He came on his own and gave me a hug and told me he had calmed down. I'm guessing that this is progress.
Yes, that is wonderful progress. What is more, you helped him regain control, by staying out of it. He will have recognised this and it is important for him to turn around from seeing you as the obstacle, always saying no and trying to make him conform, to you being the facilitator, the support and the helper.
When your child is out of control, they need to have a relationship with you where they know your aim is to help them regain control.
In our house, "Go to your room" rapidly became, "Take yourself somewhere as a refuge until you can regain control of yourself." It didn't work with difficult child 3 the way it did with the other ones. Sometimes we have to find other ways of managing. difficult child 3 will instead stand and argue, so there have been times when I have gone to MY room and said, "I need time out to get myself calm."
difficult child 3 is also learning that sometimes when he desperately wants to talk about something, he can't just dump it on us if we are tired, or brain-fogged after a long day. He is finding this terribly frustrating, often he wants to talk to us about why we MUST buy the latest computer component, software package or game. Someone we were talking to, I think it might have been therapist, suggested that difficult child 3, instead of insisting on talking to us, writie it as a proposal. Because when he goes out into the workforce in IT (his ambition) he will have to submit written proposals for stuff he thinks work should be buying or doing.
Putting it in writing is useful in so many ways -
1) He learns new communication skills.
2) He knows the need has been recorded so he is less likely to forget to follow-through on it.
3) We can read it and see the entire argument spread out before us, without being hammered verbally with, "Can we buy it? Can we? Can we? huh?"
A thought for you, and please don't panic - but keep an eye on your 15 year old. Where you have one Aspie or autistic in the family, the chances of others having Aspie traits is much higher. It's easy to miss, especially if your attention is occupied by a more troubled individual. In our case, difficult child 1 wasn't diagnosed until he was 14 even though we knew there was something very much out of place. And their sister still doens't have an Aspie diagnosis although increasingly, we're convinced. For her, however, having a label won't make any difference to her, she has adapted a fair bit and is already getting what support she would get WITH a diagnosis. Her diagnosis is ADD but frankly, the current main problems in her are the Aspie traits, not the ADD.
Back to your son and not going to church - I think you need to identify what triggered the meltdown. There can be multiple reasons and the most obvious one may mask an underlying problem. For us, church was a problem for a long time for difficult child 3 because other kids there were teasing him. For difficult child 1 there were a few times where some adults at church (which for us is like one big family) stepped in to try to chastise him, without letting us know if there was a problem, and frankly did the wrong thing. difficult child 3's godmother used to go to this church and has recently told us of incidents she witnessed (and stepped in to stop) where an adult (who obviously thought the only problem with my boys was bad parenting) was trying to discipline difficult child 1 fairly roughly. Godmother made the man take his hands off difficult child 1 and put him down. That man is no longer at our church, he still lives nearby and is a VERY strict parent. Interestingly, his younger daughter was initially a bullying problem for difficult child 3 but later on became his champion at school, telling us if teachers were bullying difficult child 3.
Church is like school in that you can't always see what is going on. But it is like family in that people there are not bound by their own behaviour rules and regulations. Teachers are themselves taught and educated. People t church are not necessarily, they are much more anarchic.
So, strong recommendation - if you take him to church, you may need to makespecial provisions for him. He is likely to have more trouble understanding what is being taught at church (because it is far less concrete) and as a result, find it more boring. His resonse to boredom is likely to annoy others there (such as other kids, other adults who feel his behaviour is disrespectful and needs to be corrected (loving chastisement, or some such ridiculous euphemism).
You can't request an IEP at church. As a result, we actually don't go to church very often and thankfully our current congregation mostly are very understanding about difficult child 3. We get the occasional ratbag as well as a lot of visitors who simply haven't the experience with him.
There are ways to involve your son in church if you wish to - for example, at our church we use overhead projectors a lot, with pages that need to be changed (song sheets etc). difficult child 3 has helped out with using the overhead projector, because these pages have to be filed away carefully and meticulously. He is also musical. After church he often gets out the cricket set and finds someone to play cricket on the beach with him (the beach is right next to the church, one step down from the strip of lawn - it makes for easy baptisms!).
I'm not trying to preach or anything here, just mentioning some practical issues to do with any community group meeting arrangement, whether it be for religious purposes or not. It is a risky situation to bring a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kid into, unless you monitor it very closely and stand ready to take your child home if necessary.
What we tend to do these days, especially now difficult child 3 is older - we let him stay at home if she chooses to. Sometimes he asks to come along and that is good. When he comes to church and finds himself 'tuning out' he has the option of going to sit in the back room (aka cry room, but there are no others in there these days, not often). The church service is piped in (can be) and if we need to, we can wander in and wander out to see if he's OK. He sits there and plays a board game or does a puzzle or plays with his Nintendo DS, then mingles with people afterwards. It's a good experience for him, to be able to join in when it's something he can follow, and to remove himself when he finds himself in danger of distracting other people.
Also, there can be many other ways to "go to church". We have various TV shows we can watch, although we havwe learned to avoid the tubthumpers around Aspies, they are very impressionable and I want my kids to KNOW what they believe, not be told what they believe. If you get my drift.
difficult child 3's understanding of spiritual things is still very basic, very concrete. He simply isn't able to really follow the degree of emotional complexity. And he reminds me of myself as a young child - we used to do Sunday School exams when I was a kid, and my knowledge of the scriptures was almost encyclopedic. But my understanding of anything abstract or of human nature - of course I knew nothing. As for what I beleived - I beleived what I was told. It wasn't until I was older and able to think for myself, that I was able to really begin to apply any understanding.
That "understanding" stage is very much delayed in Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), and this delay can lead to misunderstandings and sometimes criticism, from church family.
I speak here of church, but from my understanding, I think this would apply across all religions where people gather together in the name of religion to share their spiritual beliefs together. Spirituality is very abstract, difficult for a very young child or a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) (or other difficult children) to comprehend. Understanding needs to be very concrete and despite the compassion and love so often preached, people can be very judgemental in the name of ANY religion. Because people is people, the whole world over.
Temple Grandiin herself describes how she has to visualise "the power and the glory" as power lines, with a rainbow above. She showed us a photograph of this (a conference I attended, she was keynote speaker) and it made me realise how even with an adult autistic, understanding needs to be highly visual and very concrete. That is the starting point for abstraction.
One final point - we need to forgive ourselves for when we've got it wrong and also forgive those adults in our child's life when they just don't 'get it'. THis gives those people a chance to learn. However, that doesn't mean we let people repeatedly hurt our child. I forget where I heard what is supposed to be an Arab proverb - "Forgive the man who steals from you, but lock up your camels."
Marg