Negative, non-compliant, miserable almost 4-yo

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Yes, we understand that stimming is his way of burning off steam we let him do it wherever and whenever he wants. He mostly stims by putting things in and out of containers or boxes or playing with long snake-like toys/ribbons etc. He has free access to his stim toys and we let him bring his toy snake wherever we go.

He did have a rough year and we ended up pulling him out just a few weeks before the end. He definitely suffered many setbacks and picked up some bad habits as well as a load of anxiety. I've been trying to let him relax and just have fun doing the things he likes to do- the number of things he likes seems to be smaller everyday. Watching TV and using his iPad are some of the only things that he won't complain about and on my bad days, when he is doing these things for far longer than I'd normally feel comfortable with, he will even get bored with them. Then we're really up the creek! I'm not sure I can lower my expectations any more! I already feel like he "gets away" with far too much and that the hole is being dug deeper.

And to clarify, the kinds of actions and behaviours that we are punishing or issuing time outs for are things like purposefully knocking over his chair when we ask him to sit down for dinner, screaming when we ask him to do something (that we know he can do), shoving his sister etc.

Thanks- I have been thinking deeply about your reply. I've actually been thinking about some of the points you've brought up for a while. My son is definitely getting less attention this year- his sister just turned one and obviously takes up a lot of my time, energy and attention. So there's that. I haven't seen much obvious jealousy but we have of course had our moments when I've had to plainly tell him that I can't do something with him or help him right at that time because I need to attend to his sister. It often goes the other way too- I can't give his sister what she wants or needs from me at the moment because her brother's needs are more pressing. It's a no-win situation and at the end of the day I often feel like I've let everyone down. But my son doesn't seem jealous or anything- like everything else, he'll be upset in the moment but it doesn't carry over into everything. He is really starting to enjoy his sister too and has always shown tonnes of affection towards her. He spends more time alone now that he's out of school but seems to mostly enjoy it and he certainly isn't starved of love and quality time with both me and my husband. Some of the undesirable behaviours do seem to stem from him wanting even more attention though.

I know I sound hopeless and negative and I hope I am not projecting these feelings onto my son all the time. I suppose that's possible though. It's been a really tough year for both my son and myself. Now that we've pulled my son out of school, and there aren't any other options for him right now other than to stay at home next year- it's kind of sending me into a spiral of anxiety and depression. I don't know how I'll do it. It's already not going well. I can't contain the anxiety about it all enough to formulate a plan of how to deal. I don't have help. There are other things going on for me too that are pretty heavy at the moment. I try not to let my own emotional and mental state affect my state of mind when I'm with the kids but it's been hard lately as my son has grown more challenging.

My husband has been telling me that I'm "stressing" far too much, and of course the knowledge that my stressing is causing problems for everyone just causes me more stress. The days when I feel more together are better days for my son too. So I've often suspected that part of the problem is that he can sense my anxiety and sadness. That's a whole other issue to deal with. Add it to the list!

It still sounds to me like stress. We had something similar last year. We had issues with things our son liked and still clearly wanted to do, also. I think if my son had had those same issues at your son's age it would have been worse than it was. In my experience, the better the communication skills, the easier it is to get over this kind of thing.

Why? Because if he cannot tell you what is wrong and get it out of his system, it festers. I have a "little professor" type and even though he can talk incessantly about special interests, he has a lot of trouble with feelings. It has gotten much better this year. At your son's age he could not talk about feelings at all.

I think your son is still stressed from what went on and this is how it comes out. There are things you have to hold the line on---physicality etc. but I would try a different approach. We switched to calming time-outs which is so much easier when they are not in school and experiencing the punitive type. We had switched prior to school, but he got confused between our calming time out and the school type which he could not abide.

The way we do a calming time-out is I will take him into his room, and comfort him. I let him know I can tell he is upset, he needs to calm down and I will help him. If he does not want help, he can read or whatever. There are no toys or electronics in his room, save a CD player with relaxing music CDs and special interest language stuff. It works for us b/c it takes him away from excess stimuli and the scene of the trigger. Everything in his room is calming, and so I don't have to tell him he can't play. It is not a "punishment" so it does not make him more upset, but it is not the most fun he can have, so he won't want to do this instead of more fun things.

If you try this, you will need to adjust it for your child, of course. Note: the first few times we did this it did not work b/c he was still accustomed to timeouts at school. Those timeouts were a trigger.

I had to literally tell him he was not being punished, it was not like school --and that although the school did not understand him well enough to properly take good care of him, (Yes, I went there) I did. I told him I knew he had a rough year, and I would help him get back to being his usual happy self. This helped b/c it showed I understood, though he could not tell me. Feeling understood, helped him.

