anger and temper tantrums...9 yr old DS

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This is my first time posting on this discussion...My 9 yr old DS is newly diagnosed with AS. My DS has a hard time learning....he is currently in a resource class for 1 hour a day, attends speech therapy 1 hour a week, attend group therapy 1 hour weekly, and OT 1 hour weekly. He is very immature, tends to play with his younger sisters toys, he sometimes wets the bed, and HATES homework. He throws temper tantrums or has meltdowns. The temper tantrums and meltdowns are so intense....the whole family is disturbed. Any advice is appreciated!

I am a little behind the times - but what homework does a 9yo get?

Can you pinpoint what sparks off the meltdowns? Avoidance is always going to be better than trying to stop the meltdown once it has started.

My son is also 9 years old. I'm lucky that my sons tantrums are lessening as he gets older. I say that but he had one last night about homework. He absolutely hates it and yes 9 yo's have homework. Spelling words, vocabulary, really a little from all subjects. The only problem is my son won't write it down and when I ask him what's for homework he says he forgets.

Anyway, when my son has his tantrums he goes to time out and is ignored. Because he says some really mean things that you want to respond to but I just ignore it. Then once he's settle down I tell him what he's done wrong and then address some of the things he says if they're worth addressing. Sometimes if he's having a really bad day just talking to him about it will respark the tantrum and we just do it all over again until he realizes nothing but him is going to change. You have to be consistant w/this or it won't work. If he knows what's going to happen when the tantrum takes place he will reconsider it if he can help it. Sometimes though it's just all this bad energy they have to let go and know and sometimes takes himself there to time out. But once he settles down there has been on an occasion or two where he will appologize.

For school I ask that the teacher does the same. Let him have a quiet place to go to settle down....kind of a timeout spot. I've had some good teachers who really worked well w/my son. However this teacher he has doesn't have alot of experience w/autistic children so I definitely have my hands full this year. Next week i'm going to request a conference so that we can talk about what issues they (the teacher and my son) might be dealing w/and if he has questions and i can give my opinions/advice.

I hope some of this may help.

Thanks! Yes, 9 yr olds have lots of homework. So far, we have really good teachers - they write down his assignments or post them on Black Board. He is just to frustrated when he get home from school....he has done school work all day and is ready to "play." His meltdowns or tantrums can be triggered by anything from his food not being just the right temperature to loosing a toy...

A lot of the time parents see the worse of their kids because the child has being 'holding it together' all day. By the time they get home they are spent and so even the smallest thing will set them off.

My daughter was like that. The (almost) perfect school child. But then as soon as she got home she could be, and often was - really nasty. Anything could spark her off.

That is a difficult problem to resolve - because it wasn't actually anything particular at home that caused the problem - it was the exhaustion from the day.

The school she was at for a while (she was eventually home-schooled) actually allowed kids to stay to do their homework at school - strange idea - homework at school - but they did it. That worked out a little better because she saw managed to hold it together for an extra hour. Then when she came home she could actually defrag and recover.

This is so true for kids on the spectrum. School is very emotionally exhausting and requires them to constantly be "on" to interpret social cues. When they get home, they simply can't take any more and let all their emotions out where they feel they are in a familiar and safe environment.

My son started to fall apart at the age of 9; in the middle of the year when he was 10 we got a full assessment and diagnosis. The psychologist pointed out that this is a common year for diagnoses because there is a developmental leap in communication between grades 2, 3, and 4 (depending on the individual kids.) What we found was that suddenly social things that didn't bother anybody in 2nd grade started making kids mad (Rigid adherence to rules, rigid forms of play, monologuing and missing visual/verbal cues about what the other kids were feeling.)

Somewhere, someone else on the spectrum posted that she completed all her homework at school, so the transition between home and school was absolute; I thought this was brilliant. Ask if it's possible for you to stay in the library or school lobby with him while your son does his homework; most schools have some kind of after-school program going on, and will be amenable to this as long as they don't have to take responsibility for the child.

Oh...I wish I could help. I am right there with you. My 9-yr-old son is struggling like crazy this year. So far, school wasn't too horrible. He would have an occasional bad day, but this has been a bad MONTH (school started 8/1). I am so stressed out with trying to deal with this. Right now, a good day is one that I don't get a call from the school.

Just the mention of homework is enough to spark a meltdown. Even just asking if he HAS any homework. Heaven forbid I actually try to get him to DO the homework.

He is in a private school right now, but they are considering expelling him for his violent meltdowns and general disruption of the class. I have a meeting with the public school next week. For tomorrow, I am going to do a "homeschooling day" and get him caught up on about 2 weeks of homework that he hasn't done. I don't know that our personalities will work out with homeschooling (I also have AS and ADHD), so I will see how tomorrow goes and work from there.

Hopefully things will get better for all of our kids once they have been in school a bit longer this year.

