguerite

Active Member
Way to go! Well done, you're getting the hang of it.

Wheels will still fall off now and then, but the more success you have, the faster you will all make progress.

Don't forget to praise him for staying calm. That helps too. Also thank him for things like stopping that noise. Even if you wait until you're back in the car on the way home, praising him then is good. He wants to fit in, but he needs you to teach him how, and to teach him in the same way you might teach him a history lesson.

Also don't sweat too much about fights between husband & difficult child, although you will soon have to take this on as needing attention. Try to get husband to lurk here and read posts. It has helped us a lot, it should help him too. If necessary, he can PM my husband (aka "Marg's Man") because I'm sure they will have a lot in common, both being ex-army and having a short fuse sometimes where the "problem child" is concerned. My husband lurks constantly, posts occasionally but reads everything I post. We often talk about it and it has really helped things so much for us.

Got to go - thunderstorm approaching (for real) and we could lose power.

Marg
 
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