Could you use private or public insurance to access speech therapy, OT, or counseling so you are at least not so alone?

Just reading through again...
It seems a few people have pointed out that ages 4-6 are a rough patch.
Besides his terrible sleep, my son was a dream until about 2, but even then wasn't "terrible". Then three hit...and now we are approaching 4 and things are clearly harder for us.
So I can expect things to get easier around 6 years? Then...smoother sailing till middle school? (I hear those years are worse for aspies...)
It's difficult because friends and families with children my son's age are always saying how glad they are to have turned the corner into the easier stuff while things seem to get harder and harder for us. I know it's pointless to compare experiences and I don't generally, I just wish there were a detailed GUIDEBOOK. 'What to expect when you're raising an aspie' kind of thing. Everyone else knows more or less what's coming on the normal road of development, I feel I have no idea what's out there for us. It's scary.

If you and your husband agree that your own stress is contributing to the problem in some way, then maybe what you need is some babysitting / respite care and some extra time in the week for yourself. This could be individual psychotherapy / counseling, some time at the gym, a social activity with friends, date night with your husband or just anything that will help make your own life more worthwhile and enjoyable.

I see this with a lot of parents and especially mothers. They often refuse to put their own needs in front of their kids, which is commendable, but they take it to such an extreme that it really starts to wear on them and it turns them into worse parents in the long-run. If you can't give yourself permission for some relaxation for your sake, try to do it for your kids' sake. Even if this doesn't solve all your problems, it will hopefully put you in a better position to take action, and be a strong and consistent parent.

Personally, I am with you in the self-sacrifice department: it's hard for me to see my own needs as important in my quest to help others. Unfortunately when we take this too far, we ruin ourselves and make it impossible to help anyone. So if you're going to sacrifice of yourself for others, at least make it a worthy sacrifice - this requires at least some self-care as well.

So, let me frame this for you in terms of what I was talking about. There is a general level of stress in your house, right? You are stressed out because of worry and extra responsibilities, your husband is stressed out because of your stress, your son is stressed out because of a change in routine - and he's probably hypersensitive to signals of stress in everyone else without being consciously aware of it.

The problem is, he has no language with which to express this, so he's stuck with a frightening feeling of unexplained dread, and the longer the feeling continues, the more frightened he becomes. He can't ask you what's wrong, because he doesn't know that's how you deal with feelings like that. He can't even identify his own feelings, much less express them appropriately. He can't identify that his own routine, which anchored him through the day, is gone - so he is picking up and discarding things in a way that seems random to you but to him is a systematic, experimental and thorough Aspie sort of way to figure out the bad feeling. Is it cereal? No. Is it coloring? No. If it's not coloring, it must be cereal. If it's not coloring AND cereal, what the HECK is it? Maybe leaving the house will make the bad feeling go away. No, outside of the house, the feeling is MUCH WORSE. Armageddon.

He has no way of framing these feelings, he only knows that he is worried and some awareness that you are worried and his Dad is worried and everything is getting progressively worse no matter what he does, and he has zero idea why he has this feeling but he wants it to stop.

If you add in little things like sensory issues or motor control issues or difficulty following directions to this overwhelming, almost Lovecraftian feeling of dread (I believe Lovecraft was an Aspie of the first water) you can see where you'd have a meltdown.

I don't know if this would work with such a small child, but when there are changes in our life that cause us stress, I sit down with my son and detail them all explicitly. "You probably feel weird because school is out and your routine changed - and even if you didn't like school and are glad it's over, change is hard for you. I'm also stressed out because I have to adjust to the summer, too. Sometimes we take on other people's stress without being aware of it - so, just remember if you feel weird, that's probably why." DS often comes to me now and says "I feel weird." and we sit down and try to figure out what things might be bothering him.

This might not be helpful at all, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
My daughter went through several phases in which she was "non-compliant," negative difficult to discipline. I got lots of advice from the psychologist who dx her, parents on boards and IRL, etc. I didn't feel right putting a lot of them into practice; I figured I was just not good about being consistent and it was my fault that I couldn't "make" her behave.
I came to a turning point when I realized I didn't have to parent her so differently than her older siblings. She's the youngest in a large family, which makes a big difference to my confidence and self-trust. With my older children, I have always leaned more to gentle, attached parenting methods. I did this with her when she was an infant, but I didn't do them so much when she got older. My constant attempts to control her had damaged our relationship, not deeply, but on a surface, everyday level. A lot of the problems were around school and social events, where she was obviously not comfortable and stressed.
It was my dh who decided we should try to be more positive and strengthen our relationship with her rather than try to control her (which is never a good parenting goal). We focused on the activities we enjoyed together (which was very small at the beginning--watching "her" shows on TV--and grew to movies, drives etc.). I "let her be" a lot more, and tried to keep my requests short, polite, and minimal. It made a huge difference in my ability to enjoy her and work with her rather than against her.
J.

