Well I screwed up tonight

Post Reply New Topic

This is so sad! Is there any possibility of your child grasping that treating you nicely is not only the right thing to do, it also would help you be able to be more calm and helpful and does not have to change/increase what's asked of him?

The couch thing is, in this case, just a form of grammar-Nazism.

Where's the facepalm icon when you need it?
Re. the little side conversation with livnah.

I'd like to salute the restraint of other posters - if I had felt livnah was attacking me, I might well have responded in a much harsher way.

However... I may be wrong about this but I get the feeling that livnah was misunderstood, and was truly not interested in attacking anyone at all, and also not interested in venting just for the sake of venting.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest 2 ways to respond to people like livnah in situations like this, which I think may be more likely to result in an outcome that's pleasant for everyone, than the responses that livnah actually got.

First option:
Just quoting what YippySkippy said:

I am sorry if anybody is upset by this thread. I appreciate all the replies.

To the specific issue, I know my son has trouble seeing things that are right in front of him. I don't even think it's an AS issue as lots of kids, and adults, do it. I seem to revert back when I'm at my mom's house to a child who can't find anything that's right in front of her face. But as some of you noticed, my point with the shoes and the couch is that my son will deliberately misunderstand, from what I can tell so that he has a reason to continue to chastise me. He SAW the shoes, then said he hadn't seen him. I'm not mind reading, and I give him the benefit of the doubt for around 50% of these interactions, but most of the time it's very obvious, and it's not always about finding something, that was just an example.

It's almost always related to when he did have some sincere confusion about something, but then he started to realize what I meant. For some reason that seems to piss him off/worry him/whatever, and he can't seem to just say "oh, OK, I get it now." He will backtrack and start to pick apart the whole conversation, finding places where maybe I said northwest but should have said west northwest, and if he can't find any real points at which I was unclear, he'll make some up, by claiming something like "well you never said after dinner" when not only had I for SURE said it, he'd even remarked on it a few times, but in that moment for whatever reason he tries to say I never said it. It's all about making me wrong - in these situations he needs for me to be the reason why he was confused. I guess it's stressful for him to admit he was confused (or couldn't find something, or whatever.) Or maybe he just finds it an excellent time to have a good reason to lecture me.

These last couple days I've been trying extra extra extra extra hard to not show any exasperation when he, for lack of a better word, acts like a toddler, and to be super helpful and sweet and accommodating. I am trying to see how he is when he's under less performance anxiety stress or whatever it is he feels on a daily basis. He's had a slightly better two days, and I'm hoping to keep at it for a while then ease into Zette's great examples of how to implement Greene's methods of collaboratively problem solving. In a week we're going to have a HUGE change, so I don't want to start anything different yet because I don't know how the change will affect the whole dynamic - maybe worse or maybe better.

The change - he's going back to regular school. He's been homeschooled since the end of 4th grade, and he's in 8th grade now. My hope is that the novelty and the excitement will engage him and exhaust him and when he gets home each day we'll have some unwinding time and then early bedtime. He loves change and novelty. But the actual school could wind up being stressful after the novelty wears off. He's been in somewhat small group classes only this whole time, with close supervision, and for going back to school they are putting him right into the full time mainstream schedule, where he'll have to go from class to class to class.

I don't think he'll do well academically with that - with me, at least, he can't seem to "get out your history book, turn to page 140, read the section, and then answer the questions at the end." He can't find the book, can't find the page, sees something else in the book he'd rather read, when directed to the page he starts reading from the bottom right instead of the top left, once he's reading he's good if it's interesting, but then for the questions, he won't read the directions and won't start writing any answers.

I give him only a tad bit of that in my homeschool environment, just to push him a bit, but mostly he answers orally, or I'll have him look up online more about whatever he just read and read it and explain to me if the two things he read were basically the same or different. When he does math or the tiny bit of writing, he still writes like a kindergartner and uses up 4 or 5 lines for 3 words. He has written very nicely a few times for supervising teachers in the homeschool program. He's pretty good typing - still slow but he prefers it to writing. And he does have the diagnosed learning disabilities in math and writing and the processing disorder, so he's been on an IEP even before this new autism diagnosis.

I have no idea how he'll do. I can assume he'll do poorly, but maybe he'll really knuckle down, I don't know. The school is adamant about starting him out in the full day program, changing classes each period like any other kid, but they are putting him in the badly behaving group, because the special day class has kids who look nothing like him - I know a lot of you have gone thru this, from what I've read of old threads here. The badly behaving group has a first period and a last period where their teacher drills them on their behavior and doles out rewards and punishments. They are doing this also because of the times he's been aggressive with my mom and I. Of course aggression of an autistic kid in a meltdown is nothing like what the kids in the badly behaving class have been doing - unless they are all like my son and either misdiagnosed or in the class because the school doesn't know what else to do with them.

I am trying to see it as a test, and hopefully a break for me. They will evaluate how it's going and make adjustments in the first month or so if needed. I don't think he'll learn anything, and I'm not sure he'll manage going from class to class - not to mention PE, where he'll have a locker and will have to learn to use a combination lock and will have to change clothes twice... I'm also not sure I'll even get him to school each day, from a compliance standpoint, however he's had online tutoring for a year and he is always in front of the computer ready for her and would never want to be late. He's much better under pressure, but he's never been under pressure every day for days on end, so maybe it'll all fall apart. But I'm hoping they will delve into him and figure out what he needs. I think in the long run he'll need an in home tutor for part of the day and classes for part of the day a couple times per week. But who knows.

Thanks everybody.

No, I don't think there's any kind of NT subtext for this and I think it will vary from person to person how large the 'by the couch' area is from hand's width to that half of the room. But there are also memory issues at play, I think I saw them by the couch, but maybe I actually saw them by the couch yesterday. What I find really annoying (as an NT) is to be told, no they weren't by the couch, they were actually closer to the coffee table.