Oh boy

Malika

Well-Known Member
Buddy - can you explain more about the "social story"? Sounds a great idea (I can write but not draw :))
 

pepperidge

New Member
I haven't read all the posts yet, but just reading your story I remember that he is 4, right? The give your kids a warning and expect them to remember to come in 15 minutes is a skill that I don't think my teenagers possess. No sense of time, they will agree to anything if it gives them more play time, etc. And no matter how many warnings they get, they would still have melted down. Perhaps you need to change your focus-- say ok if I let him do this, I will get a meltdown when it is time to stop, guaranteed, so is there anything I can do to make the meltdown shorter, less painful--transition maybe to 15 minutes of his favorite movie to let him calm down or something like that? I also read your post about dysgraphia. Malika, please don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are looking under rocks for problems that don't exist, or don't exist yet. Not saying that your child is not a difficult child, only that he is a pretty normal difficult child (whatever that means) and you are perhaps worrying a bit too much at this young age.

I think you are being totally unrealistic about what your child is capable of. I also think that you are seeing not the teenage lout but the temper tantrum 2 year old coming out--unfortunately now with greater verbal capacities. When I read what you write I just think about a kid that gets so wound up he has no way to wind down appropriately--it requires a major meltdown.

One thing you might want to examine is the unstructured play time. Can you have kids in your yard where you can keep an eye on them? Don't know what is possible, but I think somehow if you could reduce that it would help a great deal because that is where your problems come.

As to how you learn to deal with it and not lose your temper....well, most of us have bad parenting moments. Part of it is getting rid of the triggers that lead to these situations, because none of us are saints.


Just went back and read the posts. I sometimes think about what my biological children would have been like. No doubt there would have been issues but realistically probably not at the level of what i am dealing with now. Sometimes I think I can say that I hated my children and the stress and unhappiness they have contributed to our family life. Maybe all parents have those momemts, it is only here where people are honest enough to share their feelings. And it is frightening now that they are in their teenage years and really capable of messing up big time...Somehow we have survived all those moments that I really wondered how we were going to go on--they have made progress and so have I.

You have a great deal of insight into your self, the buttons your child pushes, etc. That's good, but I suppose you could be over analyzing everything too.

Your child right now is 4. He sounds a pretty typical average difficult child 4, not a sociopathic difficult child 4 or a kid with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) or really major issues. Actually he sounds so much like my Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) youngest kid.

I'm not sure where I am going with all this, only that it seems like you are torturing yourself about what actually seems like pretty good parenting. A little bit of psychobabble gained from years of therapy--sometimes we try to make up for the deficiencies in the way we were parented by doing better for our children--is it possible that you are still working out things in how you were parented and not taking a very realistic view of the good parenting job you are currently doing? Or that you are very hard on yourself by nature and transferring that to your child? Don't know, just my sense that you beat yourself up too much for things most of us would call a good parenting day. LOL.

Sorry, I'm probably not helping much.
 
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Malika

Well-Known Member
Hi pepperidge. Thanks for your post. No, I'm not over-analysing (with this one, anyway :)) and not being hard on myself. I am beginning to see more clearly that unresolved trauma in my life is making me respond over-intensely and aggressively to J's oppositionality. That isn't exactly easy to admit. I do need to admit it, though, and it's not psychobabble. I need help to work on something myself. Otherwise I am going to go on having moments that I am subsequently ashamed of and which are damaging to my son.
 

buddy

New Member
Buddy - can you explain more about the "social story"? Sounds a great idea (I can write but not draw)
Hi,

Hi, sorry I was out today two doctor appts and helping my sister move. difficult child got his braces off! no more pain ea. time we adjust them, no more broken brackets, now to suffer the retainer...who knows if he will be able to not break that!

Anyway, social stories are a way to teach rules, prepare for events, explain social issues and many other things. I once wrote one for a boy who was afraid to use undies in school. (preschool age deaf/asperger's little boy). I wrote a story and printed it with online pictures of a pair of undies. I am Joe. I know how to use the toilet now! All the kids in my class wear underwear under their jeans. I am going to wear underwear too. I am a big boy now and I am all done with diapers at school. ---not exactly that but you get the idea. Some people follow a very strict protocol for social stories, I have found you just do the least number of words, sentences possible to get point across. by the way, that kid brought undies to school and was BESIDE himself proud. He just needed prep and awareness. (my asst. principal thougth I was nuts when she saw it next to me at a meeting, laughed her head off...it was a school for the deaf and not any kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), she thought differently the next day!)

So, my son has some for blowing his nose, coming in when mom calls, once i wrote one for Christmas because my sistes had a bright idea to play a game where all the kids got to pick little prizes and I knew it would make him crazy. But he did it after prep and since he doesn't like me giving him rules and directions, I stick them in a report holder ...like one of those books with plastic page holders, and just swap them out as I need to. There are some pre-published books esp. focused on little ones or adolescents etc.

here is link for the woman who makes them most popular: http://www.thegraycenter.org/social-stories/what-are-social-stories

You can probably find lots of examples online. In any event with your son you probably can't go wrong, as long as you just write a simple page and can put in some graphics from online if you think it will help since he is not a reader yet.

That make sense???
 
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