^^^I have noticed this to be true, and this is very well-worded.

As far as having a developmental manual for kids with ASD...I wish. There may be too much variation in skill sets to do this, but I would settle for even a rough estimate, too.

The main thing I have observed is that whenever I have mistakenly deluded myself that we have skipped over some important NT developmental milestone, I was wrong. We just had not gotten to it, yet. The two-year mark felt like the dawn breaking after a long, interminably long night. Terrible Twos? Hah! You know what? We hit it at about 5. The laugh was on me.

The main things that have mattered for us have been communication, trust and skills like frustration tolerance. Over time those things have improved in a steady trend line. Stressors outside the system have produced some behavioral anomalies, but over time the above variables have improved. Attention span and similar skills may be cyclical. I am not sure about that. We probably have some ADHD type traits in the mix there. I am not sure how typical that is or is not with pure ASD.

To me, the good news is that which tend to trend towards improvement. Those things are what we focus on. I try to get rid of exogenous stressors the best I can when I need to, and allow them back in slowly as I can so I can work on the other things, too. With multiple kids that is exponentially harder b/c you have so many other things in the mix to consider.

I don't know if this was remotely helpful. I hope it is, and not just a rambling bunch of nonsense.

(I accidentally deleted my post, I think, so I will try again and hope it does not double post.)

This has been very helpful... and it makes sense to me. I was always so very in tune with everything that went on between my parents and knew all about their adult worries from an extremely young age- my older sister was not and was always comletely oblivious and carefree. To this day, she still does not know all the details that went on before and during my parents' very messy divorce. Needless to say, I was an anxious kid that grew into an anxious adult. It pains me that I'm repeating the same with my son now. He is so much like me- every day I find more and more ways and I rediscover parts of myself as well.

I think he is too young for what you described above. What did work for him a while back when he was stressing at school were a kind of daily affirmations and a poster that I made with the letters of his name each standing for a positive personality trait. Going over these things seemed to reassure him that he was good (despite what I think was coming across to him from school personnel) , that everything was ok, he was loved etc.

I probably should have learned how to better cope with my own anxiety before I had kids. I'm not the best model when it comes to these things.

I haven't yet gotten through all the posts on this second page, but I saw something I need to comment on and apologize if it has already been discussed in depth:

Just because your son has not had a problem with something in the past does NOT mean he does not have a real problem with it now.

I noticed with my son that a lot of things seemed to start "tripping" sometime around your son's age. It was as if the circuit had finally overloaded and now the circuit breaker had spun to off. He never had had an issue with noise; now he had a HUGE one. He used to love crowds; now he was agitated by them (took him a while to figure that out, too; he was still attracted to it, but unable to understand what he was feeling). He started to fear the flush of the toilet. And those are only the ones I specifically remember.

Be aware that these regressive types of issues are VERY real. And, also, common to ASD.

You can NOT assume that this misbehavior is intentional instead of a sign of distress simply because there was never an issue before.

You also can't judge by his facial expressions. It is very common for an ASD child in distress to look like he is being gleefully defiant. That look is one of acceleration, not of glee.

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Just read the first post on this page .... Some of that is being 4. My NT daughter was the WORST for saying she wanted something then wanting something else and so forth. Lots of theories for why (I think they are first coming to understand the concept of choice), but mostly I think you set things up more carefully with two clear choices upfront, and a message that once a choice is made, it gets stuck to, so pick very carefully. Otherwise you can drive yourself nuts.

There is no better lesson for our kids than modeling. My husband and I are very open with my son that we've sought professional help for our own issues and are working through them, even though it was parenthood that brought us to that choice.

Just the acknowledgement that Mommy feels the same way, and yet it's still OK can be very helpful.

Age 4 was pre-diagnosis for us, so I was desperately reading everything I could get my hands on and finding very little that seemed to fit DS. Even once he got his dx at 5, most of the books seemed to be geared toward older kids. Here are the few that I found helpful in the preschool years:

Asperger Syndrome and Young Children: Building Skills for the Real World by Teresa Bolick
The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder by Carol Stock Kranowitz
Raising Your Spirited Child Workbook by Mary Sheedy Kurcinko (be sure to get the "Workbook" version)

I just remembered an email I sent to DS's preschool teacher about what worked (somewhat) at home for us. Maybe some of these will be helpful: