Stalling and rigidity

Post Reply New Topic

Day 2 back to school and I have some more questions. We started a schedule for my ds. It seems anything we try... he finds a way around. He is not following the schedule....once again a control issue I believe. The teacher puts a schedule on his desk with time frames and subject. My ds will stall starting on time and then when it's time to start the next subject he will not stop doing whatever he is on until he is finished. This throws everything off for teacher. Also during breaks after completing task.... He doesn't want to hand over his IPod they let him use and get started again. The school says he is a master manipulator....I think he tries to control and avoid tasks he doesn't like.

The teacher said she is going to try and not put times on his schedule, but if they try and take his IPod or force him with consequences he will completely shut down and have a raging meltdown. Does anyone have any suggestions for stalling or not wanting to stop what they are doing??? Thanks again......as I am trying to fight and advocate for my son!

Personally, I think the teacher did the right thing here. If the teacher had omitted time frames on the schedule, it would be understandable for your son to have a need to finish tasks due to the uncertainty of when the next activity started. But if your son knows when he needs to be done with something, he needs to learn how to find a stopping point on his own. I am extremely, extremely rigid about finishing things before being able to move on to something else, but I taught myself over the years how to make appropriate stopping points that don't make me fall behind and also make me feel "finished." I am ruled by the clock. My life is always about how much I can finish before I have to find a stopping point. If your son doesn't have a clock or watch at his desk, then the time frames on the schedule are useless to him as far as finding a stopping point and his meltdowns are realistic. But Asperger's or not, he should not be allowed to manipulate the teacher. I hope everything works out for you.

My son does this all the time-- for him it is transition related at school. He has a hard time transitioning to a new activity (starting) and a hard time stopping an activity that he is engaged in. It is like he has a hard time preparing his brain for whatever the new activity entails (like getting to the math part of his brain for instance) and then when he finally gets there and things start moving smoothly he will freak out if you tell him to switch gears (move to the spelling part of his brain) before he is finished with the math, especially since he just got comfortable doing it. This happens even if the next activity is the same or maybe only slightly better in preferrence than the first. My son hates pretty much any worksheet, no matter what the subject-- so all of them are low on the list, even if it is a topic he excels at ( I think even a NT kid would drop their math homework if you told them they could do something highly preferred instead-like a video game.) I think it helped just for the teacher to understand this, although I don't have any great solutions for you. I think she might sometimes let him finish and catch up on the new topic when she has free time-- sometimes she has to take some of his recess, which he definitely does not like. I have also offered to drop him off early or pick him up late if needed to make sure he knows that not doing his work on time results in taking his free time later.

He also does have issues transitioning from preferred to non-preferred activities-- which are totally control issues (putting down the video game to do homework). The problem with schedules is that he is not good at telling time or guaging time, even if you have a clock in front of him. What has helped is showing him the clock, telling him what time the clock will say when he has to stop, and then most importantly, giving him countdowns-- 10 minutes left, 5 minutes-- wrap up that level on your game, 1 minute left, then point to the clock time if he is fussing. Then he has to come to the table, tantruming or not, but then I allow him to play with therapy putty only for a minute or two if he needs to to calm down and get his mind on homework or give him a small treat. It was long and tedious in the beginning but has gotten easier now.

The thing that has really helped with both of these is telling him he has to hit the "pause" button on whatever he is thinking about (he makes Batman movies in his head to escape too) to get him prepared for the next thing.... we told him it is "pause" because he needs to do something else right now but that he can come back to it later after he is finished.

The other thing you might need to look at is whether he is having any trouble processing the directions-- auditory processing, or even taking instructions too literal or trouble reading printed instructions-- sometimes my son says he was just not sure what he was supposed to do, even though it appears pretty clear to me, and by the time he explains what he thought he should do or what convuluted process he went through to get a simple answer, I totally understand why it took him so long to start and get it finished. It seems the exact same problem asked a slightly different way or a worksheet that looks slightly different than what he is used to is really a completely different problem to him and he is starting from scratch every time. Not sure what to do about this, other than taking worksheets that I notice he gets every week and going over entire worksheet whether or not he got answer right- with him to see how he is thinking and how to make it easier.

They could try giving a ten minute warning. Such as in ten minutes you will need to stop x because it will be time for y. Warnings can sometimes help my daughter prepare for the transition.

We also tried using a visual timer: the one suggested (we never got it, but I could see where it would work http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0007DHU0S/ref ... B0007DHU0S ) gradually goes from green to yellow to red, but any kind of timer with a visual, even a sand timer, that gives 5 minutes or so visually, can be helpful in learning transitions. DS also gets to stop an activity 5 minutes before the class.

Also remember that this isn't something that's going to go away in a day, especially since this is just day 2 at school and he's doing all kinds of adjusting. Make sure you celebrate your son's successes, and let him know that there's a learning curve, and every success he has will make the next success even easier. Enlist his help; give him the list of stuff to do and have him organize it on the schedule (within reason.) Tell him you know this is hard for him, but he needs to learn it, and you and the school are making a team effort with him to help him succeed.

It sounds like he also needs to practice leaving things unfinished. Let him know this is something different you want him to learn, and ask him what kinds of ways you can practice it at home: can he do half a math worksheet and then do the second half later? Can he count to 10 in two separate segments? Play "put down your pen" like you would musical chairs, maybe even with just a blank paper at first.

