We noticed this years ago with difficult child 3 - whenever he's developing some illness, his behaviour gets a lot worse. While he's acutely ill his behaviour's not too bad, then as he's recovering it gets bad again.
What I put all this down to - he has to work really hard, all the time, to cope (and to try to control his behaviour). When he's coming down with something, or having an allergic reaction, he feels unwell and his body is letting him down. His ability to maintain his concentration is unreliable and he then fails to cope. He simply can't predict how much personal effort he needs to exert, to control his behaviour as well as normal. Then once there are problems, it escalates as people lose patience.
Once he's in the acute phase of the illness he is unwell but it is at least stable. There is no worsening of change in his body's reaction to whatever is causing his illness, so once he finds his own stable point, it's easier to maintain it.
As he's recovering, his body is once again changing. This changeability is also unpredictable and once again, he's not able to manage himself as well. His behaviour in this phase is still a lot better than when he was getting sick, though.
For difficult child 3, it's ANY illness which challenges his body in some way. Think how we feel in these circumstances - we're coming down with a cold. Our head feels a bit stuffy, we feel more tired, we might be aching a bit more. We have a lot more leeway behaviourally, but for a lot of difficult children. It's like walking a tightrope without a safety net. Getting sick is like someone shaking the tightrope - it's not always where it's supposed to be.
With difficult child 3, a deterioration in his behaviour that is fairly sudden in onset and is lasting more than a day, now has us keeping an eye on him and reducing his stress over the next two days or until his behaviour improves. Often, when his behaviour doesn't improve we find that about Day 3 he has developed a virus, or some other reaction. His drop in behaviour warns us.
With an allergy, the behaviour drop begins with exposure to the allergen and continues until the contact is gone. Treating him with antihistamines only makes him worse, as if he's unmedicated. Back when he was in mainstream, we kept him home with allergic reactions. That's when we really began to teach him at home to catch up with all he'd been missing academically for years.
Doctors don't tell us either because they think it's obvious, or because they figure that it's simply the child's coping mechanism not working as well due to illness. I don't think increasing medications is the way to go - just deal with it, in the same way we'd deal with being sick by staying home from work. Find a way to cope by reducing what difficult child DOES have to deal with. By making it easier to cope, this hopefully compensates for the unsettling caused by getting ill.
Marg