I was extremely sensitive at the age of 9 and I cried very easily and had meltdowns. My parents didn't handle it too well. I was told that if I was going to cry, that I was going to be sent to my room. I was also having a rough time with homework and school. Needless to say, my strong mother saw me as an embarrassment even years later.

I am surprised that no one has pointed this out yet: these may be meltdowns, not temper tantrums or anger. The difference is important because the two come from a different place and, thus, resolving them requires a different process.

Meltdowns happen when the child is overwhelmed or stressed out. There is often a gradual build up to it that you may not have noticed. What you want to do is learn to see the build up so that you can divert the child into self-mitigation before it reaches where the breaking point, where any little trigger will set it off.

Nine was a VERY difficult year for my son, and I was extremely worried about him hitting puberty without the right self-mitigation skills in place. So we worked super hard that year on process, learning self-calming techniques, him being able to identify and express his own needs, etc. Not all AS kids can learn to self-manage, but it should be your goal.

First step, since the meltdowns seem to be related to homework, is to get permission to cut down or cut out the homework without penalty. We always had this in elementary school, and it was a useful tool. It is much, much more important that the child learn how to sit down and do homework, than that he actually complete it. This is what the educators in our school district understood, and as long as they knew a parent was actively involved and not trying to let their child get off "easy," they always gave this accommodation.

For many kids with AS, homework (a) violates the school v. home box (and AS kids put everything in boxes) and (b) looks like a task that can never be completed. Things like finishing the work in on-site daycare might help with the first, but you will still have the issue of the second. For that, sometimes visually blocking off parts of the page helps, either temporarily or permanently. We've also found that my son will tackle things much more readily in his head and while pacing, than while sitting in a chair with pencil in hand, so offering to scribe answers can help, too. Anything to make it less overwhelming.

With homework, it also helps to put it on a timer. Kids at this age look at those sheets and believe they are going to take hours and hours to finish, and that sense makes them afraid to even start. Putting out a timer gives this a defined end. But here is the trade off: the timer only runs if they are sitting down and working. This way they learn to sit down and get started, which is often 90% of the battle.

Make sure your son is engaging in self-calming activities through out his day. For most AS kids this would be some sort of repetitive behavior. My son is a pacer. Not simply back and forth, but up on the furniture, into the walls, shouting out the conversations from his fantasy world movement. We used to tell him it was too disruptive, not to do it. But after reading on these forums I wondered if it was actually something he needed to do, and we experimented with encouraging it, instead (and explained why we were changing things, so he wouldn't be confused). It helped SO MUCH. I'll tell you, I'll take that crazy pacing over frequent meltdowns any day. Rearranged the furniture to make it safer, the whole nine yards, and it was one of the best things we did.

Note that one thing we've noticed is that the more stressed many AS kids are, the more controlling they try to get. This comes across as stubborn or demanding but it is, in fact, defensive: a last ditch effort to get the world to meet needs they, themselves, are not understanding. Take any increase in controlling behavior as a sign your child needs to self-mitigate.

For more on meltdowns, I strongly recommend the book written by one of our members, Tracker, which is free for download at ASDStuff.com He is in the process of editing the book, but the first version has been useful to many readers here. No one explains what happens in a meltdown better.

I was a little concerned when I first read your post that you might be punishing meltdowns, which AS children really cannot help (more on that in Tracker's book), but it sounds like you use the timeout more as a self-calming tool than discipline, which makes sense to me. The "time out" is the time for him to self-mitigate, calm himself down. I would prefer less discipline oriented language, especially since there are going to be times you want to use time out for discipline unrelated to temper or meltdown, but the process sounds like it works for you.

Anyway, on school: one thing we always had put into my son's IEP's was what I call an escape clause. If he is feeling overwhelmed or like he is about to lose it, then he has permission to leave the classroom for a pre-designated location (hallway, anti-room, resource center) to calm himself down without waiting for permission from the teacher. He is supposed to tell the teacher what he is doing or give a signal, and then he can flee. Basically, what most kids like ours need when they are upset is a safe place to calm themselves down, and the escape clause was my way of trying to make sure the school would give that to him. You don't have to wait to see if you have an agreeable teacher each year, who understands how you are working with your son on the outbursts; you can have it put into the IEP document, and I recommend you do so.

Of course, once he was in a meltdown he couldn't be moved, so part of this involved him learning to recognize when he was almost at one. Which he did.

My son, btw, is now 14 and to the public eye is meltdown free. He says he still has meltdowns, but I guess the way to describe it is to say they've gone silent. He leaves the situation, goes to a safe place, and retreats inside himself. He learned to do what we asked him to do: recognize the build up, use self-mitigation techniques to slow or stop the build up, and if a meltdown is about to happen, get to a safe place before it happens to make sure you won't hurt anyone. I can't even begin to express the relief we felt at seeing that process integrate for him; not all AS kids have enough self-awareness for it, so while I always recommend parents invest in that process (which takes YEARS, btw), no one can predict if it will work. But, thankfully, for my son, nothing with us or home or even day to day school is ever is a trigger anymore, but he is out in the world pushing at his own limits trying to live the life he wants, and some of that is really hard for him. He has a couple of brilliant but socially difficult friends that can really get under his skin, he has taken on leadership roles in Boy Scouts that can stress him out, he's involved in activities and classes that often require high stakes teamwork, and so on. It is scary for me to watch him either put himself into, or get put into, situations that I know overwhelm him, and I have to sit back and hope he's got enough tools to deal with it. He's at a point where he is asking us NOT to ask for accommodations; he wants to know what he can do. Just crossing my fingers that he doesn't regress, as some high school AS kids do; just no way to know going in if that will be him or not.

Christ do you ever sound like my life twinner. =/

On topic, if it really does seem to just be a built stress, meltdown type of thing, you could try letting him have a bit of free time to unwind before starting his homework. I know I'm always significantly more bedraggled at the end of the day, if something interrupts my 30-40 mins of calm downtime between sending students home and getting off of work.

My Aspie son is 9 and noticeably more moody and stroppy than he was even 6 months ago. He himself told me the other week that he thinks he's going through his teenage problem years early!

Emotional regulation has been a key area of focus with his SLT and we'll be continuing to work on that with him. He is very self aware, and he is able to identify when he is getting too stressed out and calm himself, often by removing himself from the situation. But his successes with this have stayed at the same level while his difficulties have increased. We seem to be hitting a developmental stage where the stress levels are hiked up a good few notches and he gets there faster! Yikes!

From what friends have told me this stage is common in many boys, not just those on the Spectrum, but with our children all this emotional overload seems to be magnified.

Fourth graders are required to be responsible for writing the assignments themselves, they had to read cursive instructions and transcribe them into their planners. My AS son hated this..he would write the bare minimum then I would follow up once or twice a week by taking a cellphone pic of the homework board then emailing it to myself just in case he forgot something important. Also I dont see mention of getting assignments in advance, not too far in advance but just a day so they know what to expect. Does he have "independent work time" during the day? If so that would be a perfect time for him to do a little homework so it doesnt seem so overwhelming when he gets home. Also fold the homework sheets in half and give him a half page at a time, for some reason my son would handle that better than full sheets. These things worked for us and hopefully they will continue to work for us when school starts Wednesday, (cross fingers). Good luck..

I always had trouble with this. by him a super cheap voice recorder. Something where he can just speak into what the assignments are, or ask his teacher to write it down. I know that even today i am so bad at this my girlfriend ends up sending me emails about stuff we just talked about so that i do them when i am ready to do them.



This, like some of the other posters said, is most likely a melt down. The saying really mean things is exactly what i do. It's a great way to clear a room and get away from people so that i can recover and stop hurting. These meltdowns are caused by stress and over stimulitation, which are both very painful for an autistic person.

Forget about talking to your kid about what he did wrong right after it. Your best to go scream in a pillow, and talk to him an hour after the meltdown, if its a meltdown, because it takes time to recover from them. Usually when people try to talk to me about them right away, i appologise and say whatever they want to hear because i dont want to fight. Fighting ends up making me meltdown again. I hate to say it, but when your talking about "being consistant" so "he knows whats going to happen" it sounds alot like what my mom tried. autistic kids are differnt from neuro typical kids. If its a melt down, then all your doing is teaching him how to suffer in pain, much like telling a kid who skinned his knee not to cry because it's not what men do. This is good for the kid socially, but wont solve this problem at all. Also forget social queues, like the mom look of death, he wont pick up on it. Most of all, figure out why he is going through this, and if its a meltdown, and explain it to him. If it's a meltdown, its often pretty far out of his control. Knowing it, will help him control it and make him not feel like he is hated. Atleast i always felt my mom hated me, because i couldn't control the "outbursts" as she called them.



A quiet place is probly the best thing. when i'm about to go through a meltdown i generally look around the room really fast or stare into space without blinking. If i can be alone for a little bit at that time, then i dont have to go into a full blown meltdown

I think your 9-year-old might be old enough to help set up a schedule at home that will include at most an hour of homework.

I was surprised and pleased when this was the first program modification my dd was offered this year. The methods & resource teacher understood that school days were long and difficult for kids with Asperger's. My dd was dx over the summer, so this will be the first year with much-needed adjustments at school, but I had already told the teachers last year that I was not going to let her spend two hours on math every night. I never did with my NT kids, either; I would write a note and tell the teacher they had tried for X amount of time and couldn't finish it. (Notes help a lot, I have found.)

I find the timing of that hour is important. I've always thought that working at school all day should be followed by a break, and I encourage outside activity while it's still light out, so homework is usually right after supper. I also make sure tv, computer or other free time is scheduled and that the schedule is respected as a minimum. The scheduling seems to help.

J.