Randomly posting this extremely helpful article I just found on rigidity http://special-ism.com/stuck-stubborn-a ... -thinking/

Visual schedules can be HUGELY helpful for kids on the spectrum but I think people often do not understand how much input it takes from an adult helper to get a child to use it. It is unrealistic to place the schedule on the student's desk and expect that he can follow it without plenty of support. We went through the same thing at the beginning of the school year. I was hounding the teacher to use DS's schedule and she was resisting because she did not see it as helpful at as since he wasn't following it.

First, time needs to be spent going over the schedule at the beginning of the day. Allowing the student to pick some of the activities on the schedule is helpful, like if there is a choice of activities he can do at break time, let him choose which one he wants to do each day and put that on the schedule. I was told in no uncertain terms to take specific times off the schedule since at school it is often difficult for things to happen at EXACTLY the right time which was an issue for DS. Which brings me to another suggestion - the schedule must be or correct. Before we had an aide working with DS on his schedule, the teacher would put it together in the morning but I noticed it often wasn't accurate. So DS would say that the schedule "lied" and he would refuse to even look at it (not a surprising Aspie reaction).

The schedule should have built in feedback throughout the day. Ours is a series of little cards that get velcroed to the front of a laminated page. The sheet has two columns. On the left are the events that are going to happen each day. As an event is accomplished, DS removes the card from one column and places it in the other.

On the not giving up the iPad - if your son is anything like mine, no amount of consequences is going to change this situation. DS's aide told me the other day that she has figured out that he has a minimum tolerance for computer/iPad time. She says its about 20 minutes. She has told the teachers that if there isn't at least 20 minutes for him to spend, then they should not allow him on to the computer/iPad at all. If he gets at least 20 minutes then he can transition off screen time to another activity but if there is less than that, it is a struggle every time.

As someone else just suggested, warnings before transitions are very important for most spectrum kids. It is not good enough that the schedule says that he has to go to reading group after choice time, he probably needs repeated warnings before the transition occurs (10 minutes, 5 min. 2 min, etc). Even then, some allowance may need to be made for allowing him to come to a stopping point that is logical for him. I don't remember how old you said you son is but for many kids, they cannot project into the future to say, "well the teacher just said I have 5 minutes left to finish working on my art project so I have enough time left to do this part of the task then I will have to stop." He may need more support. E.g. if he was doing a multi-step project and time was running out, the teacher could give him the time warning and suggest what portion of the project he had time to finish and let him know that he will have time to totally complete the project during the next art time (or during choice time or something, if the teacher can be specific about when it can be completed, I think that is helpful).

With particularly rigid or resistant kids, my DS is one, non-compliant is perhaps the most polite term I've heard used for him, the schedule needs to contain a good balance of preferred and non-preferred activities. Plenty of support and rewards need to be built in around the non-preferred activities. "Credit", so to speak, needs to be given for even brief attempts to participate in non-preferred activities. Also, look at the environment involved with activities that he is resistant to. For example, my DS strongly resisted going to reading group. It was a small group of about 6-8 kids and they sat together around a half moon shaped table. Someone figured out that DS just didn't like sitting so close to other kids (which wasn't' that much of a surprise as he has never liked sitting on the rug with all the other kids) and they placed a desk for him next to the table. He goes to reading group every day now without any resistance.

Oh, I could go on. I have learned SO much in the past 2 years about schedules and how to get my rather rigid kiddo to try new things. Of course, we currently have the (hard-fought-for) benefit of having an aide who works with DS on and off throughout the school day. I talk with her every day about what works and what doesn't and a subset of our IEP team meets every 6 weeks to review his behavior intervention plan. He still has probably about one blow up (not total meltdowns usually) a week but that is so much better than the multiple daily meltdowns he was having. Currently, most of our issues revolve around the playground. No surprise there either.

I think you've gotten some good suggestions, so I want to emphasize one thing: these are not willful behaviors, they are signals of real needs. I noticed that the more stress my son was under, the more he clung to things. It is important to reduce the stress on your child, not increase it, if you want a chance at success.

Figuring out what causes the stress is, of course, the hard part. It isn't usually the work itself, but things you and I would never consider. Maybe the room layout unsettles him. Maybe a child 3 desks over smells funny to him. Maybe the way the assignments fill the paper confuses him. It takes real detective work.

Another thought is have a social story written up of what to expect with time and the subjects the class does.

E.g, D goes to school, school can be fun, D and class friends do different subjects, these subjects can be maths, English, art, etc. Each subject the D and the class will spend 1 hr. It's good to listen to your teacher and your aide about the subject. This will help you, if you don't understand can can ask your teacher or aide. It's good to try and do the work given to you. Sometimes it may be confusing, sometimes it can be fun. If you don't finish, that's okay. D and his class friends may not finish the work given to them and finish another day.

Another thought is have 2 boxes or similar that represent 'work in process' and the other is 'finished'. You can have a color like black and white to represent finished and orange or yellow for waiting.

A reward chart for good behavior when he is able to go with what the teacher is asking of him.

Just some ideas that you may of already tried

We have had the most success with a combination of a visual schedule, and ten minute, five minute, and one minute warnings. The warnings bring attention back to the schedule and reinforce the timetable in a non- jarring manner.